Perhaps the director should make only silent movies. Scenes where characters communicate via eyes and body language usually work here, even if we don't know exactly what's going on.

Writers Rasmus Heisterberg and Nicolaj Arcel are known in America for the original version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." This film is the exact opposite: stately instead of propulsive, emotionally warm instead of chilly, lit by candles and sun instead of flashlights and neon.

This picture won't attract white audiences. I doubt that blacks would flock to a Jerry Seinfeld concert film. But we'd all get along better if we realized we had the right to laugh at each other's foibles

Like an impressionist painting. Scrutinize it closely, and the details don't make sense individually. Step back from it to study the big picture, and it will make a sweeping effect.

Any critic likes to predict the rise of a star, so let me introduce you to Gina Prince-Bythewood.

The best vampire movie I've seen in years.

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

Gone Baby Gone would be an accomplishment with anyone at the helm; from a first-timer, it's a revelation.

Mortensen has been ideally cast. He’s at his best playing fanatics, obsessives, people beyond the norm who can’t find their place in a quiet world.

The film's main virtue, a large virtue indeed, is that it does not give anything away before its shockingly apt time.

Bizarrely entertaining and brilliantly designed.

At its best, the movie powerfully indicts our violent history. A montage of bloody U.S. interventions in foreign affairs over the last half-century, most overthrowing elected governments we didn't like, left me shaken.

Hollywood hardly ever pays attention to such people, and the average moviegoer won't either. But Leigh makes an irrefutable claim that their lives matter, and that attention must be paid.

If movies were still silent, Girl With a Pearl Earring would be a near-masterpiece.

These veterans realize they’re all playing cogs in the director’s plot-twisting machine.

On first acquaintance, Seabiscuit seems to be about anything but horse racing: the disappearance of the American frontier after 1910, our love affair with automotive speed, the passing of a rural way of life, homelessness during the Depression.

Nothing too graphic, but it creates drama, as it’s only natural to root for the hunted in a film like this.

The film has such an expansive, likeable spirit.

It's freakishly funny, suddenly tender, gleefully macabre, genuinely scary, and full of a moral – fear turns weak people into bullies – which is dosed out so gently that it never tastes like medicine.

Will dazzle you while establishing the world in which it takes place. After that, you may wonder whether Guillermo del Toro got amnesia halfway through.

The Coen brothers’ new movie, set in Hollywood in 1951, brings easy laughs but dissipates from memory moments later, like the cheesy films to which it pays homage – or, perhaps, mocks.

Is it too much to ask that he take a risk next time and kill somebody off, however much we’re used to having them in the “Trek” universe?

The filmmakers do everything they can to balance levity and leavening. The subject says "drama," and the three supporting women deliver well-shaded, understated performances. (Howard shows us how weakness can be just as destructive as malice.)

Super 8 takes its place among the best B-grade science fiction movies of this generation by copying the best of the past 50 years.

For certain movies, the adjectives "formulaic" and "predictable" are complimentary. War Horse is one of them.

This is an extremely simple but likeable film.

The comedy, which verges on farce from time to time, also has the smilingly cynical approach to romance that we identify with the French.

Each major character is complex, none more so than Bill. He's almost Shakespearean in scope.

The Rookie is "Rudy" in a baseball uniform.

Deep as a Canadian lake: Below the placid surface, menacing creatures swim around unseen.

Writer-director Caroline Link (who did the Oscar-nominated "Beyond Silence") adapted Stefanie Zweig's expatriate memoir gracefully, languidly and with full understanding of its heroine.

Howard has never been so grown-up in his handling of tough themes or so inventive in depicting states of mind. Goldsman has never been so down-to-earth or created so touching a character.

You know you’re in a top-drawer Marvel Comics adaptation when even the Stan Lee cameo is clever.

It's a smooth journey across familiar territory to a safe emotional harbor, always professional and occasionally delightful.

Auteuil does an excellent job. He's like Marcello Mastroianni, whose naturalness also deluded people into thinking for a while that he wasn't a versatile actor.

If you liked "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," you're on safe ground here -- Next time, I'd like to see Gedeck serve up a hearty meal instead of a tasty but unfilling appetizer.

Cash made some untamed, exhilarating sounds in its formative days. Walk the Line is strongest when it shows him in love with either his music or his muse.

Allen, rejuvenated by foreign settings, makes us appreciate posh parts of England as he always did Manhattan. (Credit cinematographer Remi Adefarasin for showing us how seductive upper-crust London can be.)

Given a choice between this and the navel-gazing of the novel, I'll take the short ride on a fast machine.

This suspenseful drama reveals pieces of its puzzle steadily and slowly, until the final heartrending picture can be seen at last. Remarkably, it comes from a screenwriter who had never had a feature film produced and a director who had never made one in English.

Wandering, atmospheric, episodic yet strangely appealing story of love.

The film's full of in-jokes, from the Spanish-language billboards to the name of Banderas' character.

Neuwirth vamps up a storm: She's like some silent-screen hellion sending lust rays out of bemused eyes.

A richly satisfying adaptation of Louis Sachar's novel.

They've never been farther into outer space than in The Big Lebowski. Fans (myself included) may cackle at absurd situations and in-jokes. But director Joel and producer Ethan, who write together, have never made so much clamorous ado about nothing. [6 March 1998, p.7E]

Fierce, fast and funny.

If the cast were less likeable, the predictability of the story might become wearisome. (Of course, it’s not likely to be predictable if you’re 9.) But all the actors, especially young Fegley and Laurence, engage us.

Doesn't have the daring lunacy of "Chuck and Buck," the previous collaboration by director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White. Yet it gets closer to the troubled, lonely soul of its main character.

The results have the Coens' usual tartness most of the way, before turning soft and gooey at the center.

If you wait through the credits, you get one last joke in the fine print: The actors shot the whole movie in Hawaii, on the fabulously lush island of Kauai. So while they were shooting a story about indulged prima donnas, they were working themselves in one of the most tourist-friendly spots on Earth. You've gotta smile at that.

A terrific thriller...until it turns into yet another Wes Craven movie.

“22” merits a B grade. The long final credits, in which Dickson imagines dozens of future scenarios for the undercover boys, kicks it up one notch.

It's funny, in a can't-look-away-from-the-train-wreck way, and it's brutally honest. But it's not pretty.

Why on earth didn't Warner Bros. release this movie in time for Oscar consideration? Sure, it's bleak, depressing, sometimes painful to watch. But it would have been one of the best pictures of the year, and Nicholson (who hasn't done work of this caliber since "The Crossing Guard") might have been on the podium again.

The film offers an unusually rounded picture of a Latino family. All the men work, getting up early to do blue-collar jobs that demand dedication and responsible behavior. (We don't see much of them, but they have a strong presence in the household.)

Many shallower movies these days seem too long, but this one is egregiously short.

These kids may be too small for sports and may not be headed to college on academic scholarships. But for once, they've proven to the world and to themselves that they matter.

This film has two of Fincher's happiest trademarks: It's full of information and stretches over a remarkably long time (165 minutes), yet it's neither confusing nor overextended.

Finally! For the first time, Hollywood has made a whimsical, witty, feature-length version of Dr. Seuss that's neither overblown nor smutty nor emotionally hollow.

A love story more involved than I can easily explain.

Sometimes seeing a movie throws the source material into sharper relief.... Watching the textually faithful film adaptation by director Thomas Vinterberg and writer David Nicholls, though, the piece comes off more as a glossy, well-acted romance novel.

Mature folks may wonder why a simple and simply beautiful story from their youth has been buried under layers of emotion Woody Allen's psychiatrist might want to pick over.

The film's not really a whodunit or even a whoizzit, so learning his identity matters less than what happens after he reveals it. The film becomes truly French in its attitudes toward thwarted ambition and emotion, right down to an ending that may strike Americans as melodramatic.

Perelman and Otto make auspicious, nearly flawless debuts.

That Testament doesn't wallow in cheap sentimentality or grisly detail is a testament to the talents of first-time feature film director Lynne Littman, her superb cast and screenwriter John Young. [20 Jan 1984, p.4C]

Director Fede Alvarez (who did the “Evil Dead” remake) masterfully sustains a little more than an hour of shocks. Eventually, though, he resorts to the ideas lazy or unobservant filmmakers employ.

He presides over the picture with such assurance that even longtime Denzel-watchers gape.

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

If you don’t confuse this with history – or with the French film “Marguerite,” a fictional piece loosely based on FFJ – you’ll come away touched. That’s mostly because of Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.

At the heart of the film, beyond the human/crawler conflict, is the suppressed tension between Sarah and Juno. That Marshall bothered to include such a fillip sets him apart from run-of-the-mill scaremongers; it makes me want to see what else he's done and will do.

The sunshine in Sunshine comes from women around him (Fiennes).

The most important thing, though, is that we come away feeling we know him. He died on Christmas Day eight years ago, and people listening to samples of his music in rap and hip-hop may have no idea why he mattered. Now they’ll see.

Unlike its subject, "Henderson" breaks no new ground. But like its reliable star, it's a welcome exponent of a valued tradition.

Roger Deakins, probably the best living cinematographer never to win an Oscar (he’s 0-for-10), was behind the camera. So the picture never lets us down visually, even when the story occasionally strays.

Until Year of the Dog, I've never seen a movie where someone obsessed over a puppy.

Far too clever for its own good.

Hamlet has audacity, intelligence, a provocative visual and musical style, virtually no poetry, a garbled story line weakened by savage cutting of the play, and a great yawning hole where a Hamlet ought to be.

For the first time since "X-Men," I was on the edge of my seat anticipating a sequel, wondering who'd play the Joker and how quickly Nolan - it must be Nolan! - can bring the next chapter of this story to the screen.

Jon Favreau, J.K. Simmons, Thomas Lennon and half a dozen other capable comedians drift in and out. Yet the movie seems long even at 105 minutes.

It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.

Ray Liotta and Jason Patric do some of their best work in their underwritten roles, but don't be fooled: Nobody deserves any prizes here.

The good-hearted Galaxy Quest delivers fun and confusion in equal measure, as it gently tweaks the fanaticism of "Star Trek"/"Star Wars" fans while validating it at the same time.

The film takes place half in English, half in French. The chilly, responsibility-laden world of British society contrasts with the sunny, relaxed quality of life in fare-thee-well France. If these seem like cliches, Ozon and Bernheim exploit them so adroitly that they never become stale.

Allen's laziness is startling, even in so mechanical a filmmaker. He uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.

To enjoy it, you have to make a leap of faith wide enough to sail over a Grand Canyon of disbelief.

Laughter trumps logic here, and the laughs flow freely.

Gilbert sets up a rhythm, telling the story in short scenes that proceed at a relaxed pace. The film never hurries, but it moves forward constantly. [26 Jun 1998, p.10E]

Button has a wide-eyed innocence that almost never palls. It strays far from the mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but often enough it came near to my heart.

The effect is as potent as a straight right to the solar plexus.

This sequel is, by design, entirely absorbing and satisfying without being one whit memorable.

Despite Hunter's terrific acting, the mom seems too unaware.

Why is The Emperor's New Groove Disney's funniest animated movie in years? Because it's the least like a Disney animated movie.

The writing is self-consciously literary in a way that probably worked better on the page.

This is the first real family comedy I've seen in a long time: one honest enough to satisfy teens, wryly funny enough for adults and zany enough for little kids.

Its uniqueness lies in its juxtaposition of happy faces and unhappy realities, of fleeting expressions of art and culture undone by daily brutality.

I can say only three good things about his latest martial arts picture, the incoherent The Curse of the Golden Flower: 1) Gong Li deserves better roles, 2) The costumes are astonishingly beautiful, and 3) Ummm...wow, how about those costumes!

This story of a guy looking for love in many of the wrong places turns out to be one of the happiest surprises of the movie year.

Blessedly, the kernel of the writing remains undisturbed, and its arguments are still powerful.