In Fabric is good bizarre fun, but after a while that’s all it is.

It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.

The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.

The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.

It's delicately made, yet forceful in its delicacy.

By the end of The Peacemaker, you feel you’re watching a Samuel Beckett character furiously trying to improvise himself out of the play. In the process, he’s bringing the rest of us along.

Comparisons have been made to the films of Jim Jarmusch and early David Lynch, both warranted. Amirpour wears her influences like a badge of honor but she also has a nascent sensibility of her own, arguably more feminine and certainly more sensual.

Us is, in many ways, even more get-under-your-skin-and-into-your-nightmares creepy/funny/scary than “Get Out.”

The Wedding Banquet is one of the year's most joyful film discoveries - multiculturally hip, acted and directed with finesse, full of bright surprises, with lots of heart. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]

Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.

Only occasionally, as in “Thank You for Smoking” (2005), do these men — and the audience — understand that bucking the system doesn’t always make you less a part of it.

This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.

The opening and closing scenes of this film evoke those in “Crimson Gold.” They are long shots of the outside as seen through a security gate. In “Crimson Gold,” the view is of a chaotic street in Tehran. Here, it is the empty sea. This difference demonstrates what Panahi has been deprived of, and what the world has lost because of it.

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to visit this corner of the world, you’ll instantly recognize the blissful natural grandeur that Moana captures, as well as the Pacific’s intimidating vastness.

As loving and welcome as Chris & Don is, it's not well enough conceived to create equilibrium among its many parts.

Shadow shows a master at the top of his game, and if you have any love at all for the movies and the places they can take you, catch this one on the biggest screen possible.

Mostly it’s a footloose tour through the noise and sun of a summer metropolis and an unassumingly wise portrait of a friendship.

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]

Cousin Jules is one of those rare experiences that’s rooted in the past yet feels very much of the moment. On top of that, it’s timeless.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

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.

Being cluttered isn’t the only problem with Your Name. It also features insipid characters and dippy montage music from the J-pop band Radwimps.

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]

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

Henry David Thoreau plays an enigmatic role in Shane Carruth’s hypnotic thriller — an oxymoronic term to describe a film that is truly sui generis.

Polished? Not exactly. Poignant? Definitely.

The General is a gravely beautiful film (in wide-screen black and white) by John Boorman about an Irish career criminal who was an antiauthoritarian folk hero, a warm family man to a menage a trois, and also a dangerous psychopath.

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