So fraught with unresolved issues of class, sexuality, and spiritual need, and so carefully observed by Pawlikowski, that it opens out like the movie's West Yorkshire countryside.

The tense climax stretches the story's credibility to the breaking point, but for the most part this is noir of an exceptionally high caliber, its sequence of events revealing two complicated and compromised people.

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.

A moving evocation of longing unfulfilled.

It's smart, energetic filmmaking that also makes for engrossing entertainment.

The film rarely strays from easy likability, with Hallstrom's spare, efficient styling creating a sense of chaste northern lyric (simultaneously warm and chilly: everyone wears coats in summer) familiar from early Bergman. More unassuming mongrel than pricey pedigree, but not a bad time in all.

A first-rate thriller, maintaining a high level of suspense.

The film is best when it takes itself seriously, worst when it takes the easy way out into giggly camp--as it does, finally and fatally, when Lex Luthor enters the action; Gene Hackman plays the arch-villain like a hairdresser left over from a TV skit.

Adapted by Van Sant and Daniel Yost from an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle, this 1989 feature has the kind of stylistic conviction that immediately wins one over.

Max Ophuls’s witty version (1950) of Arthur Schnitzler’s play showing love as a bitterly comic merry-go-round.

This is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you're likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions—which become prevalent only at the very end—and go with the 60s flow, just as the original audiences did.

Seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style.

Like the painter, it's painstakingly serious about what it's up to.

Despite its farcical moments, Late Marriage leaves an aftertaste as sobering as other recent films that critique cultural conservatives in the Middle East.

Disappointingly conventional though well-made...An OK teen movie, but not a whole lot more.

Gentle, muted film of limited aesthetic ambition.

The nonsensationalistic results are also somewhat ho-hum--and oddly less convincing than Friedkin's lurid mess, let alone the elegant satanism sagas of Tourneur and Polanski.

The visuals are wild, the sound track has the audacity to underscore the subtext instead of just echoing the obvious, the comedy is irreverent and occasionally slapstick, and the metaphorical details are consistently strong.

A lot of claims have been made for this campy bloodbath concerto (1989) by Hong Kong director John Woo, and I must admit that he's even better than Brian De Palma at delivering emotional and visceral excess with staccato relentlessness.

Inspired by anthropologist Donald Thomson's early-20th-century photographs, this collaboration between a Western filmmaker and the native people of Ramingining is an impressive achievement of ethnographic cinema.

While the outcome is never really in doubt, director Frederic Fonteyne illuminates the wife's inner world with a rich sense of atmosphere, and Emmanuelle Devos' riveting performance manages to convey every shift in her character's suppressed emotional life with the subtlest of gestures and expressions.

The Maid may turn mostly on issues of housework, but it never feels trivial, because Silva is so skillful in exposing the alliances and levers of power inside the household.

The period ambience (call it funk) is irresistible, but the main points of interest here are sociological rather than musical.

The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.

Bob Hoskins gives a growly, charismatic performance as the kingpin brought low by phantom forces over the course of an Easter weekend, and there’s a political theme that asserts itself with nicely rising force.

Laurence Olivier's famous 1948 interpretation of Shakespeare's play suffers slightly from his pop-Freud approach to the character and from some excessively flashy, wrongheaded camera work—including the notorious moment when Hamlet begins the soliloquy and the camera begins to track back.

Has memorable characters and images. Yet the story is elusive and occasionally puzzling, and some of the ideas are amorphous and self-conscious.

Leonard Kastle, a composer who turned filmmaker for this single feature, brings a spare dignity and genuine depth of characterization to his exploitation subject—the series of murders committed by Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck in the late 40s.