The final questions in Pervert’s Guide to Ideology nag at us, and in a culture so built upon and so profiting by fantasies of Hollywood apocalypse, they deserve to.

Earle's song introductions, like those of his mentors Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, are as meaty, pointed, and touching as the tunes themselves, and his spoken words -- full of humor and humanity -- are the heart of the film.

Bronson isn’t a story in the traditional sense at all. It’s a meditation on the art of rage - an action painting passing itself off as an action movie.

It’s vintage Shyamalan, with a twist.

This is still a rich and worthy journey, comfort food that’s also food for thought. It invites us to consider timelines longer than a day, a year, a war, and a life, and to tread carefully on the kings and commoners who might lie beneath our feet.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

Sings in the key of life.

There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.

Thirst is deliriously bonkers and keeps getting more so; you watch it holding your breath, waiting to see where Park will zigzag next.

It's a mixed bag almost by definition. Yet the good is good indeed, making this show worth a look for devotees of the form.

Phyllis and Harold is really about Phyllis and how discontent has a way of spilling, then spreading. Kleine never quite says so, but her mother’s life was a tragedy.

The fact is that this is a pretty good summer-kablooie movie, and Cruise is better than pretty good in it.

With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.

Some of the most honest and tender observations come from Basquiat's girlfriend at the time, Suzanne Mallouk.

The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional.

A stylish and very funny teenage coming-of-age story graced with surreal fringes and a mysteriously hushed core.

Notoriously remembered as a mastermind of the Final Solution, Eichmann was also infamous for the just-following-orders dispassion he maintained all the way through his trial, a banality that Kingsley channels expertly.

Midnight Traveler unfolds in many kinds of limbo, and the one between living a disaster and recording it for the world to see is the least problematic. Like its makers — all four of them — the movie is flawed, human, hopeful, and desperate for a place to land.

If Blaze is a bit mushy, it's also more than skin deep. It's the kind of film whose shortcomings are easy to minimize. It's a muted last hurrah for a departed and worthy brand of populism, but a hurrah all the same. [13 Dec 1989, p.66P]

This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.

McQueen has matters of life and death on his mind, and the final act of “Supernova” puts them on the table with a frankness that’s admirable without wholly succeeding as drama; the script’s schematic nature shows through the cracks even as the actors themselves can’t be faulted.

Amazingly, no one seems steeped in the salubrious self-explication of therapy. They just sound like very good storytellers.

Until it spins manically out of control in the last act, Easy A is a charmer: a high school satire with a lethally sharp script and a big, smart, adorable star performance from Emma Stone.

Sayles seems to be trying, single-handedly, to correct centuries of First World self-centeredness in Third World contexts.

Yet not only does this bares-bones “Close Encounters” make a virtue out of found locations and empty night-time streets, it has the confidence of a story sure in its telling. It feels original.

A bittersweet, wryly comic, keenly observed look at senescence.

The Krays is one of the artiest, eeriest gangster movies ever made. [15 Sep 1990, p.14p]

Say what you will about Gibson, but he's a genuine filmmaker, and Apocalypto gallops along the thin line between the deluded and the inspired with such conviction that you're yanked into its wake.