Like her subject, Kempner’s film doesn’t try to be flashy or stylish. She adheres to the Ken Burns school of old footage, photos, period ads, newspaper stories and cartoons.

Overlooked on its initial release in 1967, Huston's adaptation of Carson McCullers's novel still feels unsettling and cutting-edge nearly 40 years later. [28 Sep 2006, p.26]

Here's all you really need to know in order to determine whether Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris is something you need to experience for yourself: Her blond hair is often all frizz, and she prefers glasses with a big black frame. She's Mia AND Woody.

The cast — Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, comic sad sack Chris O’Dowd (“Bridesmaids,” “The Sapphires”) — is in a higher weight class than the material and, rather than be dragged down into formula, they raise the movie up to the nearly scintillating.

Man Bites Dog brings new meaning to the term guilty pleasure...You will by now be thinking that "Man Bites Dog" isn't easy to take. It isn't. But the viciousness of its violence is justified by the fact that it isn't exploitative. It's there to indict exploitation and complicity...It's "Sweeney Todd" filtered through "Spinal Tap," shock theater designed to remind us that we conveniently downplay our central role in the media's preoccupation with violence. [30 Apr 1993, p.50]

In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.

Employs both eloquent and down-to-earth methods to explain the complex reasons why so many of the world's developing countries remain caught in an economic quagmire that prevents them from becoming self-sufficient.

The movie star Julie Christie turned 62 last month, and anyone under the impression that she merely floated through her prime heedless of the age in which she worked should catch her in A Decade Under the Influence.

Isn't much more than ''Baise-Moi'' in business suits as they deconstruct sisterhood with an expense account, but their duets sizzle.

Unfolds with an absolute minimum of dramatic highs and lows, and it's so disaffected that it prompts laughter at the wrong moments.

It's a portrait of the artist as Mary Poppins.

Jay Kelly would make a good double feature with “Sentimental Value,” another film about a driven moviemaker seen from the perspective of the daughters, not the father. I think this film is the better of the two, even if it is more conventional in its storytelling.

Alain might not have the very particular set of skills of Liam Neeson’s character in “Taken” (2008), but he does have the perseverance of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards.

The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people - by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man's back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground.

To those filmgoers who wouldn't know Rat Fink from Barton Fink, this reviewer's advice is: Pass. The latest counterculture tribute by Mann, director of 1988's "Comic Book Confidential" and 1999's "Grass," is as proudly silly as it is informative, and it can't help that a critical amount of brand coolness gets lost in the translation.

The grown-ups in Lucia Puenzo's XXY are a glum lot.

Animal lovers stand to flinch at the hunting scenes and other moments of violence, all of which appear to have been staged aside from documentary footage of creatures fleeing from gunshots. By contrast, the movie makes a dark but compelling case that the people on the other end of the barrel deserve whatever’s coming to them.

In spite of the entropy, Jellyfish is close to a comedy, with a gentle sense of absurdism and a welcome generosity toward its characters.

Maybe the most inexplicable thing among the movie’s many inexplicabilities is the near-complete waste it makes of an actress as gifted as Cotillard.

An entertainingly brutal portrait of feckless privilege and buried tragedy, hewing reasonably close to those points we know to be true and juicily provocative about what happened in rooms you and I weren’t privy to.

The performances are worth a look, especially since Christopher Walken so rarely gets to play a sane person.

It's an altogether satisfying drama -- the sort of movie some people complain they don't make anymore. So here it is; what's your excuse?

Korengal is a more diffuse film than “Restrepo,” less reportorial, and not nearly as emotionally overpowering.

The film, which is as economically made as it is primitively animated, ambles from adventure to adventure, taking nothing seriously, not even itself.

Lynch (one) may be the documentary David Lynch wants, but I'm not sure it's the one he or we deserve.

A bit of a cop-out, wrapping in wistful sentimentality a failure to acknowledge a connection that is more than epidermal.

If 'The Flower of Evil' is not vintage Claude Chabrol, it's at least vintage mediocre Claude Chabrol.

A patient, suspenseful exercise in genre craftsmanship

The laughs in The King of Staten Island are earned, and they are frequent — a frequency that is no small accomplishment, given the pain and loss at the film’s center.

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.

The filmmaking is shallow but assured, the star charisma thoughtful but undimmed. As for the character, I'd vote for Mike Morris. Actually, I wish I could.

Though it delves into some dark territory, Shortcomings has a light touch and is at times very funny. The hilarious Cola is easily the film’s MVP, but Mizuno and Maki are also quite good. The film’s self-awareness and humor about its protagonist are its greatest assets.

While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.

A subplot involving Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) seems to have wandered in from another, less watchable movie. It might have been for the best if Eve Hewson, as J.P. Morgan’s daughter and Tesla’s sort-of love interest, had wandered out.

The first-time filmmaker aspires to show us what caused him to leave his neighborhood and stay gone for 20 years. All I can really glean is that the place was too loud.

Poison is at once disturbing and beautiful, a cereus blooming in the darkest of night. Uncompromising and heady with ambition, Haynes likes to make his audiences think. Poison succeeds in this goal, and increases in power the more you look back on it. Like the most potent movies, it creeps on you. [19 Apr 1991, p.41]

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.

Whatever blend of fact and fiction is really at work in this latest offering from ''Dog Days" director Ulrich Seidl -- known, by the way, for playing fast and loose with the documentary format -- the irony-laced ''Jesus, You Know" does persuade viewers to sit up and take notice of its inspired conceit.

The performances ratchet up to giddy near-hysteria, as Hilde toys with Solness’s randiness and repressed memory.

Daniel Anker's Music From the Inside Out is so intent on divining the mysteries behind the creative act that it comes up frustratingly short on specifics.

The movie has the indulgent fondness of a gift from a son to his talented mum and aunties. But it also feels the funk, and that’s what counts.

A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.

It takes a personal rather than a political perspective, exploring the ambiguities of truth and individual identity rather than the complexities of an ongoing historical calamity. And though the human drama is hypnotically gripping, it comes at the expense of the bigger picture.

It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.

It really only comes alive in its shots of people in the neighborhood sitting around their television sets. What we're really talking about here is a problem in scope. In Hamburger's film, the world is no bigger than a cup.

A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."

Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.

Long Shot is awfully funny when it’s not being completely preposterous — and sometimes even when it is.

Silva doesn’t resort to any fancy tricks to depict his characters’ inner experiences. But something happens nonetheless, a bonding of sorts that is almost, if not quite, convincing.

The Legend of Ochi is being pitched as a family movie by A24, but I don’t believe most kids would enjoy this slow-moving slog set in the Carpathian mountains.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.

Finally, a movie with at least some coherence despite its sadly challenging circumstances.

Telling all is not necessarily the same thing as telling the truth, even if Bowers’s memory seems as clear as the glint in his bright blue eyes. Maybe it’s his ego that’s not clear — or too much so.

Upgrade, Whannell’s second outing behind the camera, is yet another top-notch repair job, this time a kinetic sci-fi riff fashioned from scrap metal and human entrails, nervily updating Cronenbergian body horror for the iOS era.

The film is something to see, and when it addresses the mysterious bond connecting creative people, it has an urgent, ugly splendor.

Patti Cake$ charts a path of rise and fall, breakthrough and disappointment, montage and romance that would be woefully predictable if we weren’t having so much fun tagging along. What’s fresh is the central figure, her talent and presence, and an exuberance that all that concrete Tri-State armor can’t hide.

Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.

The sharp comic timing and devil-may-care breeziness of the original only return intermittently, and the new film’s emphasis is on family feuds and forgiveness. It’s heavy on the feels. There are hugs.

One of the movie's strengths is how we see the revolution - or, rather the anticipation of it - not from the perspective of royal or radical but courtier and servant.

Although expertly directed by Bill Duke, Deep Cover becomes the cinematic equivalent of a drive-by shooting, posing as community uplift. [15 Apr 1992, p.91]

It’s an easy film to watch and become engrossed in, and it’s just as easy to forget, despite a true-life twist that darkens the final minutes without making much of an impact on the whole. Expertly shot, excitingly edited, smartly acted, The Connection never quite connects.

It’s one of this year’s best movies. I don’t know how it will fare at the box office, but I can see it becoming a beloved favorite in the same way “The Shawshank Redemption” ultimately did. Like that classic, this one really makes you think about life and the things we take for granted.

“Don’t Worry” is not a conventional biopic. That makes sense — Callahan sure isn’t a conventional biopic subject — but that unconventionality can present problems. Sometimes the movie is sentimental. More often, it’s scabrous. Maybe if the movie didn’t feel overlong (trim and tight it’s not), those qualities might seem better balanced.

It's slick, but also heartfelt. It's for those who think it's cool to watch "Brady Bunch" reruns and uncool to watch MTV, and it's got terrific performances by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller, who also directs this very appealing canter through the vocational and emotional minefields of our downsizing trash culture. [18 Feb 1994, p.33]

Knowlton has landed on four stories that deserve to be told, and she's told them in a straightforward way that gets the job done, with obvious dedication and love.

What you may not be prepared for is the way that humor does play a part in the story, in the sense that recognizing the total absurdity of a theocratic police state is one way to rise above fear and keep one’s mind free. In Rosewater, ridicule becomes a weapon of liberation.

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

Cairo Time is a kind of bourgeois delusion. It's authentically aggravated but bogusly conceived.

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

These are women who seemed raised on Louisa May Alcott and might have been aspirationally besotted with Jane Austen. But you sense tragedy looming. They're hurtling, inexorably, toward Tennessee Williams.

Once “M:I-TFR” kicks into action mode, the film becomes riveting as we await whatever crazy stunt Tom Cruise is going to spring on us.

Coogler and his returning company of actors and behind-the-camera craftspeople work overtime to achieve a balance of quiet empathy with the big thrills audiences have come to see.

Though it occasionally pulls its punches, the blows Chevalier does land sting and leave a mark.

As sympathetic and well-turned as it is, Nowhere Boy only gives us more mythology.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

The documentary doesn’t give the sense of McEnroe as a person that Douglas’s film does. But it gives a rather astonishing sense of him as a player. With all due respect to those other McEnroe guises, that’s the one that matters.

You have to admire that someone thought it’d be cool to assemble three of the movies’ most fascinating noses for a 90-minute romp.

Even with his glossy new look, Charlie Brown remains the Charlie Browniest.

A smart, well-acted two hours at the art house, full of witty observations and fellow feeling. But, really, it has no business being a movie.

Whether unclassifiable and inconsequential oddity, or overlooked key to the meaning of life, or both, The Creeping Garden is the slime mold of documentaries.

This extremely dry film mixes humor and melancholy to distinctive, if muffled, effect. Take away the muffled part, and that’s very Nighy, too. In being winningly understated and sometimes maddeningly stylized, Sometimes Always Never is a bit like Alan.

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

There is actually an occasional moment of inspiration, but as an experience, the movie doesn't hog much shelf space in the memory.

It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.

What Christlieb and Kijak do so well is keeping these folks from not seeming like loons.

More predictable than it ought to be - you can set your watch by the appearance of the mournful Nick Drake song on the soundtrack.

What's unique about this documentary is that it grips history with both hands, shakes it, examines it, and exits with the entire wrinkled contents bravely in tow.

There are moments when faltering levels of energy and inventiveness threaten to turn Too Much Sleep into a nonevent. But it signals the arrival of a promising filmmaker and is worth sticking with.

Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.

What’s best about the documentary is all that Obama sun. It’s hard to come by these days, even in retrospect. The shade, however, and what occasions it, is all too available.

Hipsters is also kind of amazing, thanks to headlong enthusiasm and an endearing obliviousness to just how ghastly the whole thing keeps threatening to become.

There isn't a single chase scene in The Russia House. There's scarcely a love scene. And it dares to be slow. But it's attached to feelings as few spy movies are - and as even le Carre's book was not. The greatest compliment one can pay The Russia House is to say that it's the kind of spy movie that's making spy movies obsolete. [21 Dec 1990, p.49p]

To appreciate Solaris, the new film by Steven Soderbergh, it helps to downshift your moviegoing metabolism to a level approaching the cryogenically frozen: The movie's that cerebral, that contemplative, that slow.

Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.