When Branagh's camera soars above the final celebratory dancing and choral anthem, you'll soar, too. [21 May 1993, p.23]

There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.

20 Feet From Stardom may possibly be the happiest time you’ll have at the movies all summer, but it comes with a heavy load of frustration. The joy...is in the sound of women singing their big, beautiful hearts out. The pain comes from the anonymity they’ve spent their lives working under and fighting against.

We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.

Astonishing.

The Joy Luck Club is "Terms of Endearment" in quadruplicate, aimed at the heart and right on target. [24 Sept 1993, p.47]

A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

Touching Academy Award winner that remains one of the best films ever made about returning veterans. The sterling cast includes Fredric March, Myrna Loy and Harold Russell. It's touching without being silly, and it has aged very well. [04 Jul 1989, p.23]

The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.

One of the year's most winning performances, Logue's Dex will grow on you as he stumbles toward emotional fullness.

What makes Toy Story such a dazzling surprise is that while technological novelty is partly what it's about, it transcends technology. [22 Nov 1995, p.29]

Stillman has become a master at escalating the laughter by waiting an extra beat and then understating something devastatingly funny, as when someone looks Chris Eigeman's club manager, Des, in the eye and says, "I consider you a person of integrity - except, you know, in the matter of women."

Nomadland balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for that restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it.

One of the wittiest and most creatively exuberant movies of the year, and maybe one of the best.

It's a relief that when Fellini decided to sum up his career, he still had enough left to do it so wittily, jauntily and with such expansiveness of spirit. Lovely stuff, just lovely. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

Vincent and Theo is one of the great Robert Altman films... It's Altman's most structurally conventional film, although it's filled with such trademarks as overlapping conversations. It's also his most personal and deeply felt. [16 Nov 1990, p.81]

Nobody ever placed brilliance in the service of silliness quite the way the Python gang did. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is stuffed with both.

After a period of creative drought, Zhang’s homecoming is a cause for celebration.

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.

This smart Richard III looks terrific, moves like the wind and rides the nerve of McKellen daring us not to enjoy its central monster's evil panache. [19 Jan 1995, p.57]

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

What makes A Streetcar Named Desire rewarding to watch today, especially on a big screen, is the same thing that made it so cherishable in the first place - Williams' heartbreaking lyricism, the titanic performances by Vivien Leigh's Blanche and Marlon Brando's Stanley, and Williams' most perfect realization of his ongoing central theme - the extermination of sensitivity and refinement by the brutes and carnivores of the world. [Director's Cut; 18 Feb 1994, p.37]

Jungle Fever is Spike Lee's best film yet. Although it's about a black man and a white woman launching an intimate relationship, it's anything but an interracial love story. Which is exactly the film's point. [7 June 1991, p.43]

This is one of the year’s best films. It’s also one of Lee’s finest joints.

Birdman finds Iñárritu in the mood for play, and with a mighty cast that fields every pitch he throws.