When a tone is sustained as confidently and with as many delicious flourishes as A Shock to the System manages, and the screen is filled with characterful performances, it's a sign the director is doing something right. [23 Mar 1990, p.46p]

Alda's work as a writer on M*A*S*H didn't go to waste. His script delivers a lot of laughs - patently related to TV sitcom, but laughs all the same. Betsy's Wedding is fun, and LaPaglia is a find. [22 Jun 1990, p.43p]

Housesitter is the kind of sweet little user-friendly concoction that until very recently defined the term summer movie. It won't solve the environmental crisis or raise your IQ, but neither is it likely to promote brain damage, which immediately puts it miles ahead of, say, the presidential race. And, needless to say, it's funnier. [12 June 1992, p.29]

The things in Licorice Pizza that are so good, like the performances from Haim and Hoffman and Cooper and the period fidelity, make you wish that the entire movie was just as good.

Killers of the Flower Moon is flawed, but still worth seeing. The film’s final scene, which will surely be divisive, is perhaps the best coda Scorsese’s ever shot and features his most intriguing cameo appearance. It’s a gutsy way to tie up all the film’s loose ends — proof that even this far in his career, he still has a few new tricks up his sleeve.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

Stylish, sad, opulent, brilliant, and clear-eyed, Wilde does justice to its complex subject. It should stand as the definitive biofilm for years to come. [05 Jun 1998, p.D6]

It's funky and funny, not just sleek, riding witty repartee that makes it seem an extension of the fizzy, romantic comedies of the '30s (as well as the Harlem Renaissance, invoked by its poetry club scenes). [14 Mar 1977, p.C1]

If you miss Anthony Bourdain — and for many, the celebrity chef’s death in 2018 felt like the loss of a close and troubled friend — Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a salve.

Really, The Lost Leonardo is a detective story. Like any good detective story, it’s also a morality tale. Or maybe immorality tale better describes these goings on.

It’s no surprise that [Rex] gives Mikey everything he’s got. What is a surprise is how much he’s got to give. The performance is riveting until, like the movie, it just becomes too much.

What makes a rock band worth attending to a half century after its breakup isn’t its personalities or backstory or context, interesting as those can be, and here they’re all highly interesting. It’s the music.

Decision has real velocity without in any way feeling hectic or rushed.

The sterling and reliable Strathairn brings stoic dignity to the husband's role, young Mazzello takes advantage of the chance to show more here than he did in Jurassic Park and Curtis Hanson's direction is expeditious and unpretentious. But River Wild is a Streeporama, and Streep at the flood tide is something to see. [20 Sep 1994, p.61]

When coupled with the itchy urgency of Garfield’s outstanding performance as Jon, the brio with which Miranda infuses tick, tick … BOOM! helps to camouflage the fundamentally clichéd nature of the dilemma faced by the protagonist.

Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.

Clockwatchers may not be perfect, but it's on to something. [22 May 1998, p.D5]

It's poetic, resonant, wistful, convulsive, regretful, exultant. There also are times when it's demanding to sit through, when time passes slowly, urged on only by flickers of uncertainty on the face of its protagonist, or by his insistent peering after meanings that may not even exist. But it's also a film that offers the kinds of rewards possible only to the contemplative mindset. [25 Jun 1999, p.D5]

The Eel careens all over the stylistic map, from irony to slapstick. But it's chaos in the service of rebirth and redemption, a rich screenful of zigzagging. [16 Oct 1998, p.C5]

Watching “Story,” one realizes that so much of what most of us most love about the movies isn’t the medium, per se, but its appurtenances: stardom and glamour and the pull of narrative. What Cousins loves is the medium. We love the effects. He loves the cause.

Surely it’s no coincidence that Encanto is set in the homeland of the literary master of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. That’s what Encanto is, magical realism brought to the screen by way of the Magic Kingdom.

The movie has an unhurried rhythm, not slow, but unpressured. It’s a visual equivalent of the clacking of the railroad tracks.

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.

From start to finish, you don’t know what’s coming next in Nope. When was the last time you saw a movie where that was true? Nope is deeply strange, and Jordan Peele knows exactly what he’s doing with that strangeness. It’s designedly strange. It’s coherently strange.

The Spanish-Argentine comedy is about as far from being a CGI-fest as you can get, but Cruz’s hair is a very special special effect. Its oxblood abundance is torrential, jungley, diluvian, an in-your-face to the very concept of baldness. It’s also gloriously ridiculous, and ridiculousness masquerading as glory — male pomposity and artistic pretension, too — is what “Official Competition” is all about.

About a third or so of Spencer doesn’t work: flashbacks to Diana’s childhood, hallucinations involving Anne Boleyn, a secret visit to her old house, a Boxing Day pheasant shoot that turns into a battle of wills between Diana and Charles (Jack Farthing). But Stewart’s performance makes those things immaterial and the rest of the movie seem all the finer.

These characters are so vibrant and the episodes so richly imagined that it’s easy to overlook how shapeless The Hand of God is. The film has the vividness of memory, but also the structure of memory, which is to say no real structure at all. Visually, though, the movie is of a piece; it’s Sorrentino’s eye that holds it together.

There's a grim fatalism in Les Voleurs, with more than a few pangs of resignation and a melancholy respect for the problematic nature of life. But it's also bold and powerful and totally unpredictable as it draws its narrative strands together to conclude that the human heart can be the biggest thief of all. [17 Jan 1997, p.D5]