Roughly translated, Touchez pas au Grisbi means ''don't touch the loot.'' But in literal terms, this film version of Albert Simonin's blockbuster really couldn't care less who ends up with the cash.

The women here aren't afraid to get extreme about love, but in the end, you sense that they are too sound to destroy themselves over the worthless man they have allowed to personify it. That's what lifts Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from the amusing to the sublime. [23 Dec 1988, p.23]

The movie puts us so close to so much yet keeps its emotional distance -- as if to say, no matter how much we see, we'll never truly know.

A solid, not to say ironclad, winner in the less than overcrowded family animation arena.

The movie is floating into a fierce war of wills between Iya and Masha, one in which their locked stares gradually seem to become an eerie, eternal bond of sisterhood. They can’t look away. Neither may you.

In his three-decade run, Rogers touched millions of souls. But the film is honest in questioning whether, in the end, he really made a difference.

There's nothing out there remotely like Meek's Cutoff, for which some viewers may be thankful. The ending seems calculated to drive the literal-minded screaming out of the theater and yet it's the only possible way out.

Sensuous and rarefied, elevating its particulars into epiphanies, The Long Day Closes is as joyful as introversion gets. [9 July 1993, p.25]

Writer-director Coogler could easily have turned Fruitvale Station into a work of agitprop — a film to work you into a froth of anger — but he’s after things that are harder to grasp: the measure of a man’s life and the smaller struggles, satisfactions, and injustices that can fill it.

Director Walter Salles returns to the political filmmaking he employed in the 2004 Che Guevara film, “The Motorcycle Diaries.” Like that film, this one follows a protagonist who becomes an activist after being jarred by political events.

The movie's few false notes come from Lumet's script, which can be overly explanatory. Because Demme is opting for present-tense realism, the characters are forced to fill us in on who did what when to whom, why, and how.

Powerful as the archival material is, the most loaded footage is of these survivors back on the pain-drenched turf of their Hungarian origins and the blood-drenched soil of the former concentration camps they outlived. Given the moral authority of their presence, the film doesn't need extraneous drama, and wisely avoids it. [26 Feb 1999, p.D4]

Riveting tale of family dynamics packed with as much drama, conflict, and poignancy as the best feature film.

Such moral outrage, apart from the artistry in which it is embedded, tells us that the forces of change are stirring in Iran.

What an amazing presence Gorintin has. Never mind her hunched back and white hair, she's no crone. She makes Eka needy for happiness but susceptible to heartbreak. It's a great performance, full of both joy and the quiet, disappointing parts of being alive that come with knowing change is part of life.

Elegantly depraved and immaculately degenerate, Park Chan Wook’s The Handmaiden is an astonishment. The filmmaking is masterful, very near to Hitchcock in its sly, controlled teasing of the audience.

The majesty of this film comes from how the director and his team use an often surreal mix of music, editing, sound, and image to allow the viewer to experience the world as we assume EO does.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

Even when the meager story line falters — more on that in a bit — the music and visuals mesh into a dazzling whole.

With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

Slight but fascinating.

It's so simple, so obvious - and a revelation.

Shining with freshness and commitment, Get On the Bus is one of the far from overwhelming number of films you owe it to yourself to see in 1996. [16 Oct 1996, p.F1]

Fremon Craig has made a completely satisfying crowd pleaser full of first-rate performances.

The movie, a balm for the senses and the soul, celebrates and discreetly mourns an activity that stretches back to antiquity and is slowly being snuffed out by global market forces.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

A ferocious and first-rate drama.

Broadcast News grows in your memory. It recalls an era when movies were made by, for and with three-dimensional characters you cared about. Let's hope it doesn't take James L. Brooks another four years to make another one. We can't wait that long. [25 Dec 1987, p.53]

Revanche was a foreign-language Oscar nominee this year, and it's a better movie than most of the films in the main race. The word "revanche" means "revenge" in German, but "waiting" would have been just as good.

It's a quiet little gag homage both to Boris Karloff and to the set up of shelf-loads of pulp novels and films noir. And Peltola, with his flat, serious face and damp, oil-black hair, happens to look, at times, like Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas.

It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.

Yet, paradoxically, the fact that almost every line becomes a double entendre confirms the fact that the movie is one of Allen's best. Although Allen, like the character he's playing, may self-destruct, the movie emerges triumphant. It holds us from start to finish - a rueful, ironic, wrenchingly funny study of yet another set of mixed Manhattan doubles dedicated to the belief that there's no marriage or relationship so bad that it can't be traded for - or transformed into - something worse. [18 Sept 1992, p.51]

The byplay between DiCaprio and Pitt is delicious and finely drawn — you’d better believe Tarantino knows he’s dealing with two of our last old-school movie stars and sneakiest actors.

A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

Filled with affection and verve and will do very nicely until the next shipment of Latin jazz comes along.

In his masterful and haunting documentary Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.

Thanks to Chen's eye and the strong central performances, Farewell My Concubine comes together with historical resonance and stirring, full-blooded sweep. [29 Oct 1993, p.51]

If “Sinners” commits one sin (forgive me), it’s a tendency to overexplain itself during the film’s climax. Still, Coogler and his excellent cast have created a sexy, funny, boisterous, and very bloody crowd pleaser, one that features a mid-credits sequence that adds another wrinkle to its intriguing mythology.

Never settling for mere irony, High Hopes becomes a small banner of sanity and good humor among the social ruins. Leigh never shies away from his unflinching dead-end class view of contemporary London. Nor does he wallow in '60s nostalgia. Which is part of the reason his passionate, life-embracing High Hopes is so exhilarating. [31 Mar. 1989, p.30]

Bonhôte and Ettedgui leave viewers winded from the pace of the ascent. But much the way we know that there was a rise, we also know a fall is imminent. This is where McQueen wobbles.

Generations from now, when people talk about horse movies, they won't be talking about "National Velvet" or "My Friend Flicka," they'll be talking about the majestic beauty of Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion. [07 Feb 1980]

Booksmart registers as an instant classic that doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as refurbish it from within, and it matters very much that the writers, director, and stars are all women. Also that they’re having a hell of a good time.

Haunting, powerfully acted, penetratingly written, it's about people coming home -- and not coming home -- to their marriages.

Remembered for being the best Boston movie of all time. [27 Feb 2005]

What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

The movie’s a social history, a love story, and a call to arms. It’s very sad and it’s very good.

The Joy Luck Club is "Terms of Endearment" in quadruplicate, aimed at the heart and right on target. [24 Sept 1993, p.47]

Spacey is diamond-brilliant in a role that plays as if custom-made for him.

This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.

From beginning to end, it bristles with ironies in classic Eastern European absurdist style.

An epic film in every respect.

Another complex and magnificently acted melodrama.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

A hugely entertaining and emotionally resonant pleasure for audiences of all ages.

Maddin's Winnipeg is a rich, funky, funny stew of fears and desires, of mangled civic chronology mashed up with hothouse private emotions. This is a secret history, and it's a wonder.

The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’

Like a cool lemon ice on a blistering summer day, In the Heights feels like a reward.

A remarkable subject, the Kraffts cry out for a remarkable filmmaker.

The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.

Love it or hate it, “Hamnet” will get a response out of you that you won’t easily shake. I was equally moved and horrified, and I loved every minute of it. As Hamlet would say, the rest is silence.

This startling, assured feature debut from New Hampshire-born, Brooklyn-based writer-director Robert Eggers has one foot in early American history and another in legend and fairy tale.

With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.

It’s the latest from Cristian Mungiu, one of the leading lights of the New Romanian Cinema and the director of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” by general critical consensus one of the finest films of the new millennium. Graduation is a more quietly damning drama; it doesn’t eviscerate you like the earlier movie but instead sticks with you like a nagging doubt.

The movie is genuinely creative, genuinely outside-the-box, and often genuinely scary; parents of toddlers and nightmare-prone children are herewith warned.

More than an hour passes before Khaled and Wikström’s stories intersect, and though it would be an exaggeration to say each redeems the other, in this film the other side of hope is not despair, but decency.

Yet not only does this bares-bones “Close Encounters” make a virtue out of found locations and empty night-time streets, it has the confidence of a story sure in its telling. It feels original.

Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.

Medea works on von Trier's own imagistic terms. There are shots and sequences in this movie that feel unique.

Deeper, darker currents move through Momma's Man, eddying around fears of letting go on both sides of the generational divide.

It is violent, sad, tender, and alive, and it is as assured a piece of moviemaking as you’ll ever see.

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."

Volver brims with personal and cinematic allusions, but no one hungry for a well-told tale from a master storyteller is required to understand them.

An electrifying, at times heartbreaking documentary from the Egyptian-born, Harvard-educated documentarian Jehane Noujaim (“Control Room”).

All movies are phony. What, you think beautiful people doing ugly things on a screen is real? Some movies are phonier than others. Widows is one of those. The always thin line between a twisty plot and a silly one gets crossed about an hour in.

Synonyms turns increasingly oblique in its final half hour, as it dawns on Yoav that the door he’s hammering at may never open and let him in. But the sight of this desolate young man strutting about Paris in a borrowed orange trenchcoat is not one you’ll soon forget, nor the exhilarating film that swirls around him.

I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie this year that simultaneously depressed the hell out of me and filled me with hope like Boys State.

At times Mantegna's character seems little more than his dilemma, but Mamet's stylized dialogue crackles urgently and colorfully, each word landing with a weight you find only in good writing. The dislocation accelerates compellingly into ironic absurdity as Mamet lets his cop swing in the wind in this mordant parable of wrong things done for right reasons. There have been a lot of cop movies, but never one like Homicide. It has a way all its own of raising your consciousness by whacking you in the head. [18 Oct 1991, p.33]

Museum Hours is an unusual film. It lacks a score yet feels like a sonata, intimate and musical. Secret harmonies are being heard.

I can't think of another movie this year that made me laugh or weep harder for the whole lumpy business of being - the compromises and connections that get us through the day and somehow add up to entire lives.

First Man plays a different and arguably more rewarding game, one that looks for the man behind the hero. It’s a movie that shows how the most personal moments can coexist within and alongside the most momentous events. It’s a film that insists history is made from private lives.

On the level of a popcorn thrill ride, Snowpiercer is a beaut.

Lund has crafted a good-natured hangout movie that tells the story of one final game at Soldiers Field, a New Hampshire-set diamond slated for demolition the following day.

Happy-Go-Lucky isn't one of Leigh's epic social canvases like "Secrets & Lies" or even "Topsy-Turvy"; rather, it's an edgy character study whose message only gradually emerges.

Suggests a summit meeting between ''The Princess Bride'' and ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' it has a decided charm of its own.

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

What you're not prepared for in Marziyeh Meshkini's astonishing debut film is the way its central image instantly leaps into the pantheon of world cinema with a rightness and an urgency that glue your eyes to the screen.

The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.

The movie’s a galvanizing, tragicomic work of 21st-century schadenfreude, marred only by a barely repressed giddiness on the part of the filmmakers.

Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.

This is at bottom a pulp thriller that strains -- sometimes pretentiously, at other times with gutter magnificence -- to reach the level of basic human truths.

If Foley's strategies don't quite regenerate the caged-animal urgency of the play, the tradeoff of some verbal fireworks for piercing closeups isn't all bad. [16 Sep 1992, p.72]

It’s not a perfect movie, but it may be a great one.

The Oceanic Preservation Society doesn't change the world so much as call attention to something so very wrong with it. And in doing so, The Cove culminates with an image of political agitation that might be one of the most oddly effective public service announcements you'll see.

After “Rocco,” Visconti’s style lost the vestiges of naturalism and indulged in rococo artifice and aristocratic splendor.

The movie observes the general misery of needing serious medical treatment and the particular awfulness of needing medical treatment you can't pay for.

The best thing about Together, apart from the way some of its characters grow on you even as others put you off, is the way it snatches idealism back from the brink of life-smothering orthodoxy.