It’s a showcase for an actress who wins us over by degrees and a reminder that there are no new stories — only fresh ways of telling them.

It works well as a documentary, and I can’t deny that Presley gave 110 percent to his audience at every show. That in itself is impressive. (If you’re a fan, add an extra star to my rating.)

That Ginsberg is played by Daniel Radcliffe might come as a shock, but the shock wears off as the movie rolls on and you realize you’re in very good hands.

This being a Czech film, drama, comedy, history, and social commentary are served up in equal proportion.

In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.

Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.

A rarity for documentaries. The movie is a full-tilt farce, and were it not completely true, it'd be a piercing satire that Preston Sturges might have polished into a resonant screwball.

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

It's the movie "Yellow Submarine'' should have been but didn't know how to be.

There’s a bittersweet poignancy in watching the children bond with animals and people during their travels before beginning the next leg of their journey.

Especially wonderful is Taraji P. Henson as Petey's longtime girlfriend Vernell , a vision in Foxy Brown period clothes with a pixie smile, lollipop legs, and a filthy mouth. After "Hustle & Flow ," this is at least the second movie Henson has stolen, and will Hollywood please do something about it?

It's earnest and well-acted and sturdily filmed: We're in good hands and we know it.

In the end, Fighter, despite its newsreel footage, is less a document of wartime experience than of the mentality one needs to maintain in order to be a fighter.

If it weren’t such a good and distinctive film, “Flee” would still have a strong claim on the attention of moviegoers, since it’s that powerful a rendering of the refugee experience. But it is that good and definitely that distinctive.

It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.

Their film is a fiendishly detailed toy -- the sort found at the back of a forgotten museum -- and while the shadow play it presents is an old and eternal one, you never cease to hear the whirr of the gears.

A triumph of romantic impulse over stylistic indulgence. [21 Oct 1983]

Marshall reveals himself to be a terrific showman of chaos and comic savagery. This is Baz Luhrmann's "Mad Max."

Polar chaos notwithstanding, “Fate” delivers action with more consistent visual precision than in the last couple of films, as newly enlisted director F. Gary Gray accesses the flair he brought to 2003’s “The Italian Job.”

Nobody makes films as sympathetic to struggling working-class types as Mike Leigh, and nobody makes them as uncondescendingly. Although uneven, Leigh's latest, Life Is Sweet, is a honey of a film, one of the few to feel good about in this dismal year. [22 Nov. 1991, p.35]

We’re asked to believe in the healing power of art, and the performances sell the idea well enough for us to commit.

Larysa Kondracki's impressive debut achieves its aim to shine light on an international human rights issue as well as signaling a new director to watch.

Made of a serene dynamite that's all but unknown to American film audiences.

Huston's direct style and subtle touch keep Bastard from becoming a sociological treatise. Not for a moment can we forget that these are people hurting people. [13 Dec 1996, p.C28]

What Hoss is asked to play - and does play with great skill - is the fine line between self-protection and hauteur.

Focuses on a parallel universe that moviegoers rarely consider: that of the invisible, hard-working craftspeople who put the illusion together.

It's got all the energy and idiomatic rightness one could hope for, but, dramatically speaking, it lacks a knockout punch. The violent ending in an alley is flat. One reason may be that the boxing-card scam seems musty and dated. Winkler's got the right friends on camera, but you're never as interested in the story as you are in the characters inhabiting its sunless atmosphere. Night and the City is a qualified success. [23 Oct 1992, p.27]

The happiest news about the third (and final?) X-Men movie is actually quite sad: headstones. Yes, The Last Stand brings the lamentable deaths of several major characters.