Durkin has a filmmaking style of indirect direction, one that leans on certain ’70s suspense-movie tricks: slow zooms into figures standing at windows, eerie soundtrack drones. But the performances are bold: Law making the grand, obvious gestures of a poor kid pretending to be rich and Coon turning Allison’s unhappiness into open rebellion in a restaurant scene that leads to a delirious solo night on the town.

It's the most touching love story about tragically separated sexy beasts since "Cold Mountain."

To a Western audience, the movie may at times feel pat, cooked up, wishful beyond realistic measure. But we're not the ones who need to see it.

What the movie doesn't do, oddly, is leave much of an impression after it's over.

Love hurts in Secretary -- but not too much. It's not impossible to imagine adventurous young couples seeing this movie and rushing home to try out the handcuffs and paddles.

Kindergarten Cop finds Arnold up to his old tricks, which will be exactly what his fans will want to know. But it's tough on kids and may make more than a few feel uncomfortable. [21 Dec 1990, p.51]

The result is entertainment whose pace and sound, while dizzyingly brisk at points, still accommodates characters and a setting that are terrifically rich — a menagerie more fully, memorably realized than “Zootopia.”

The film never quite hits a sure-footed stride. The fictional love story stays fictional. But ''Pearl Harbor'' delivers the main event.

Kong: Skull Island isn’t a remake or a reboot or a re-anything. It’s just a Saturday matinee creature feature with a smart, unpretentious script, a handful of solid supporting players, and a digital Kong who feels big enough and real enough to provoke the necessary awe. This is all to the movie’s credit.

It needs only to entertain. And that it does thoroughly, leaving us both charmed and enriched without feeling very preached at. Praise be.

Boys of all ages, by contrast, will be mesmerized by the relentless, breathtakingly visualized action.

Schreck matches the wit and fire of her writing with a riveting performance that often does not feel like a performance at all, but rather a cri de coeur wrenched up from a deep place where the personal, the historical, and the universal have met and merged.

The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.

The Brutalist reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” With both films, I found the first half spectacular, while the second half left me dissatisfied and scratching my head.

Here's a film made by grown-ups for grown-ups, on grown-up themes of statelessness and belonging. Yet you could show it to a 6-year-old and have him or her understand all the nuances of plot and characterization.

Those who can endure it will find Kirby Dick's film provocative and surprisingly touching. [14 Nov 1997, p.D11]

Writer-director Im Sang Soo's coolly stylized political satire doesn't provide a lot of answers, unfortunately, but it does show how the future of a nation might turn on a few drunken insults thrown around at a high-level dinner party.

A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances.

A Royal Affair is tosh but it's ripely entertaining tosh, with emotions as flamboyant as the window treatments. There is nothing like a Dane.

What is the value of art in times of strife? Should people be sitting in the theater or rioting in the streets? Walter's film reminds us that once there was a man whose work made no distinction between the two.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President isn’t a political documentary, but it is a civics lesson.

The Crimson Rivers could teach many an American thriller a thing or two about sophisticated creepiness.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

What Redbelt reminded me of more than anything else was a modern version of a classic film noir, particularly 1950's brilliantly seedy "Night and the City," with its pro-wrestling subplot.

Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?

A cautionary tale for the fleet-fingered social media generation, Zola explodes off the screen in a burst of emoji confetti.

Imelda is at its most acridly useful when comparing the former first lady's recollections with others' less sanguine memories.