It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

Moore's conception of the character is compelling. She rivets us. She's assisted by the superb performances Redford has elicited from her co- stars, Sutherland and Timothy Hutton, who plays Conrad, the guilt-ridden surviving brother of the dead boy. [26 Sep 1980]

Mesmerizing and unforgettable.

The more I consider it, the more I realize the best elements of this film make it worth seeing, if only marginally so. There is enough to, dare I say, marvel at while you are beaten senseless with plot.

The most remarkable accomplishment of Heavenly Creatures is its unfailing ability to compel us to identify with its two young Salomes. They're right to sense that the adult world around them means to snuff them out, and you can understand and even sympathize with their desperate need to muster a preemptive strike so they can stay together. Heavenly Creatures is potent, daring, invigorating filmmaking. [23 Nov 1994, p.29]

This smart Richard III looks terrific, moves like the wind and rides the nerve of McKellen daring us not to enjoy its central monster's evil panache. [19 Jan 1995, p.57]

More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.

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

At once riveting and heartbreaking. This youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy has the good sense — far rarer among documentarians than you’d like to think — not to get in the way of her material.

Krisha sucks you into its gradually worsening family dynamic with a confidence of style and a maturity of observation that is remarkable in a home-brewed Kickstarter movie. At times you laugh in horror. At other times you shrink from the screen. There are truths here.

The Inheritance is a welcome reminder of film’s flexibility as a medium of protest, a vessel of cultural history, and an agent of change.

The Babadook remains a potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood. The ending, remarkably, gets to have it both ways, reminding us that some of the scariest monsters are the ones we learn to live with.

Sachs doesn’t push the tragic aspects of Little Men, but they’re there, looming behind the life-goes-on vibe of the final scenes and waiting for you to work it out on the way home.

Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often.

Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.

A haunting experience, one that requires patience (and then some) but that offers spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic rewards beyond the immediate power of words to describe.

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.

The ending is deeply moving.

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

The surehandedly wrought, beautifully acted, almost unbearably tense In the Bedroom is a rare film, not to be missed.

It works well as a documentary, and I can’t deny that Presley gave 110 percent to his audience at every show. That in itself is impressive. (If you’re a fan, add an extra star to my rating.)

What Hoss is asked to play - and does play with great skill - is the fine line between self-protection and hauteur.

Like the best spiritual movies, of whatever faith, "Of Gods and Men" moves us toward a union with the infinite, and when we come to the monks' last supper, the moment is staggeringly powerful.

Museo is slightly frustrating on first watch, as its themes lie partly hidden behind Bernal’s intentionally abrasive performance and the mix-and-match filmmaking of Ruizpalacios: Bursts of faux-epic movie music in Tomas Barreiro’s score, camerawork that can be ironically portentous, scenes that flit along the edge of the surreal. The connective tissue is sometimes hard to discern.

Newman is an American classic, one of the few actors Hollywood has allowed to age and deepen. He and Nobody's Fool don't so much shine as glow softly and steadily. [13 Jan 1995, p.73]

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.