The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.

Like any good murder mystery movie, the real fun lies in watching the performances and taking the overall journey. “The Sheep Detective” scores big on both of those counts. This is one of the most enjoyable movies of the year.

Married to the Mob is a funny yard sale of a film about regeneration in a junked-up America. [19 Aug 1988]

If you want to take the kids to a cockle-warming tale of humans and computer-generated critters, do yourself a favor: Skip the singing rodents and head for the baby Loch Ness Monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.

Plá’s comedy is black, but his moral position isn’t black and white.

Despite the lack of an especially defined narrative arc, the people are what make the movie -- as they should in a tale like this.

Tom Volf’s distinctive and affecting documentary makes plain how much the persona also owed to appearance and intelligence and life history.

Written in wisps and watery double-entendres by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, and the movie is so benign that its proceedings are beside the point.

Wacky enough and gadget-driven enough to appeal to bored kids looking for fresh energies.

Give it a chance and you'll probably share the cast's collective impulse to dive in and embrace it.

Green unquestionably has a rare, intermittent knack for rapture.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

The film was technically astonishing and yet brazenly simple.

Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.

Luca has energy to spare and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, if not as visually outrageous as, say, the recent Coco. The moral lessons — be true to your friends, overcome your fears — are tidy and shopworn, fresh to young audiences but lacking the jolts of originality that make classic Pixar films an all-ages proposition.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

The movie clips are luscious, as you'd expect, and Cardiff's own "home movies," shot on various movie sets with a 16mm camera, catch the gods during downtime.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

The Menu might make you crave a hamburger or think twice before boarding a ferry to a private island with no cell service. But once the loose ends are tied up and the credits roll, it leaves you less than satisfied.

Holes functions as a film, but just barely: Readers familiar with the book may negotiate the film's antic crosscutting, but newbies will need to pop a Dramamine before the lights dim.

As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.

Just as Anspaugh and Pizzo pushed all the obvious buttons with their high school basketballers in "Hoosiers," so they turn Rudy into the "Rocky" of South Bend. It may be that Rudy's crowning piece of perseverance consisted of his dogging Anspaugh and Pizzo to film his story. It must be a comfort to Hoosiers Larry Bird and Don Mattingly to know that when the time comes for their biofilms, Anspaugh and Pizzo are in the phone book. [13 Oct 1993, p.75]

The Big Lebowski isn't quite up to the level of the Coen brothers' best films - "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and "Barton Fink." But second-level Coen brothers can be funnier than first-level almost everybody else. [6 March 1998, p.D5]

Like its protagonist, the movie is smart, soulless, glib, and utterly charming -- just the thing to warm up a movie season that's been late to bloom.

Though the plot gets a tad thin toward the end, “Heretic” does a good job of pelting us with uncomfortable questions.

Lowery’s update turns out to be one of the summer’s best surprises, a gorgeous, magical reworking that deftly strikes that once-elusive balance between contemporary and quaint.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.