Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

Never has a movie so soberingly made the fight to save life and the struggle to hold on to it seem so futile.

Of all the great monster mothers in cinema history, Cornelia Keneres (Luminita Gheorghiu, who sets the standard other performances should be judged by this year) ranks high on the list.

It’s predictable in many places and acerbic in others, sentimental when you expect it and poignant when you don’t. But it stars Lily Tomlin, and that’s all you really need to know.

One of the year’s surprises, a defiant, funny, and multi-layered saga of talent and class resentment, marred only by some technical oddities and a certain smug awareness of everything the moviemakers are daring themselves to do right.

The screenplay tries to say something about female autonomy and male selfishness, yet the film plays like an overlong, 108-minute riff on the old reliable stand-up routine subject “girlfriends be crazy” that never subverts the trope.

Uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat--an homage to film noir--gets off to a nice start before it becomes entangled in its convoluted and somewhat uninteresting plot machinations.

Like Anderson, many directors claim to value local color, but few have gone as far, or achieved such impressive results, as has Chris Smith in The Pool.

The man we meet is intelligent and good-humored. "They do what they want," he says with a shrug, indicating a set of just-completed canvases. "I planned something different."

The Twentieth Century exists somewhere on the Venn diagram between midnight movie, fever dream, Turner Classics fetish object, and all-Canadian prank. Does that sound interesting? By all means. Does the movie go anywhere? Not really. Will you mind? I didn’t.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

Imitation and musical enthusiasm are all there is to this performance; in the dramatic scenes that make up the majority of Maestro, Cooper is the weak link that drags everything down.

The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.

For all its bells and whistles, “Project Hail Mary” is also a lovely, bittersweet character study, a pas de deux between man and alien that elicits a surprising amount of emotions by the time the credits roll.

The movie is a steady, frightening depiction of a baton of awful knowledge being passed.

Though the outcome is a matter of public record, it still unfolds like a suspenseful tragedy. Suffice it to say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.

As quietly confident in its emotional grounding as any American film you'll see this year, and animated by a radiant debut performance from Ashley Judd in the title role, Ruby in Paradise is refreshingly removed from the usual strivings for effect. Part of its allure is that it plays out in what seems like real time. [12 Nov 1993, p.49]

His carnival-esque filmmaking style, which can leave some Spike Lee joints in tatters, helps this one expand in sorrowful heart and indomitable wit. Chi-Raq is a vibrant community mural of a movie, and it stretches to the horizon.

This is one of the year’s best films, and the most fun you’ll have at the theater this summer.

It's a celebration of free expression that treats youth like a fierce and beautiful animal, and never attempts to tame it. In Pump Up the Volume, the "why-bother" generation finds a voice, and begins to bother. [22 Aug 1990, p.47]

I generally love noir, gore, kick-ass women, the 1980s — but “Love Lies Bleeding” ladled out a visual stew I did not enjoy consuming.

Taking its title from the site where Christ was crucified, the controversy-courting film has a lot of Catholic church business (and doctrine) on its mind, and veers from poetically eloquent to jarringly blunt in hashing it all out.

I'm wary of implying that it's your civic duty to see The House I Live In, but - guess what - it is. And see it with someone whose views are different from your own. We're going to need everyone to help get us out of this mess.

As the title implies, though, Keep on Keepin’ On has more on its mind. The film’s as much about the young Kauflin’s struggles — as a 21st-century Asian-American naïf trying to succeed in a 20th-century art form created by African-Americans, as a blind man navigating the often callous New York jazz scene. It’s also about the ongoing health of jazz itself as the music recedes further from the mainstream into the protective world of festivals and small clubs.