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.

The stakes in the film are high enough for some plot, but low enough to maintain healthy blood pressure. There is a delicious lack of exposition — and plenty of inside jokes for the true fans.

What starts out as a beautifully depopulated filmic exercise - it's 14 minutes into the movie before Guzman introduces any people - becomes toward the end a nearly unbearable examination of good and bad in the human heart.

Richly textured, beautifully acted.

It's a powerful depth charge of a film about reinvented family values. In Denis's hands, this urgent, loving brother and sister act is lyrical, exhilarating, flecked with mystery. [24 Oct 1997, p.C6]

A quirky, welcome addition to Disney's cavalcade of animated stars.

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

Miguel Arteta's Star Maps is an uneven first feature, but what's good in it is very good. It's got invigorating rawness to spare, making its low budget work in its favor. [22 Aug 1997, p.F5]

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

Finally, a summer action movie that delivers the goods!

The actors turn in great work, but the true stars of “Blitz” are the production design by Adam Stockhausen and the cinematography by Yorick Le Saux. Collectively, they put you inside the Tube stations and shelters that were occupied by Londoners trying to escape the Blitz.

Anvil! is one of the sweetest, funniest films I've seen this year. Also the loudest and most foulmouthed.

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

The ambiguous finale provides neither certainty nor respite, and may prove frustrating for some. I had no idea where Hamaguchi’s cautionary tale was taking me, but I remained intrigued until the bitter end.

A perfect example of a small, well-made, and (in its central role) rivetingly acted film.

Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.

The best movie Steven Seagal never made. Except that Statham, while just as marked for death, is harder to kill.

Outrageous controversialist meets brilliant attorney, and fact intertwines with fiction.

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.

Like Anderson, many directors claim to value local color, but few have gone as far, or achieved such impressive results, as has Chris Smith in The Pool.

Judy Irving's terrific documentary 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is ostensibly about birds, but only in the way that a game of Scrabble is about tiles.

If you don't get hooked on the storytelling in Fried Green Tomatoes, you'll surely be charmed by its five terrific actresses. Fried Green Tomatoes can't match the dramatic focus and rich texture of Rambling Rose, it's far more appealingly nuanced than Steel Magnolias - and with actresses like Tandy, Masterson, Bates, Parker and Tyson on the job, it's downright irresistible. [10 Jan 1992, p.73]

It is an uncompromising family tale, one that's dark but lyrical and moving in its rendering of the ties that bind even the most dysfunctional families, despite valiant efforts to destroy them.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

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.

No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.

Once the case comes to trial, Anatomy of a Fall becomes an engrossing courtroom drama, but not for the reason you think. The French court is a vessel for grandstanding and verbal sparring matches; it’s far less stodgy than the American ones we see in even the most absurd courtroom movies.

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

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

A rousing, sometimes funny, frequently depressing documentary.

Wake in Fright is a monster movie, and the monster is us.

Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.

White Noise is an expertly edited, four-year immersion into a phenomenon that has shaped the volatile politics of our time. It’s an auspicious debut for both Lombroso and The Atlantic, and its intimate and empathetic approach might be a more potent way of countering those who promote such toxic ideas than blunting confrontation.

Pacific Rim is, hands down, the blockbuster event of the summer — a titanic sci-fi action fantasy that has been invested, against all expectations, with a heart, a brain, and something approximating a soul.

Barry Levinson's Diner is an extremely clever, slick male fantasy that takes some time to work out its mood and tone but ultimately blossoms into a moving film. [16 Apr 1982]

It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker

They may not be as cool as Bono's fly shades, but the plastic yellow glasses required for viewing U23D supply an amazing fly-on-the-amp view of the Irish rockers in their natural habitat.

Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

Bell is utterly persuasive as the boy literally yearning to leap beyond the oppressively apparent confines of his world.

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

Melville's austere yet sensuous reinvention of the genre's macho honor and trenchcoated, fedora-wearing iconography, coolly projected by Delon's expressionless face, makes "Le Samourai" a pungent and pleasurable experience still. [02 May 1977, p.D7]

Is The Story of Film worth 15 hours of your viewing life? Well, that's between you and your kino conscience. The first part certainly is. Cousins is extremely good at laying out the emergence of a film grammar. More important, he communicates the sense of wonder and excitement that characterized the emergence of so astonishing a medium.

A coming-of-age story set on four wheels, has the distinct charm of a film assured of its voice, even as its central character strives to find her own.

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.

It's a stunningly stylized, fiercely emotional one-of-a-kind film that seals in amber the horrors of a life the director couldn't wait to escape. [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

What does it add up to? What’s it all about, Wes? In a word: evanescence.

Timothy Treadwell was killed, along with his girlfriend, by a rogue bear in October 2003.

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.

A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive." It also does something that, if you're from around these parts, seems downright perverse. It takes the Boston out of George V. Higgins.

Most coming-of-age tales chart a course from childhood to maturity. Scrapper flips the premise, allowing a kid who grew up too fast the luxury of slowing down to savor childhood.

Conclave is a massively entertaining slice of melodramatic excess, with actors who know they’re in a soap opera disguised as high drama. As a result, everyone plays their roles completely straight — and to great effect.

If their movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

What keeps the film going, and helps it keep its comic tone, is the constant threat of cataclysm - and the deadpan Buster Keaton charm of the ever-responsive Pinon as he combats the giant Rube Goldberg meat-grinder that the house, in effect, is. [17 Apr 1992]

This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.

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.

Varda's charmingly eccentric amble, wise in its seeming waywardness.

Most refreshingly, Science Fair illustrates the many different kinds of STEM students out there.

There is a great and perhaps unique French cinematic tradition of braiding together love and manners and the past. Think of "Children of Paradise," "Casque d'Or," "The Earrings of Madame de . . .," "Elena and Her Men." Now one can think of The Princess of Montpensier, too.

Rental Family is the kind of movie that should not work at all. It takes an unusual premise, one ripe for oversentimentality, and then strikes the perfect balance between heartwarming and heartbreaking.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

Not Without My Daughter creeps up on you like an icy chill. Not since Midnight Express in 1978 has imprisonment in a foreign country been so alarmingly and intimately conveyed on film. [11 Jan 1991, p.69]

Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

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

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

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

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

The triptych is a device but never a gimmick: three windows into one fractured soul.

The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

Enormously enjoyable.

In short, "Crossing Delancey" is a joy of a romantic comedy. It's got warmth, brains, heart and humor. So what's not to like? [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

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.

In The Hurt Locker, the thrill is unexpectedly contagious. You don't realize how riveted you are until you're back on American soil observing James in civilian life.

It starts with a flyboy roasting franks in the exhaust of a combat jet and never lets up, giddily puncturing all those wartime flying hero movies and throwing in a heap of movie parodies besides. Either way, the pacing is jetstreamed and the level of inventiveness is sky-high. [31 July 1991, p.25]

Moore's roving essay feels even more urgent now than it did when the jury had to make up an award to honor it at the Cannes film festival in May.

As savage and as epic as film gets.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

Fighting has real grit and excellent acting. In other words, there is gold in that dirt.

Throughout the history of film, nothing turns campier faster than dinosaur movies. This one will have a much longer shelf life than most.

Antal is a professional who respects your dollars. In a season where the blockbusters are as flat as month-old soda, that’s the most romantic gesture a commercial filmmaker can make.

Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.

It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.

As casually insensitive and careless as you might expect from a film of this era, but it's also surprisingly crafty about finding ways to incite discussion

There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.

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

What gives the film its tension, apart from Hitchcock's masterly manipulation of suspense as he sends them into a wine cellar used to conceal uranium, is his way of connecting with Bergman's masochism and Grant's stoniness as they circle one another, mutually attracted but holding back. [03 Apr 1992, p.94]

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

Nair, to her credit, doesn't succumb to any special pleading, which deepens her film's impact. Time and again, you sense that she and her subjects come from a place that believes in film, as "Salaam, Bombay" specifies its world and compels us to inhabit it. [15 Sep 1988, p.68]

The final moments, however, are all Ruben’s, which is to say they’re all Ahmed’s, and the actor makes his character’s ultimate decision feel both hard won and achingly simple. Coming out toward the end of a year of great and terrible cacophony, Sound of Metal understands the gift that is hearing and the blessings of silence alike.

The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.