Solidly engaging.

Compelling despite an almost complete lack of subtlety.

Grandly entertaining.

The director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight.

Combines live-action and animation with breathtaking wizardry... Alternately hilarious, frightening, and awesome.

In this littered environment there's no such thing as trash, only salvage, and the biggest threat to the siblings' humanity is a creeping tendency to think of themselves as commodities as well.

The broad Italian family humor gets so thick at times that you could cut it with a bread knife.

Warmly recommended to viewers who like their romantic comedies small-scale but life-size.

This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.

This may be light family entertainment, but it's also a pleasingly perverse celebration of Victorian morbidity.

More about the myth of Karloff than the monster, this Mel Brooks pastiche is probably his best early film: within limits, it has unity, pace, and even a dramatic interest of sorts.

Sexual politics, family dynamics, the debate over heredity versus environment, and the dubious ethics of scientific research on animals are rigorously explored in this ambitious, bittersweet work.

The music sounds terrific, with Young's wizened expression and rheumy eyes belied by the storming intensity of his performances. Demme has said, "If you're not a Neil Young fan, don't waste your time," and that's really all you need to know.

A good movie for kids and armchair Freudians (1944), with 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor training her pet horse for the Grand National.

As Dr. Octopus, Alfred Molina makes a more baroque supervillain than Willem Dafoe did as the Green Goblin, but the other stars--seem happy to be giving us more of the same.

The director, Henry Hathaway, is another old veteran, and the cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, but somehow it comes off like a TV celebrity roast.

Gast does a nice job of building the suspense leading up to the fight, fleshing out the story with some good color commentary by a handful of people (filmed by director Taylor Hackford, who wisely convinced Gast that these reminiscences and remarks would fill in some historical gaps).

A quantum leap in movie magic; watching it, I began to understand how people in 1933 must have felt when they saw "King Kong."

The movie he (Wenders) went on to make with her Tanztheater Wuppertal is more than an elegy; his meticulous use of 3D endows the performances with a corporeality and intimacy hitherto unseen in a dance film.

A densely textured moral universe that makes good on his metaphoric title-and in this case, the animals are perfectly willing to eat their young.

Though it's meant as a droll comedy of manners, what emerges is mincing, crabbed, and petty.

Scorsese transforms this innocent tale into an ardent love letter to the cinema and a moving plea for film preservation.

Based on a true story, Ken Loach’s powerful and disturbing British drama (1994) about a single working-class mother with four children from four different fathers is made unforgettable by stand-up comedian Crissy Rock’s lead performance and by the filmmakers’ determination to make the story as messy and as complex as life itself.

I was floored by Cronenberg's mastery of the material. Fiennes gives one of his finest performances; Miranda Richardson, playing at least three characters in the protagonist's twisted vision, is no less impressive.

The script is funny and observant, full of shocks of recognition, but for all his progress as a writer, Allen's direction remains disconcertingly amateurish. Still, it remains perhaps the only film in which Allen has been able to successfully imagine a personality other than his own.

After directing three Spider-Man movies, Sam Raimi makes a masterful return to the horror genre.

Unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.

As in the first movie, To deftly references the "Godfather" trilogy, examining the moral equivocation and shifting alliances among various syndicate members.