It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

Microcosmos is a microspectacular. [08 Nov 1996, p.C6]

Riveting tale of family dynamics packed with as much drama, conflict, and poignancy as the best feature film.

Catchy and unobtrusively assured, it's both hip and innocent, stylized and natural, charming its way through a conventional hey-kids-let's-have-a-party plot with bright comedy, great dancing, and on-top-of-it rap. It even manages to send a few messages about responsibility without being boring. In short, it's the best teen genre movie in ages. [23 Mar 1990, p.43]

It rates a resounding yes because it doesn't insult our emotional intelligence. [23 Nov 1983]

If they called it “Divorce Story,” you wouldn’t go see it. And you really should. Not only is Marriage Story possibly the magnum opus Noah Baumbach has been working toward for much of his career; not only does it give space to two or three or five of our finest working actors to re-enact the human condition as a daily tragicomedy; not only is it a “Kramer vs. Kramer” that refuses to take sides.

One of 2023′s best films, “The Taste of Things” is achingly romantic and devastatingly sad. You’ll spend the first two-thirds of this movie salivating, and the last third of it sobbing.

Intriguing, arresting, delightfully refusing to be pigeonholed.

The movie masterfully evokes, through stunning direction and magnificent performances, the heat and passion of desperate people living in desperate times. [18 Feb 1983]

The best mainstream film since "E.T.," is an uplifting reminder that Hollywood can still produce truly great entertainment...The plot is so exquisitely developed that divulging anything beyond the basic outline might diminish the joyous surprises that await an audience thirsting for originality in a reactionary medium. [03 July 1985, p.57]

This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

Cold War is a ravishment, a cinematic feast for the senses, and it packs an epic inner landscape into a dense 88 minutes.

A life is not plot; plot is not life. By scrupulously sticking not just to the accuracies of Turner’s life as we know them but to the tiniest of details, the chipped mugs on kitchen tables, the pantaloons on a passing merchant, the spray of storm surf across the bow of a ship, Leigh wants us to truly see the world Turner moved through. Only by seeing that world can we see how he saw and painted it.

Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July is a knockout, a huge angry howl of movie that uses a crippled Vietnam veteran's disability as metaphor for a country's paralysis. [5 Jan 1990, p.67]

Never has a film taken such relish in between-the-wars malice as Gosford Park.

This is a brilliantly structured hall of mirrors that wraps Catholicism and the movie industry into a tasty film noir.

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.

Just when you thought gangster movies had peaked, here's Warren Beatty in Bugsy, a film so suave, outrageous, flamboyant, knowing and above all playful that you're liable to overlook the fact that it's more loaded with American resonances than any three pop culture courses you could sign up for. [20 Dec 1991, p.53]

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

Fueled by Meryl Streep's performance in the title role, energized by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen's script and tempered by Mike Nichols' understated direction, Silkwood is a brilliant movie that puts art above polemics, and the facts above speculation. [14 Dec 1983]

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.

Cross Fame and Spinal Tap, color it Irish, and you've got The Commitments, the summer's most irresistible movie. [30 Aug 1991, p.79]

Blistering and brilliant work.

Spacey is diamond-brilliant in a role that plays as if custom-made for him.

All you really need to enjoy "Triplets" is a taste for the weird and the wonderful.