Although not without flaws, Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo is, nevertheless, the most ambitious and impressive achievement of Vietnam's young film industry. [01 Nov 1996, p.E5]

By the movie’s end, viewers will have had a soul-searing brush with the unthinkable that far exceeds any real horror film of recent memory, and surpasses in its impact more traditional features and documentaries about the subject.

Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.

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.

It's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.

Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.

The heroine of a woman’s picture is almost always a victim, a practitioner of redemption through suffering. Janis is no victim, and Cruz’s performance makes that very plain. In revisiting the genre, Almodóvar, with Cruz’s help, is also subverting it.

This emperor verges on dementia, having no apparent clue how to function.

This is a film about a professional divorce, not a romantic one. The fallout is just as painful.

Richly allusive and eloquently stylized.

Resonates with intelligence and a poignancy made more sorrowful by what happened to all of us, but especially to New Yorkers, on that terrible day.

Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.

A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.

It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s superficial, it’s full of likable stars and scientific mumbo-jumbo, and, above all, it taps into the human urge to see big things become little and little things get big. It’s as close to lizard-brain entertainment as superhero blockbusters get, and as the mercury pushes toward 100, I’ll take it.

This is movie as inundation. It’s daring, dashing, often delirious — except that the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels, as they like to bill themselves) keeps the delirium under just enough control.

An exquisitely filmed, emotionally transfixing epic about a white South African boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild.

A subtly comic, ultimately moving film about modern adult relationships.

Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets.

After Dark, My Sweet sticks to essentials, and nails the fatefulness in this doom-haunted genre. [24 Aug 1990, p.35p]

An inventive, propulsive office thriller.

Mirrors loom large in this movie, and Marina reflects back an image that too much of society refuses to see, to the point where she herself starts to doubt her own reflection. Yet the film’s most potent and lasting image involves a hand mirror and a steady gaze, and it serves as a breathtaking poetic metaphor about gender, identity, love, and the human soul. All you have to do, says Lelio, is look and see.

Carlito's Way reunites the Scarface team of Al Pacino and director Brian De Palma to much better effect than the first time around, proving there's a lot of life still to be found in the conventional urban-gangster movie. [12 Nov 1993, p.45]

There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.

It's also [Coppola's] most gloriously extravagant film since "One from the Heart." [12 Aug 1988]

Mad Dog and Glory is the funniest and most original studio comedy since "White Men Can't Jump." What makes it fun is its ability to find new ways to do old things. [5 Mar 1993, p.61]

The Story of Louis Pasteur dates from the golden age of Hollywood biofilm, marked by conviction and craftsmanship. [13 Dec 1991, p.60]

Think “An Inconvenient Truth” meets “Babe,” or “The Good Earth” meets a biodiverse “Marley & Me,” with a dash of the Food Network’s “Pioneer Woman” tossed in. Among other things, that means furry critters romping to a folksy soundtrack with tubas and banjos employed unironically. It means circle-of-life lessons and sun-dappled everything. It means check your cynicism and snark at the gate, if you dare.

Sly, oddly sweet, wickedly funny take on violence that's as American as apple pie. [15 Apr 1994, p.91]