Reichardt's satire is directed just as devastatingly at present-day mindlessness and its inability to reinvent pop myth as against the cliches people inhabit as a substitute for living. And yet there's an affection for the cultural and spiritual meltdown her film's world embraces. River of Grass is incisive and funny. What's even rarer, it's simultaneously subversive and compassionate. Reichardt is a filmmaker to watch. [15 Dec 1995, p.70]

The movie’s a galvanizing, tragicomic work of 21st-century schadenfreude, marred only by a barely repressed giddiness on the part of the filmmakers.

In Bopha! the usual apartheid-struggle elements never thin out into abstractions. They're elemental, encapsulating a country's tragedy resonantly and powerfully in a single family's. [24 Sept 1993, p.51]

No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.

Another complex and magnificently acted melodrama.

A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.

Just when you were about to give up on the Internet as a swamp full of trolls, bullies, and liars, along comes a documentary like Ido Haar’s Presenting Princess Shaw.

A delightfully deranged steampunk adventure.

The new film is simply more confident, more idiosyncratically dark, weird, gnarled and twisted than "Batman." And because it's more obviously permeated by Burton's style and sensibility, it's also more fun. [19 June 1992, p.47]

If some light deja vu is the price horror fans must pay for a mainstream offering this spine-tingling, most will still come away feeling spooked and satisfied.

When the effusive Pedro Almodóvar adapts the minimalist Alice Munro, he reveals the passions seething under the bleakness of the latter’s monotone mid-Canada. By setting his version of the Nobel Prize-winner’s interlinked stories “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” in the vibrant settings of Madrid and other Spanish locales, he adds a Sirkian twist to Munro’s Chekhovian sensibility.

Efficient, cogently argued, and visually compelling documentary.

Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.

It’s the latest from Cristian Mungiu, one of the leading lights of the New Romanian Cinema and the director of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” by general critical consensus one of the finest films of the new millennium. Graduation is a more quietly damning drama; it doesn’t eviscerate you like the earlier movie but instead sticks with you like a nagging doubt.

Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.

It’s the classic modern dynamic of lefty parent and tightly-wound yuppie spawn, but Toni Erdmann takes it out of sitcom territory and into something longer, richer, weirder, and ultimately a great deal more affecting.

The dialogue is terse and funny while hinting at much larger matters, such as the way poverty can be handed from generation to generation like a bad gene or a disease.

Neruda is a dream of Chile, of what it was and might have been, brought to the screen by a master dreamer.

The ending is deeply moving.

Arrival would be nothing without Adams.

Visually, it has the intense intimacy of a dream.

The imaginative, touching, and dizzyingly animated Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sequel with a rich, broad vision that addresses all of these issues faster than you can say Fix-It Felix.

The strength of Kopple’s film (as opposed to the strength of Sharon Jones, which is mighty) is that it honestly depicts the vulnerabilities of an indomitable woman.

It’s a long, jangling, melodious soak, rich with backstage incident and wall-to-wall hits.

At its best, which is often, Their Finest by Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners;” “An Education”) manipulates appearance and reality, relief and recognition, with exquisite finesse. As befits a film about making films.

The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.

You don’t get groundbreaking cinema from Fences, but what you do get — two titanic performances and an immeasurable American drama — makes up for that.

A fairly standard coming-of-age saga on its face, with an effectively pained performance by 15-year-old Lucas Jade Zumann holding center stage.