Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

No is a comedy, but of a dangerous sort. Its eyes are open and the laughs tend to stick in your throat.

The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.

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

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]

I’m not sure Lore holds up to repeated viewings — Shortland’s style is so feverish it could quickly turn precious — but it demands to be seen at least once.

Even more than "Chicken Run," Were-Rabbit is a tiny plasticine masterpiece.

Each of these dames of the realm gets to play the choicest of roles: herself.

It's easily the best of the movies I've seen by the various "Saturday Night Live" alumni, and part of the reason it's funny and satisfying is that it doesn't strain. [09 Jun 1983]

Astounding. It is also bizarre, challenging, and, at times, admirably overreaching. In short, it's the kind of ambitious little film that can leave critics in a swoon and American moviegoers scratching their heads.

School Ties might have been more potent if it were set in the present instead of 1955; still, it's richly drawn, strongly felt, handsomely produced, with a smoldering performance by Brendan Fraser. [18 Sept 1992, p.56]

Another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.

The joke's on us, it turns out; as a director, Affleck has come through with a sharp, morally ambiguous piece of pulp crackerjack.

The movie’s pretty great — not quite “Fargo” with lobsters but close enough, and about as good as regional filmmaking gets. Filmed in Harpswell, Maine and environs — the cobwork of Bailey Island Bridge curves through one scene — Blow the Man Down delves cleverly and suspensefully beneath the surface of a small, well-appointed fishing town in winter. There are bodies and there is blood. There are also a lot of quietly furious women.

Despite its ultimate nuttiness, has a quiet, consuming power that sneaks up on you and doesn't go away. This is something new and ambitious for Von Trier: a work of compassion.

Like a nightmare you recall during waking hours, and then only in its vast outlines, Antichrist has the power to haunt beyond words. For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema.

It's practically a primer on how to rework a literary classic into an impressively restrained movie with something fresh and intelligent to say.

Angst-ridden, yet graceful, stylish, and optimistic allegory about swerving off one road and finding your way back via another.

The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.

It’s a long, jangling, melodious soak, rich with backstage incident and wall-to-wall hits.

With unpatronizing empathy, Paris Is Burning beckons us into a subculture. [09 Aug 1991, p.39]

Does Antarctica attract dreamers or create them? It's a thread that runs throughout the film.

A proudly Calvinist work - I mean the comic strip character, not the philosopher - that understands the delights of deep play.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

Marty is one of those films that appear every few years or so -- a picture so sensitively acted, so tenderly written, so human in its appeal, that it has the utmost distinction, no matter what kind of audience is in the theatre. [04 Aug 1955, p.21]

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

Self-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.

The ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.

It's hugely entertaining.

This is one cinematic novella that stays with you for quite a while.

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

I have seen the future of Hollywood movie stardom, and its name is America Ferrera.

Loaded with heart, wit, originality, juicy performances and contemporary relevance, Patrice Leconte's Ridicule is one of the most rewarding costume dramas in years. [06 Dec 1996, p.C6]

The film is startlingly even-handed.

Please Give is a moral comedy that feels at times like one of the late Eric Rohmer’s deceptively breezy miniatures, or a mid-period Woody Allen movie minus the fussiness.

Bindler's recognition of the rich and intense human drama boiling away beneath the laconic surfaces and underplayed verbalizations turns Hands on a Hardbody into a surprisingly affecting metaphor for American life as an ongoing exercise in endurance. [30 Jul 1999, p.D7]

I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.

It's filled with vivid characters and action. Beneath its modesty of gesture, it's one of the year's richest, most humane films.

While it preserves his baseball feats, it looks beyond them to clarify Greenberg's place in American culture.

The Fighter is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of its time and place - Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s - and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward's battles with the family that almost loved him to death.

In a way, Lipes’s documentary resembles Jonathan Demme and David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” (1984) — in which Byrne goes on stage solo with a beat box and the rest of the Talking Heads gather one by one — as much as it does Wiseman’s films.

If some light deja vu is the price horror fans must pay for a mainstream offering this spine-tingling, most will still come away feeling spooked and satisfied.

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is just about the sloppiest Shakespeare ever put on the screen. It may also be the most exhilarating — a profound trifle that reminds you how close Shakespeare’s comedies verge on darkness before pirouetting back into the light.

Each installment saw an increase in runtime, and “Chapter 4″ clocks in at a massive 169 minutes. Not one second of it is wasted; this is wall-to-wall carnage of the finest, most entertaining order.

The Scent of Green Papaya is an astonishingly rich evocation of maternal energies and gestures, expressed in lovingly lingered-on images. [25 Feb 1994, p.47]

It makes politics exciting again.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

This rather simple story, played with stunning conviction by Rourke and Basinger, achieves its apex through director Adrian Lyne's steamy direction. Yet, it's not nasty enough. [14 Mar 1986, p.11]

Magically transports the viewer across time and space. As it does so, it becomes a humbling reminder of the universality of the human experience.

You keep watching Cobb waiting for the usual lulling cliches of the sports world to arrive, but they never do. Cobb is seething and bleak and unsparing, with a blast-furnace performance by Jones, and there isn't a placating moment in it. [06 Jan 1995, p.52]

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

He even calls the majestic view from one of the hospital landings his Cinecittà, after the legendary Italian film studio. The movie is a Cinecittà of the mind.

At its best, which is often, Their Finest by Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners;” “An Education”) manipulates appearance and reality, relief and recognition, with exquisite finesse. As befits a film about making films.

Step, the African-American competitive art that is the subject of Amanda Lipitz’s taut, intimate, passionate, and celebratory documentary of the same title, is not to be confused with its Irish namesake in “Riverdance.”

A miracle of data retrieval as the grown schoolchildren are measured against their footage from the earlier films.

A tribute to the power of imagination and storytelling, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

Shine a Light did something I didn't think was possible. It got me caring about the Rolling Stones again.

The director's cut has been getting a much warmer critical reception than the original release, but not necessarily because it's significantly better.

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 plenty of invention and exuberant vigor in the chopsocky, and Wilson's cool, ironic drollery provides the perfect foil for Chan's heroics.

Ends on a note of triumphant populism, but the film’s bitter aftertaste hints that when we ignore the details, we only ensure they’ll be repeated.

A League of Their Own may not boost its material into the level of pop myth as, say, last year's great female buddy movie, "Thelma & Louise," did. It's a bit too concerned with being likable to make that kind of bold leap. But if A League of Their Own doesn't knock the ball out of the park, it's a clean hit, with extra bases written all over it. [1 July 1992, p.41]

Most of all it's the emotional and spiritual arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives ''Before Night Falls'' its power.

At its best, The Sleeping Beauty reclaims fairy tales as a kind of oral folk REM state, chewing over anxieties about adulthood, behavior, sex, and belonging in potent symbolic form.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is the black diamond of family films, brilliantly conceived, touchingly pure of heart, much more endearing than scary. [22 Oct 1993, p.55]

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 Gibson gives us is a portrait of a man behaving gracefully under several kinds of pressure, some of it shamefully unfair. It's a solid acting achievement, and his directing, which never calls attention to itself, is right on the money, too. The Man Without a Face is an affecting evocation of a man of principle who teaches a boy what's important. [25 Aug 1993, p.53]

Utterly adorable.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

Turns out to be one of the finer peeks into the creative process of staging a play. Granted, that's a tiny genre, and the film's core audience -- theater majors and the people who love them -- is narrow. The lessons, however, are big.

Just don't expect the truth. An extremely bent, highly amusing form of the truth, maybe, but not the truth. 24 Hour Party People shares with the current Robert Evans documentary ''The Kid Stays in the Picture'' an awareness that a good anecdote often trumps the facts, but here the cheats are cheekily laid bare.

I couldn’t help but see a parallel between the De’Snakes’s plight and numerous historical atrocities where minorities were slandered, brutalized, and robbed of their rightful property. That Disney somehow manages to deliver this message, Trojan-horse style and without heavy-handedness, in an entertaining feature for all ages, is the true success of “Zootopia 2.”

The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]

Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.

Michael Clayton is about the gap between predatory professionalism and the sins of real life - about how those sins can corrode the hardest business suit of armor.

Bright Star is a thing of beauty and a joy for a movie season that needs it.

The trio give excellent performances, working together to create a credible family unit. Father and daughter hit their strides during their moments of catharsis onstage, which explains why audiences at Sundance reportedly laughed and cried during the climactic performance.

The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.

In the end, the film describes not so much an arc as a circle. Kim, who had criticized the World Bank for its callous approach to financing health care for the poor, is appointed its chairman by President Obama in 2012.

Reichardt's satire is directed just as devastatingly at present-day mindlessness and its inability to reinvent pop myth as against the cliches people inhabit as a substitute for living. And yet there's an affection for the cultural and spiritual meltdown her film's world embraces. River of Grass is incisive and funny. What's even rarer, it's simultaneously subversive and compassionate. Reichardt is a filmmaker to watch. [15 Dec 1995, p.70]

The film is a tower of literary and cinematic references, tangential yet somehow essential characters, and one fantastic performance after another. It's a simple movie yet is anything but.

In temperament and technique, the writer-director Noah Baumbach occupies a niche exactly between Woody Allen and Wes Anderson. Baumbach’s films are almost all about his own tribe of neurotic upper-middle-class white New Yorkers, but while he has a more novelistic distance on his characters than Allen, his visual style is less antic and whimsical — more traditional — than Anderson’s.

A quieter, less melodramatic piece of work than last year's "Crash," and arguably a better one.

As goofy action comedies go, Shaolin Soccer is one of the best.

The Dardennes resist the expected cliches: The climactic scenes gather force and purpose and the movie seems headed for a breakthrough of some sort, but then it glides softly and unexpectedly to a halt.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

Burshtein has achieved a gripping film without victims or villains, an ambiguous tragedy drawing on universal themes of love and loss, self-sacrifice and self-preservation.

No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.

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.

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]

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.

Immersive, enlightening documentary.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

McKellen and Coel give a master class in line readings throughout “The Christophers.” It’s a real pleasure watching two seasoned actors bounce off each other in service to creating their characters. It’s even more delightful to see this in a film made for adults that has plenty to say about human nature, love, and the inspirations that fuel our lives.

About halfway into Colossal you may experience the novel vertigo that comes when you genuinely have no idea where a movie is taking you but understand you’re in competent creative hands. That sensation holds until you’re deposited, happy and a little worse for wear, at the end.

Fully realizes its ambitions as a tale about confronting and navigating life's land mines with humor, tenacity, and hope.

A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.