A rapturously beautiful, lyrically dazzling work.

Despite its mawkish tendencies, the film is remarkable for the naturalistic acting of its cast, particularly the simple, tenderly expressive performances of the two leads.

The humor about male neurosis doesn't try to remind you of Woody Allen at every turn.

The dual-track plot, with constant cutting between mother and daughter, seems less an attempt to establish meaningful parallels between the two stories than the nervous twitches of a compulsive channel changer.

This 1975 satire about a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they’re like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case.

The grand architecture of Milan and the icy rhythms of composer John Adams set the tone for this elegant Italian drama about the suffocating power of family, wealth, and tradition.

While the low comedy is undeniably effective, the film leaves behind a bad taste of snobbery and petty meanness.

Apart from some unexaggerated notations about American puritanism in the 1940s and '50s, this is more a work of exploration than a thesis, and Condon mainly avoids sensationalism.

This highly stylized portrait of a loveless marriage at the beginning of the 20th century merges a claustrophobic theatricality with dazzlingly cinematic wide-screen compositions (the sumptuous cinematography is by Eric Gautier).

Dizdar inventively examines bigotry, combining daring humor and hyperbole, dark realism and shining idealism.

Has the expressionistic simplicity of Kurosawa's other late films.

Drove violence to the point of redundancy.

The 37 Yale and Harvard players Rafferty interviews are such a rich and articulate cast of characters that the season leading up to the game and the game itself become an epic story.

The acting, showy and instinctual, is most of the movie; the visual style is too forced and chicly distended to let the drama acquire much natural life of its own. It's a film that expresses a great deal of disgust toward homosexuals, while placing a sympathetic homosexual relationship at its core.

The acting is too eccentric and the narrative drive too weak to satisfy fans of the genre, but Herzog's admirers will find much in the film's animistic landscapes and clusters of visionary imagery.

Jarmusch's narrative setups are often artificial and implausible, but his stories are usually charming anyway because the sense of character runs deeper than plot.

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

What begins as a leave-taking turns into a homecoming that reflects the mixed-race society of the modern south.

It's a noble undertaking, and Eastwood is stylistically bold enough to create a view of combat based mainly on images that are clearly manufactured. (As with "Saving Private Ryan," the movie's principal source is "The Big Red One," whose director, Samuel Fuller, actually experienced the war.) But this is underimagined and so thesis ridden that it's nearly over before it starts.

One reason Bright Leaves is McElwee's best film since "Sherman's March" is the richness of his reflections on this multifaceted material.

The movie is enjoyable for its flashy surfaces--the witty editing, the narrative forecasting, the droll omniscient voice-over--but as drama it seems superficial.

He doesn't lose his stylistic identity either: in addition to the very Mamet-like delivery of unfinished sentences, his command of rhythm and flow remains flawless throughout.

Tsai Ming-liang's most exciting and original to date.

Richard Linklater goes Hollywood (1995) -- triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock.

The French title is Comme une image ("like an image"), but Tennessee Williams's phrase "the catastrophe of success" seems more appropriate.

The whole thing's so worthy that I wish I liked it more. It makes time pass agreeably, but Square John still seems about as innocent of fresh ideas (aesthetically and otherwise) as most of his characters, and for this kind of leftist multiplot I found his "City of Hope" more engaging.