Comparisons have been made to the films of Jim Jarmusch and early David Lynch, both warranted. Amirpour wears her influences like a badge of honor but she also has a nascent sensibility of her own, arguably more feminine and certainly more sensual.

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.

Seeing Superman save, and work with, more than just white people is refreshing, but it really struck a nerve with fans who rely only on hearsay. Gunn doesn’t care if you’re offended; he’s too busy showing us a good time. “Superman” is a surprisingly entertaining reboot.

Holofcener writes as well as Albert Brooks at his best, and her finesse with actors is as assured as James L. Brooks's on his TV and film projects from 20 and 30 years ago.

Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]

The Founder is a solid, smart, worthwhile film and the only remaining mystery is why the Weinstein Company is burying it with a quiet January release rather than pushing its much-loved star into the awards race with the usual fanfare.

The Traitor is a coolly epic appraisal of a country’s struggle with its dark side rather than a mobbed-up melodrama. If it’s “Godfather” clichés you want, there’s always “The Godfather.”

The movie also rather sweetly suggests that the apartment being shared is Europe itself. There's a reason this warm, stylish human comedy was a big hit all across the Continent: It conveys a new generation's conviction that borders no longer matter.

Tweel has edited this material into a complex and emotionally exhausting vérité-like tapestry.

The pure joy of music-making is what this gem of a film is all about.

Hills is a far cry from its cheesy and predictable predecessor. "Gruesome" doesn't begin to describe the horrors that are revealed on-screen here.

Everyone from Channing Tatum to Danny DeVito to Hollywood transplant LeBron James is here voicing the movie’s winsomely rendered snow creatures, but it’s the creative story more than the routine-if-likable characters that makes this one so engaging.

The Program is much better than its limited commercials suggest. There are so many ways this film could be awful, a minefield of potential trite plot lines and character-development lapses. Director/co-screenwriter David S. Ward evaded most like a punt returner weaving through would-be tacklers. [24 Sept 1993, p.49]

Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.

Cancer dramas are not uncommon; what lifts Ordinary Love just enough out of the ordinary is its concern with how a married couple survives the ordeal. Intimate, unsparing, and attuned to the micro-nuances of a longtime relationship, it is made special by the two actors at its center, both out-size talents who here relish the opportunity to play close and draw from life.

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

This one has a tang and texture and rare sense of everyday epiphany. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you find out you’ve figured wrong.

The movie is daring and unconventional. It’s daring in feeling so static, with a distinctive, unhurried rhythm. It’s unconventional in letting evocation drive plot more than events do. It can feel a bit dreamlike that way. A melancholy lyricism defines the movie.

Though not as graphically powerful as other documentaries on similar subjects, such as Fredrick Wiseman’s “Meat” (1976) or Georges Franju’s “Les Sang des Bête” (1949), the emphasis on the disastrous global impact of these practices is more disturbing .

Billy Crystal's wit and sweet energies carry it past what could have been a fatal degree of mushiness. Although there's rather too much redemption for one cattle drive, and the film's attitude toward women is at best opaque, Crystal brings warmth and ease to his sharp timing and edgy comic style as he and his pals entertainingly usher us into their brotherhood of schlepdom. [7 June 1991, p.53]

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.

Brings the '30s vividly to the screen.

Trumbo never wavered in his belief that his persecution was only a horrible symptom. He understood the real victim of blacklist America was America itself.

"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.

Hardship and suffering don't drive this movie so much as a romantic's gloss on the two.

Baumbach has something of an evil genius for casting. If Driver — the mercurial Adam of “Girls” — and Seyfried are solid as the incoming kids, Charles Grodin (the original “Heartbreak Kid”) ruthlessly represents the boomers refusing to cede the stage.

Few directors lavish as much tenderness upon life's bruised survivors as Kloves does, and many a more prominent director has failed to find in the dust-choked West Texas plains the wistfulness with which Quaid and Ryan fill their most solid and shtick-free work yet. [05 Nov 1993, p.42]

Yes, Younger has made an update of the ''shiksa who changed my life" story in ''Annie Hall." But Prime is missing the psychological acuity and scabrous cultural wit of Woody Allen at his best. These lovers meet standing in line to see Antonioni's ''Blow-Up" and never mention the movie.

A clever and satisfyingly abundant entertainment.

The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.

It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.

Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.

The film is profane. But who knew police brutality could play as a laughing matter?

Only loosely concerned with behind-the-scenes gossip and is squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability.

There's scarcely any dialogue, and the "hukkle" sound is universal enough to make subtitles unnecessary and to please an audience of any age and attention span.

Solanas’s daring takes the form of ambition. Upside Down has a visionary look that has affinities with everything from “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner” to “Children of Men.” Solanas has the temerity to split the screen horizontally in many shots. Usually, this works, though “Upside Down” is not recommended for anyone subject to visual dislocation.

In Summer Wars, it's what's old that's made to seem refreshingly new.

Eric begins this story as a sad-eyed cipher and ends it as a whole man, and maybe that’s structure enough, and reason enough, for one film.

Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema.

Gyllenhaal’s excellent, but, playing his girlfriend, Tatiana Maslany (star of TV’s “Orphan Black”) is something special.

The stone-faced silent comedian’s influence on every possible aspect of physical comedy is wide and deep, attested to in this movie by entertainers old (Bill Irwin, Paul Dooley, Richard Lewis), ancient (Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner), youngish (Bill Hader, Quentin Tarantino), and random (Cybill Shepherd, Werner Herzog).

Tina is celebratory and glossy, with no mention of her recent health issues, her son’s 2018 suicide, or other painful subjects. The life is still more than eventful enough.

If it were any more real - if it were Imax, say -- the audience would be molting.

Raimi seems more comfortable being his outlandishly jokey, B-movie self, letting entire sequences play on the line between carefree schlock and Hollywood blockbusting.

Watching them issue hugs produces an involuntary response. You want to hug them, too.

The movie only looks like a coming-of-age freak show from the outside; in reality, it’s unexpected proof that flowers can grow even in a prison.

In Brad’s Status, Stiller becomes the face of white male privilege — and its comeuppance.

Perhaps not the most uproarious of Veber's farces, but entertaining and emotionally satisfying all the same.

The film's most remarkable achievement, in this culture of clamor, simply may be its decision to keep the volume down, drawing us in as opposed to pummeling us, as most films do.

As a filmmaker Soderbergh requires nothing more of us than a willingness to enjoy ourselves. He had fun. Why shouldn't we? With Contagion, the fun begins with a cough.

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.

Slowly it emerges that Gaga is Naharin’s “dance language,” a way of expressing one’s inner being through external movement. Gaga is dada — for dancers.

Part of what hooks you to this movie is how Leth outsmarts his taskmaster, and how the two men have divergent, almost incompatible aesthetic ideals.

Without stooping to the uselessness of style, Working Woman makes its points simply by staying with Orna as she proceeds through stages of shock, humiliation, self-loathing, self-censorship, all emotions her husband finds difficult to understand and which the Bennys of the world rely on.

Walking the line between the movie’s broad strokes and its near-perfect pitch is the art itself, which has been designed and constructed by a team of smart designers.

This engaging ensemble comedy that could have been called ''Father Doesn't Know Best.''

Examines this dilemma with compassion and sensitivity.

Gallo has delivered a clever suspense comedy that, thanks to a taut script, creative direction, and first-rate performances from its leads, gives Double Take more weight than one would expect from a genre crowd-pleaser.

With its inventively nutso action, youthful vibe, and subversive topicality, the “Kingsman” franchise feels more relevant than even Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Screen espionage doesn’t come any hipper these days.

The movie has more style than depth and it's sometimes in danger of confusing the two.

Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage.

The primary talking head is Ono, of course, who's serenely protective of Lennon's greater legacy. Her cooperation ties the film's hands, but only to a point.

A tale of narrow talent destroyed by pop hubris, raging insecurity, substance abuse, and murder.

It's a genre film - the action is fierce and nonstop - with a brooding undercurrent of unease that aims for the complexities of John le Carre.

Beatriz at Dinner has been directed with subtle but damning chamber-comedy finesse by Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck & Buck”) and written by that great deadpan satirist Mike White (“Chuck & Buck,” “School of Rock,” TV’s “Freaks and Geeks”).

In addition to the film's two extremely likable stars, the strong supporting cast features a who's who of rising African-American actors.

The film’s chief flaw is that it’s in the room but never really in the room — the key figures talk about passionate interoffice policy arguments, but we never actually see them. Still, The Final Year takes in setbacks, breakthroughs, gaffes, and a steady drumbeat of talking-head criticism from televised outsiders, heard on the film’s soundtrack but not seen.

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.

An inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to.

For all its shortcomings, Restoration is miles beyond most historical epics. [26 Jan 1996, p.51]

As fascinating as the material is, like so much of popular culture it doesn't hold up well out of context.

The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.

A rhapsodic erotic romance that takes place in a cultural prison, and it pulses with a defiance that would be mischievous if it weren't so rip-roaringly angry.

Like Field, the new movie has a sneakily dark sense of humor, a taste for the odd bit of gore, and a love of psychedelic mushrooms and cinematic hallucinations.

Witherspoon is a professional, demanding we give ourselves over to her carbonated pluck.

It is a film about Los Angeles, culture and coexistence, the American dream. It is the opposite of narrowcasting.

In Every Little Step, the performers bleed, sweat, cry theater - without having to tell us.

The anti-"Kill Bill." This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.

Penn's Kumar could become Jeff Spicoli for the generation of college kids who've never seen "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" but always seem to have a copy of "Dude, Where's My Car?" cued up at a moment's notice.

There are unexpected things in “Magician,” such as Puck’s presence. Welles’s first screen test, from 1937, and an appearance on “I Love Lucy” are others. But even the expected things, such as the numerous Welles clips, are consistently unexpected.

A note of paranoia creeps in that nods to classic film noir on one hand and baroque misogyny on the other. Or maybe this is just Garland’s dank idea of what men do when they’re left to their own devices: Create dream mates from the flayed skin of their fantasies.

Some of the best scenes show the family gathering after court sessions to discuss strategy, support each other, and vent.

Cinema's greatest caveman meets his ancestors. For us, it's a reassurance: The creative process is astonishingly old and its fruits still surprisingly fresh.

Cleo from 5 to 7, a sort of combination between realism and avant-garde imagination, is the kind of film that young people, learning to appreciate foreign-made pictures, will find stimulating. [15 Feb 1963, p.8]

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

The RKO Swiss Family Robinson isn't considered a lost classic — a lost pretty-good-movie is more like it — but the fact that Disney is finally releasing a movie they bought specifically to sit on is unexpected and welcome. [20 Oct 2019, p.N1]

It's all a treat to behold, and, at least where the turtle and the jellyfish are concerned, it's transcendently beautiful, too. I just wish there was more of it.

New rule: All Disneynature films must be narrated by Tina Fey.

Engrossing and provocative.

Yet despite the retrospective sensationalism, Lovett's 70-minute documentary is a sobering anti-erotic cautionary tale.

This is a person you'd enjoy spending time with and learning from. That's certainly the case with Dorman's film.

The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.

It’s a sly, twisty little chiller, not ashamed of its B-movie bona fides and better for it.

The quest ends in a surprise Capra-esque resolution, which both satisfies and cloys.

The last time I felt the sort of outrageously kinetic action-movie high District 9 delivers, it was 1981 and George Miller, Mel Gibson, and "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" had just come roaring out of Australia.

The film elects a storytelling manner that's scarily similar to the beginning of a lot of hip-hop thrillers.

A long, warm, satisfying farewell encounter.

Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.