Perhaps the elusive, uncanny soundtrack of Tangerine Dream brings this about, or maybe it’s Friedkin’s juxtapositions of close-ups and stark long shots of the tiny trucks lost in jungle or desert landscapes, but Sorcerer eventually seems to be happening someplace not of this world. Not hell, exactly; maybe Limbo.

A powerful documentary that, with a wider scope and a bit more shaping, could have been even more powerful, perhaps unbearably so. What's there is strong enough.

The movie’s one big pitfall, really, is that Reeves’s character is so intently focused, he takes care of business a bit too quickly. Some final skirmishing and a tonally false sign-off feel like unconvincing bids to stretch the story to a more legit feature length.

The movie reaches its emotional climax with the signing of the accords. But even under the best of circumstances, climate change offers no quick solutions. “This is a mission I have dedicated myself to,” Gore says, a mission that remains “a constant struggle between hope and despair.”

The movie’s a minor pleasure rather than a major work. But minor pleasures have their place, especially in summertime, and at its best The Way, Way Back goes down like a popsicle on a hot July day.

An engaged, engaging voyage of (re)discovery that’s too in love with its subject to qualify as food porn. It’s food romance.

Gibney has too much information, too much material, and too many people to shape a mystery or a drama or even a farce out of it all. His movie has elements of all three without ever sustaining one.

The title is an imagined word to describe a hard-to-imagine (but very real) place. Combine "Detroit" and "dystopia" (the opposite of utopia) and Detropia is what you get.

One quibble: For such a legendarily elusive spot, the snowmen’s Himalayan hideaway seems awfully well trodden these days. If you thought the similarity between, say, “Coco” and “The Book of Life” was a case of animators not looking resourcefully enough for inspiration, how about the trifecta of “Smallfoot,” “Missing Link,” and DreamWorks’s upcoming “Abominable”?

An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.

Dream Horse is a very nice movie, about very nice people, but nice is rarely enough, and thank goodness Toni Collette knows that.

Shirin Neshat's film, a magical-realist cry from the heart, is as up-to-date as last year's pro-democracy protests.

If you were alive in 1991, the televised images may still stick in your mind and your craw.

Alan Pakula's literal adaptation of William Styron's Sophie's Choice is an admirable, if reverential, movie that crams this triangle into a 2 1/2 -hour character study enriched by Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, and nearly destroyed by Peter MacNicol. [21 Jan 1983]

The film often settles for the sentimental and the anecdotal rather than trying for something richer and deeper, but on those levels it works well enough. Audiences will relate to its warmth and sincerity. Essentially, the film is a series of pages from Levinson's family album and it means something to us because it clearly means something to him. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

Rise is very consciously a drama about a Simian Spring, and it's close enough in its details to a recent documentary to be thought of as "Project Nim: The Revenge."

Fully realizes its ambitions as a tale about confronting and navigating life's land mines with humor, tenacity, and hope.

Vigalondo is only partially capable of building suspense (the film's latter stages contain one knot too many); his achievement owes more to his imagination than his pop craftsmanship.

Holofcener writes as well as Albert Brooks at his best, and her finesse with actors is as assured as James L. Brooks's on his TV and film projects from 20 and 30 years ago.

Voyeurism is central to the cinema and to acting, of course, and you'd better believe these women know it. Still, Casting About feels oddly disingenuous.

Mad Detective is equal parts gonzo inspiration and overwrought indecision. It could be called "The Lunatic From Kowloon."

A taut, expertly constructed, and suspenseful police procedural, it also explores the issues of loyalty, trust, betrayal, and revenge that those engaged in such morally ambiguous if essential activities would prefer not to think about.

The film includes the standard escalating horror set pieces — one occurs on fiery scaffolding, another inside a different flooded subway — that grow repetitive in their oscillating bouts of tension and release. But Nyong’o and Quinn manage to keep the film anchored in connection.

My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]

It's scenic, confidently directed and performed, dutiful, faithful, revelatory, informative, and largely involving. Rarely, however, is it any <I>fun</I>.

Everyone here is obsessed with finding "the real thing" - the next hot actor, the next revealing paparazzi shot, the lover or the friend who'll make it all worthwhile. Everyone settles for the illusion of reality instead. It's prettier, and it doesn't hurt so much.

Even at 85 minutes, the movie contains maybe 50 minutes that scare.

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.