As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]

The vividly realized squalor, cruelty, and ugliness engulf everything, including the narrative.

The film, dazzling and poignant and five years in the making, retells the ancient Indian epic "The Ramayana" from a gentle but insistent feminist perspective.

Part courtroom drama, part murder mystery, part social anthropology, Brother's Keeper is nonstop fascinating. [19 Sep 1992, p.29]

Panahi deftly juggles his stories, merging them together in the devastating final minutes of No Bears.

One of the reasons that Spotlight is so deeply, absurdly satisfying to this newspaper writer — is that Tom McCarthy’s movie doesn’t turn its journalists into heroes. It just lets them do their jobs, as tedious and critical as those are, with a realism that grips an audience almost in spite of itself.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

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.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.

It's my favorite movie...Chinatown is a complex reminder of how movies were made when filmmakers held the cards - before product placement, marketers, and agents assumed control of the business. Before movies had to be sold to studios on the basis of zippy one-liners. I dare say that the movie wouldn't stand a chance of getting the green light today unless Julia Roberts was interested in playing Jane Gittes. [5 Nov 1999, p.D5]

I liked these characters, and suddenly not having them in my life anymore, simply because Denis has decided to start the closing credits, devastated me.

In nerve, guts, heart, and mind — one of the finest films of 2017.

The Mauritanian-born Abderrahmane Sissako, one of the great filmmakers of sub-Saharan Africa, does not need to resort to propaganda in Timbuktu to denounce fanaticism. He has poetry. With subtlety, irony, and even humor, he gradually prepares the viewer for the horror to come.

The Act of Killing is one of the most extraordinary films you’ll ever encounter, not to mention one of the craziest filmmaking concepts anywhere.

Music for the eyes. That's why it has become a treasured classic. That's why we'll see it again and again. [2002 re-release]

The best film of 2001 was made in 1979. [10 Aug 2001, p.D1]

The performance of Flanagan, a first-time actress, is both harrowing and possessed of an eloquence that has no need for words. You come away from this movie weeping for the Autumns of this world but awed by their endurance.

Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The film is not just about a Nazi couple, or even just about the banality of evil. Rather, it is about the ways in which people close themselves off to destabilizing truths. We all live beside some sort of looming awfulness. How we act in the face of that evil is what matters.

Quiz Show, Robert Redford's strongest movie yet, has contender written all over it. Swinging from the heels, it connects solidly, powerfully and probingly with the event that triggered America's loss of postwar innocence and erosion of public trust. [16 Sept 1994, p.59]

If Leviathan takes the Academy Award on the 22nd — and it’s considered the front-runner by some — it’ll be a win for great filmmaking and a loss for the Putin government.

For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.

It’s when Toy Story 3 becomes a jailbreak movie that it comes into its own.

The Souvenir demands to be seen. Hogg is a major filmmaker pointing herself in new directions -- the past and future simultaneously – and hashing out the places where memory tells the truth and where it only offers more romanticism, more lies.

A heady flow of brilliant stupidity.

Over and over in The Look of Silence, we hear people tell the filmmakers, “The past is past.” The wound is healed, they say, and if you don’t want trouble, don’t reopen it. The movie itself proves otherwise.

All in all, “The Secret Agent” feels like a memory play filtered not only through its director’s reminiscences but through the cinema’s past as well.