The cast - including Derek Jacobi as the modern-dress chorus, Paul Scofield, Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Emma Thompson, and Robbie Coltrane in an effective cameo as Falstaff - is uniformly fine without any grandstanding.

Provides glorious escapism without asking you to turn your brain off.

I'm not sure what it all means, but, as in Ed Wood, Burton's visual flair and affection for the characters make it fun.

More a film about unreasoning fear than the supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects.

Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.

The character interactions are strong, especially for this depleted genre, and Hill's tight, efficient styling recovers a lot of lost formal ground: his framing and crosscutting are as sharp as ever, and the bloodbath finale is, improbably, a model of intelligent restraint, the classicist's answer to Peckinpah baroque.

Pulses with feeling for childhood and nature and develops a surprising amount of suspense considering it takes place around a single suburban home.

Sitting in the theater, you're liable to buy all this simply for the pleasure of watching Caine work. Like Eastwood and other actors of his vintage, Caine brings to the project not only his own formidable skills but more than half a century of movie history.

No simple tabloid recap. Gibney applies himself to two mysteries, neither of which he unravels but both of which make for gripping cinema.

The conduct of the French intelligentsia under Nazi occupation remains a tender topic, and the 2002 release of Bertrand Tavernier's film about two filmmakers who follow divergent paths through the Vichy years stirred intense controversy.

The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling's Method acting with Hopkins's more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.

The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.

The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars.

It's more than a simple improvement, inverting some of the original's qualities so that the impersonal, well-crafted filmmaking remains lucid throughout.

Greengrass takes pains to keep events believable and relatively unrhetorical, rejecting entertainment for the sake of sober reflection, though one has to ask how edifying this is apart from its reduction of the standard myths.

This film by Julio Medem has dreamlike visuals, lush sensuality, a gorgeous cast, and a plot built on elaborate, self-conscious coincidences.

The virtue of this play and the film of this play is that many readings and meanings are possible. The same can’t be said for the propositions of its detractors, who merely want to sweep an enduring and potent form of liberal protest under the carpet.

Almereyda's respect for his audience and his queasiness about the present register with equal weight, reinventing the poetry in the most relevant ways possible.

The illicit lovers in this eerie South Korean drama communicate whole worlds without ever speaking.

This is probably Alan Parker's best film, in part because it's one of his most modest.

Since the virtues of heroism and decency it celebrates are universal, I hope it doesn't get absorbed into the dubious agitprop of American exceptionalism.

Imamura’s detached, almost scientific style forestalls any pat sympathy for the central character—he is not a sentimental “victim of society,” but the embodiment of its darkest Darwinian forces.

Given what Young charges for concert tickets, all his organs could be gold. So I was even more grateful for this documentary of his August 2005 shows at the fabled Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, expertly directed by Jonathan Demme.

Puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone.

Durkin reveals how the sisters have been pulled in opposite directions by the death of their parents. But the story structure also nurtures a creeping, finally unbearable dread that may have you looking over your shoulder all the way home.

Prince himself, passing through a spectrum of costumes and sexual roles, is never less than commanding, as performer, composer, and director.

It is a moving and entertaining work, executed with high finesse by a master cineast.