By contrast, the undercard of Shirley is the bruising, scintillating war of wills between Jackson and her husband. Stanley Hyman was by all accounts a larger-than-life figure, and Stuhlbarg plays him with the exuberance of a clown and the insecurity of a bully.

Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

With mother!, Aronofsky throws caution to the winds and delivers his most abstract cinematic experience yet. It’s also arguably his worst.

Related with stolid majesty, with long shots of brooding landscapes and close-ups of opaque faces, the film provides poor preparation for the subversion of genre conventions to follow.

Comically rueful, semi-autobiographical, warmly appealing. [25 Oct 1996, p.C8]

“Shadows” has its share of lines that will be repeated by fans ad infinitum (a favorite: “Yes, now Google it”).

This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.

Mother has a slyly subversive premise and a terrific and commandingly comic role for a woman - which immediately sets it apart from most other American films - and Debbie Reynolds pounces on it with such savvy and self-assurance that it reminds us how funny self-possession can be in the right hands. [10 Jan 1997, p.C3]

It's not the mega-tech or the shootouts that make Ghost in the Shell memorable, but the ghostliness of it, its ability to convince us that Kusangai - no less than Rutger Hauer's strangely noble android in "Blade Runner" - has a human's ability to conceptualize her own mortality. Nor does arid intellectual speculation make Ghost in the Shell what it is. [1 Mar 1996, p.29]

Rabbit Hole is a personal project for Kidman - she produced the film after falling in love with the play - and it seems to have revived the quickness in her. That ice-blue gaze has found its focus again, and it looks deep into the one thing none of us want to face.

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."

While Last of the Mohicans is an eyeful - how could anything shot in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina not be? - it's mindless, meticulous in its externals, taking refuge from awareness by clinging to Cooper's distortions. In the end, it'll be remembered for its three S's: Stowe, Studi and the scenery. [25 Sep 1992, p.27]

It would be wrong to call El Planeta a comedy, or drama, or even that wretched if useful term dramedy. It’s a slice of life, the life belonging to Gijon.

The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.

The most striking aspect of Mud is the air of myth and tall-tale telling that hovers lightly over the settings and characters.

Nightcrawler is about TV news-video parasites, but the freakiest thing in it — the biggest bedbug of all — is Jake Gyllenhaal as the movie’s hero, Lou Bloom.

The Woman King lets its excellent cast weave between hubris, shakiness, and strength, achieving not just richer representation but more thrilling fight scenes, too.

If you asked an AI program to create a Wes Anderson movie, you’d get Asteroid City, the latest — and worst — film from the writer-director of “The French Dispatch” (2021) and “Isle of Dogs” (2018).

The most startling achievement of The Last Emperor is that it accomplishes what seems to have eluded Bertolucci for some time. He has found the small in the large and, in many ways, he has created what many thought impossible -- an intimate epic. [18 Dec 1987, p.95]

Very few people will take in this spectacle of a society amusing itself to death, of “reality games” and the vapid media hysteria that surrounds them, and not draw a parallel to our own televised bread and circuses. At its best, “Catching Fire” is a blockbuster that bites the culture that made it.

Submarine has its own specific miseries and darkly funny vibe. It makes quirkiness briefly seem like a good thing again.

Marguerite strives for ambiguity and settles for a muddle. It piles too much on its serving plate, and at 129 minutes it’s definitely overlong.

Nouvelle Vague succeeds in giving you a feel for the films it’s documenting and paying homage to, without the pretentiousness and snobbery those films are accused of conveying. It’s a welcoming gateway drug for newcomers curious about its subject.

Although not without flaws, Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo is, nevertheless, the most ambitious and impressive achievement of Vietnam's young film industry. [01 Nov 1996, p.E5]

As films about the young and the horny go, I preferred the smarter approach director Jeffrey Blitz takes in "Rocket Science."

Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury.

Using compassion and the slightest touch of syrup, Kore-eda brings his characters to a place where they realize with shock that they’re finally on the same page.