A Kafkaesque series of interwoven stories that depict the hopeless lives half the populace there (Iran) must lead.

It'll hearten anyone who believed Lee had insights and merely needed to find the right vehicle to express them. Bus is that vehicle. [18 Oct 1996, p.1E]

It depicts a world close enough to our own to be terrifying, yet different enough to rouse curiosity.

(Mendes') film debut shows he can shock not only with noise and nakedness but with subtle observations.

Begins and ends quietly, like stirrings of thunder from a distant storm. In between comes a tragedy that rolls over us like a compact hurricane.

A wild, self-indulgent but completely captivating extravagance.

A handsome tribute to an era as quaintly distant as tail-fin Chevrolets and A-bomb scares.

(The Coens have) never again achieved the one-two punch of Blood Simple and "Raising Arizona" - the first darkly cynical, the second light-headedly comical.

The Witch is a horrifying film, one unique in my experience.

The leads blend as seamlessly as any young-old character coupling I've seen. The prosthetically altered Gordon-Levitt, unrecognizable at first, really resembles Willis.

As usual, Almodovar finds unusual camera angles to break up the straightforward storytelling. But for the first time I recall, not a single male character is crucial to his story, and no actor has a leading role. You won't miss them.

At bottom, all Payne's films make us smile, often ruefully but hopefully.

It's possible to groan, chuckle, wince and be moist-eyed, sometimes in a span of seven or eight minutes.

Greene's words haunt us like a prophecy from half a century and half a world away.

The grandest presence here is Eastwood. His directing, like his acting, is minimal: unhurried, spare, unforced, rather somber.

The real joke is that the picture's most conventional elements, the superbly acted entanglement between the complicated Orlean and the boastful but unexpectedly thoughtful Laroche, would have made a compelling movie all by themselves -- if written by someone other than Charlie Kaufman.

The film is visually sumptuous, morally ambiguous, dramatic and dreamlike, with a narrative as engrossing as any live-action movie of 2013. It’s easy to follow yet hard to shake.

This isn't a cheerful movie. But director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga tell these stories with authority and verve, making 2½ hours zip by.

This Oscar-nominated documentary does everything you want a documentary to do. It introduces us to a compelling character and, by the finish, allows us to feel we know him well. It makes larger points about the human toil and suffering he shot for most of his career, before he turned to nature to refresh himself.

Corpse Bride had me at the maggot.

Yet for all the fun the sequel provides, the series shows signs of wearing out quickly, unless characters get developed thoroughly and in unexpected ways.

Most documentaries put us inside people's heads. The dazzling, experimental Pina puts us inside people's feet.

Whatever you think of gay people (or politicians), you may find the movie compelling viewing.

If you're tired of false holiday cheer, Lilya 4-Ever will provide a corrective to the spiritual eggnog force-fed to us all season. The climax takes place during Christmas, though one that would make Tiny Tim grateful for his crutch and cold chimney corner.

Virtually all science fiction functions as metaphor, and I took this film to be a metaphor for the act of becoming fully human.

Cedar is mostly interested in the father-son dynamics, and he cast excellent actors. Lewensohn, a famous Israeli theatrical director, makes his film acting debut, while the veteran Ashkenazi ("Late Wedding") handles his low-key role with bearlike grace.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven, who makes her feature debut as writer-director after a couple of short films, tells the story exclusively from the girls’ point of view – both emotionally, as they have all our sympathy, and physically, as almost nothing happens that one of them could not be seeing.

What does it say about a picture when the highest praise must go to impressive scenery?