Orlowski does share Balog's smoldering rage at a society that refuses to face the consequences of its actions, and that rage forms the necessary spine of Chasing Ice. This is an agit-doc with no apologies and a lot of sorrow.

It's a handsomely crafted revisionist Western that effectively destigmatizes the legendary Apache raider, reveling as much in political correctness as in its sunset-tinted red sandstone. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

The film's no masterpiece, but at least you're in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.

The film is almost as shaky as the science, but Nichols knows how to get the most out of what amounts to a one-joke comedy, and Bening works virtual miracles.

A heady, sometimes blurry combination of fable, legend, and social-political commentary.

Kang balances the uproariously comic with the profoundly sad, and the two tones amplify each other with subtlety.

Chicken With Plums has Iran in common with "Persepolis," but little else. Largely, though not entirely, live action, it's a fairly traditional story about thwarted love - a kind of fairy tale for grown-ups.

Armed with a dinner theater accent and hair that looks like an LP melted on his head, Turturro pockets the picture. As a demonstration of his newly accessed maturity and benevolence, Sandler helps him do it.

Crewdson's work is distinctive, and this film does a great job helping us understand the specific nature of his vision.

The film is faithful to its absurdities, sometimes hilariously so.

These men tend to be laconic, tormented, tattooed, impenetrable, usually bearded, potentially or actively violent, with screwed-up families and traumatic pasts. Nothing that a good horse couldn’t cure, or a talented female director.

A very good drama about the difficulties of being young, black, and gay. With a bigger budget and a sharper focus, it might have been a great one.

In general, the more young people who see the film, the more who will be made aware of a fascinating, complicated near-relative whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.

Renoir may be too decorous, but it’s about decoration — the intense beauty of surfaces.

Like a meal prepared by an extreme chef, ''Hustle" is more than a bit of a mess. It still tastes like nothing you've ever had before.

This doomed world may feel familiar, but Stake Land remains one of the genre's smartest entries in years.

Computer Chess is deeply strange and occasionally impenetrable, yet it’s also surreally funny, with touches of science fiction that bedevil the proceedings with outré possibilities.

In short, Roger & Me is a breath of new life blowing through the Rust Belt. So depressed has this country's underclass been that any sign of life from it makes you want to cheer, and the funny and furious Roger & Me makes you want to cheer a lot. [12 Jan 1990, p.38P]

Dolls is an art film, and a languid, inexplicably haunting one at that.

As a coherent, well-judged alternative history, the movie's a mess. As a thought-provoking and frequently hilarious jeremiad, it scores again and again.

Radnor's script is more bittersweet than laugh-out-loud funny.

The movie works.

Eric Roberts, making his movie debut, shines as a Travolta-ish hero who wants to surmount his family origins. [19 July 2015, p.N]

Hits far more marks than it misses. And no work has brought viewers deeper inside the psychology of war. [06 Apr 2007, p.D10]

The film never drags, but one of the enjoyable things about it is its way of taking its time letting us get to know and savor the characters.

The romantic love triangle dramedy “Love, Brooklyn” is more than just a visual showcase for the favorite borough of the average New York City hipster. It’s also an unabashed devotional to the interior design of the Brooklyn brownstone.

It's affecting, and the tone, which is polemical, is also rueful and realistic.

A big, handsome throwback to star-powered historical costume movies.

Gives three first-rate actors a chance to stretch, and they do.

As Altman misfires go, Brewster McCloud is one of the better ones. [25 Jul 2010, p.12]

As directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita , the sluggish haze between extracurricular activities is exquisitely captured and framed, then patiently edited. Every shot feels like a gift.

Unlike “Belle,” however, in this case Asante does not allow her story to be overwhelmed by period decor and costumes.

Bobby marks a turning point for Colin Farrell, whose vulgarities and inelegance tend to get the better of his range.

Takes you inside a kingdom you've never seen the likes of before. Not only is it an IMAX film, with all the superlatives (six-story screen, 12,000 seat-rumbling watts of digital sound) this implies, but it's also computer-generated 3D animation.

The violence in the final 45 minutes of Mr. Vengeance is tough to watch.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

I thought of “That’s Life!” while watching Memphis, Tim Sutton’s sometimes forced, sometimes extraordinary tone poem about a modern-day bluesman. Enigmatic and brief — all of 79 minutes — the movie seems to fall into the cracks between documentary and fiction.

Schnabel tries to re-create van Gogh’s inner workings during the intense last two years of his life — his point of view and his way of looking at the world that resulted in the masterpieces that have since become invaluable investment commodities.

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.

As a production, Fados is pretty with its reflected surfaces and many projected images. But at times it hurts for the bite and texture of life outside that studio. For all the dolorous singing about and shots of streets, it'd be nice to hit one.

Bizarre, fascinating, and frustrating documentary.

Sweet little crowd-pleaser.

His abiding interest is in the ways that human beings work together, his famous fly-on-the-wall shooting style revealing the constant struggle to connect and create. Wiseman's are the movies to show to the aliens when they arrive.

Eating is an eventful afternoon with a bunch of colorful characters. They're oh-so-enlightened, and they're oh-so-miserable. [10 May 1991, p.29]

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.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — which sounds like a Boy Scout jamboree presided over by Donald Trump — is a very traditional movie masquerading as a very odd movie. What helps make it a good movie is how well it (mostly) maintains a balance between tradition and oddity.

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

It's rare that a crime movie achieves such emotional complexity, but this one is smartly layered.

An amazing and incendiary movie that dives straight into the rough waters of contradiction.

Turbo-charged wallbanger with the IQ of a tire iron. But it jumps off the screen with the mindless panache of a good bad movie.

Sommersby is a handsome throwback to a kind of film that hardly gets made anymore. It's a richly textured period love story powered by two charismatic and intelligent star performances, with a fullness and amplitude that one more readily associates with quality studio films of the past rather than the MTV quick-cut present. [05 Feb 1993, p.25]

It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.

Where most documentaries offer us facts to hold on to, his (McElwee's) are obsessed with the mystery of things we don't know and never will.

Shirin Neshat's film, a magical-realist cry from the heart, is as up-to-date as last year's pro-democracy protests.

Half melodrama, half Holy Minimalism, mostly engrossing, the film is guided by the idea of two women moving slowly toward each other in friendship and understanding, one an atheist doctor and the other a worldly bride of Christ.

In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]

Distinguishes itself from the recent glut of mediocre political documentaries by opting for nonpartisanship.

One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.

A surprisingly effective slice-and-dice cheapie; cool, controlled direction by Jack Sholder, who also wrote the script. [31 Oct 2012, p.G27]

Juice is a film about choices. The right ones. The tragically wrong ones. There will be comparisons to Matty Rich's brilliant "Straight Out of Brooklyn," but Dickerson's effort is more richly textured, more grounded in an ordinary kid's point of view. And Dickerson's dogged determination to film from that perspective has resulted in a film rich in the right lingo, the right clothes, the right attitudes. [17 Jan 1992, p.67]

Rebuilding Paradise is well worth seeing, but know that Howard’s taste for the upbeat keeps getting drowned out by a dire and dissonant doomsday drum.

Full of elegance but hampered by lack of depth.

One of the great newspaper comedies. [24 Nov 1989, p.112p]

Once the film started throwing in Satan worship, spooky dolls, and nuns with agendas the Pope would not endorse, it became more silly than disturbing. Still, I have to admire a filmmaker who, once realizing he’s painted himself into a corner, opts to bust through the wall rather than accept being trapped.

Gibney lays out the full picture, availing himself of terrific concert footage, archival materials, and interviews with Fela’s colleagues and family members (including eldest son and musical heir Femi Kuti). The portrait that emerges is of a larger-than-life personality who seems to have been closer to those who didn’t know him than those who did. (Again, much like Brown.)

Director David Lowery (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints,” “A Ghost Story”) did the adaptation of David Grann’s New Yorker magazine article. His direction is winningly relaxed, and his script has real flavor.

There's warmth and a kind of benevolence in bed with them, too, and it carries the film past its compromises. If White Palace is no "Last Tango in Paris," it's at least a sizzling, fat-free "Last Hamburger in St. Louis." [19 Oct 1990, p.33]

Mercifully, The Station Agent is not about how these misfits heal one another -- they're not that miserable, for one thing. It's about the unlikely ways proximity, need, and coincidence create friendships.

Never has space travel looked so sordid, debased, mean-spirited, or crummy, qualities intensified by the (intentionally) ugliest cinematography ever — except for the close-ups of faces — from the great Agnès Godard, Denis’s longtime collaborator. But seldom has space travel served as such an eloquent and tragic representation of the human condition.

Working with his brother Ivan, Sam Raimi is laughing with us - and often louder than we are.

The mother-child dynamic here is the fraught stuff of any worthy melodrama.

A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking.

It's a perfect example of how far production design and editing WON'T take you when the story's not there.

How does a filmmaker tell a Holocaust story that hasn't been told before? The Matchmaker does it by weaving fable with realism, coming-of-age innocence with adult grief, and guilt with romanticism.

Maybe the redemptions offered are simplistic in the context of this place, but they make for a dramatic (if heavily foreshadowed) conclusion.

What saves “Anora,” and makes it worth seeing, is the performance by Madison.

Many of the backgrounds look like watercolors that are either drying or dying.

A Knight's Tale, will either repel you or win you over. It won me over.

Stylish and arrives at a satisfying cumulative weight, even if it isn't Austen pure.

There's wonder and mystery in "The Secret of Roan Inish," a handful of utterly convincing characters, knit together by Sayles' ability to freight their naturalistic moves with larger, deeper meanings. [24 Feb 1995, p.71]

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."

As for The Little Mermaid, it’s one of Disney’s better remakes. But don’t throw away your DVD of the original.

Nightcrawler is about TV news-video parasites, but the freakiest thing in it — the biggest bedbug of all — is Jake Gyllenhaal as the movie’s hero, Lou Bloom.

A movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that’s a key part of the joke.

Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.

Any metaphoric meaning is left up to the viewer, who will be too busy basking in the fine performances to give it much thought.

Their non-specific excursion unfolds like a blithe Woody Allen movie without all the name-dropping.

Cuesta prizes curiosity and perception over conflict resolution. He likes the way kids take their cues from adults and the ways they revolt against them. Even as the kids do the ugliest things, the film stays cool without ever being cold.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."

If there's one image that sums up the filmmaking style of Takashi Miike, it's the close-up of a bubbling hot pot on the family dinner table.

The reason Bread and Roses works as well as it does is that as didactic as it sometimes gets, its heart is always bigger than its ideology.

Spielberg has said that in their collaboration, cut short by Kubrick's death, Kubrick had opened his heart as never before. Although the fingerprint of each is upon A.I, there are times when the prints are blurred and merged. And this film will blur the hitherto distinctive profiles of each.

Jackman and Stewart’s fond, easy dynamic helps to balance some very provocative brutality, as the movie pushes Wolverine’s berserk nature to graphic new extremes.

He’s the dreamer in the machine, and if he truly is retiring, the world stands to look a lot more ordinary.

Though it plays fast and loose with several details, The Burial remains true to its focus on race, class, and how capitalism exploits both regardless of a person’s color or financial means. The message is not subtly delivered, but it’s still effective.

Rudo y Cursi is a grave and calculated affront to the men of Mexico, and that's the source of its roistering charm.