It’s not a gimmick if it works, and “Tower” works unnervingly well. The film is essentially an oral history, with firsthand accounts from those who were there — survivors, responders, and onlookers — with their words read by younger actors.

A messy, congenial empowerment story that knows how aggravating adolescence can be when you refuse to fit in.

Plays like a dislocated version of ''Death in Venice,'' but in a dryer, higher climate that features exponentially more firepower.

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.

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.

A meditation on fame, acting, aging, and acceptance, “Clouds” is a multilayered rapture on the subject of woman, performing. Not only does the film demand repeat viewings, it rewards them.

Familiar Touch accomplishes a lot in just around 90 minutes. By no means should you expect a wallow in misery. Like its protagonist, the film refuses to go gentle into that good night. Its defiance is tempered with dignity and grace.

Epic in scope, ambition, and execution, it's a classic swords-and-samurai film with postmodern blood and guts, and it's completely satisfying.

Rambles without apparent purpose, and yet it blooms in emotional impact as it goes.

The achievement of this simply told, exceptionally fine film is the clarity with which it portrays the drama of a good soul in an inert body.

All the voice work here is excellent, especially Oswalt's. He sounds like Paul Giamatti but with a greater capacity for confidence.

Director Walter Salles returns to the political filmmaking he employed in the 2004 Che Guevara film, “The Motorcycle Diaries.” Like that film, this one follows a protagonist who becomes an activist after being jarred by political events.

Capturing today’s twenty-somethings is tricky enough even with a tight script (“You’re a spreadsheet with a superiority complex”), but making Zoomers realistic and ridiculous is all up to the delivery. And the cast of “Bodies” does not disappoint.

Krisha sucks you into its gradually worsening family dynamic with a confidence of style and a maturity of observation that is remarkable in a home-brewed Kickstarter movie. At times you laugh in horror. At other times you shrink from the screen. There are truths here.

Sarnet elevates his Rabelaisian folktale into a tragedy illustrated by haunting, metaphorical imagery.

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.

There's nothing out there remotely like Meek's Cutoff, for which some viewers may be thankful. The ending seems calculated to drive the literal-minded screaming out of the theater and yet it's the only possible way out.

Ju Dou is far richer and more jolting than "The Postman Always Rings Twice," which it suggests. When it comes to film noir entrapment, we have nothing on the Chinese. [05 Sep 1990, p.63p]

The story line is not what carries this picture. Pomeranc carries it, with his gentleness, taciturnity and wise eyes. Whether throwing an easy match just to see what will happen if he loses, or looking infinitely sad and worldly as he contemplates the folly of a narrow-focus opponent, Pomeranc makes the linking of a moral intelligence to a chess intelligence the most exhilarating and touching sports combo at the movies this year. [11 Aug 1993, p.29]

One of the most compelling films the Holocaust has yet produced.

It is violent, sad, tender, and alive, and it is as assured a piece of moviemaking as you’ll ever see.

Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.

Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.

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.

What Christlieb and Kijak do so well is keeping these folks from not seeming like loons.

One of the funniest yet most depressing movies in Martin Scorsese’s long career — a celebration and evisceration of male savagery, financial division. It’s like “GoodFellas,” only (slightly) more legal, which is very much the point.

Maddin's movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.