It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled "Between Enemy Lines."

This movie rocks.

Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick turn in layered, nuanced performances, while the male actors playing varying degrees of scumbag are suitably and effectively nauseating and intimidating. The Royal Hotel is a little like the Hotel California in that you can check out any time you’d like, but on some level, you can never really leave.

While the subject matter is often bleak, this isn’t a depressing journey. Seeing great actors at the top of their game working with such rich material is never a downer.

In a pair of elegantly chilling sequences (the editing in this film is superb), Maya and Ryan fight for their lives against the needle-drop background of first “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues and later “The Best of Times” by Styx. You’ll never think of those classic rock tunes in the same way again.

Gretchen Mol is finally the key to the mysterious appeal of the film, to its sweetness and sadness.

A slick, exciting, well-made crime thriller, dripping with atmosphere.

The new version is just as satisfying, if not as dry and cynical, as the original.

Forrest Tucker’s swan song moments in The Old Man & the Gun are well tailored for Robert Redford’s swan song as an actor. It’s a damn good performance that also serves as a fitting curtain call.

Penna and his co-writer Ryan Morrison handle this existentially challenging material with grace, and Kendrick, Collette, Kim and Anderson deliver equally impactful, intense performances.

For all its moodiness and melancholy, Logan is also a rip-roaring action film — and it’s wickedly funny at times as well.

I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you.

The training sequences are as they have to be: incredible rigors, survived by O'Neil. They are good cinema because Ridley Scott, the director, brings a documentary attention to them, and because Demi Moore, having bitten off a great deal here, proves she can chew it.

Landline is a very funny film about people dealing with very serious situations.

It’s a carefully crafted, almost reverential character study of man and music Hawke clearly and greatly admires.

Here is a film that uses very good actors and gives them a lot of improvisational freedom to talk their way into, around and out of social discomfort. And it's not snarky. It doesn't mock these characters. It understand they have their difficulties and hopes they find a way to work things out.

Nearly every scene takes a sideways turn, and nearly every expectation we have doesn’t work out the way we anticipate it working out, and that’s what makes the journey so much fun.

I Will Follow doesn't tell a story so much as try to understand a woman. Through her, we can find insights into the ways we deal with death.

Presumed Innocent has at its core one of the most fundamental fears of civilized man: the fear of being found guilty of a crime one did not commit. That fear is at the heart of more than half of Hitchcock's films, and it is one reason they work for all kinds of audiences. Everybody knows that fear.

Damon’s everyman workhorse is tragically sympathetic, plodding ahead against all odds. Copley is brilliant as the sadistic villain. Foster is … well, you gotta see it to believe it. In the meantime, you’ll be treated to one of the most entertaining action films of the year.

What is best about A Mighty Heart is that it doesn't reduce the Daniel Pearl story to a plot, but elevates it to a tragedy. A tragedy that illuminates and grieves for the hatred that runs loose in our world, hatred as a mad dog that attacks everyone. Attacks them for what seems, to the dog, the best of reasons.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is very good, but a step down from "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," if only because that film and its casting were so fresh and unexpected.

A well-crafted family thriller that is truly scary and doesn't wimp out.

Clash of the Titans is a grand and glorious romantic adventure, filled with grave heroes, beautiful heroines, fearsome monsters, and awe-inspiring duels to the death. It is a lot of fun.

Barthes takes her notion and runs with it, and Giamatti and Strathairn follow fearlessly.

Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

Even with a coked-up George Carlin (a spot-on Matthew Rhys) and the ubiquity of marijuana and the hard-R language, “Saturday Night” is a smooth and polished gem — a far cry from the spirt of raw anarchy permeating the birth of the series.

After spending a bit too much time taking us through the all-too-familiar chapters of Elvis’ career, from his embrace (and yes, appropriation) of Black music to his ascension to stardom to the Army stint to the movie career that turned him into a caricature, “Return of the King” soars in the final segments, as we see Elvis rise to the challenge and achieve greatness in the live-on-tape performance.

Nearly every step of the way, Stargirl finds just the right notes to find the right side of the line between precious and lovely, between arbitrary and plausible, between serendipitous and condescendingly magical.

This is a very promising first feature by Eggers and showcases some exceptional acting.

Like "Finding Nemo," this is a movie that is a joy to behold entirely apart from what it is about. It looks happy, and, more to the point, it looks harmonious.

One of those comedies where everything works.

Sandler gives one of his most authentic performances.

Nearly every scene is contrived, but Melfi has a nice way with dialogue, and the cast is uniformly outstanding.

We're fully aware of the plot conventions at work here, the wheels and gears churning within the machinery, but with these actors, this velocity and the oblique economy of the dialogue, we realize we don't often see it done this well. Silver Linings Playbook is so good, it could almost be a terrific old classic.

Thanks to the superb screenplay by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack and the brilliant, brave performances by the cast, Dallas Buyers Club gets just about everything right, save for a few over-the-top scenes that hammer home points that have already been made.

Tells a story we think we already know, but we're wrong: It has new things to say within an old formula.

One of the pleasures of Fiennes' film is that the screenplay by John Logan ("Hugo," "Gladiator") makes room for as much of Shakespeare's language as possible. I would have enjoyed more, because such actors as Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox let the words roll trippingly off the tongue.

That it succeeds is some kind of miracle; there's enough material here for three bad films, and somehow it becomes one good one.

This is an almost Dostoyevskian study of a man brooding upon evil until it paralyzes him.

After his murder, Michele Montas goes on the air to insist that Jean Dominique is still alive, because his spirit lives on. But in this film Haiti seems to be a country that can kill the spirit, too.

What sets Deep Cover apart is its sense of good and evil, the way it has the Fishburne character agonize over the moral decisions he has to make.

Clint Eastwood, a master director, orchestrates all of these notes and has us loving Mandela, proud of Francois and cheering for the plucky Springboks. A great entertainment. Not, as I said, the Mandela biopic I would have expected.

This is one of the best crime thrillers in recent years, with Anna Kendrick demonstrating a strong set of storytelling skills and a keen eye for period-piece visuals in her directorial debut, while also turning in one of her career-best performances as the “bachelorette” who unknowingly chooses Alcala as her “dream date.”

Given the grievousness of their sins, one wonders why the church continues to shelter them. Might it not be more appropriate to excommunicate them, and refer them to the attention of the civil authorities?

All of Me shares with a lot of great screwball comedies a very simple approach: Use absolute logic in dealing with the absurd. Begin with a nutty situation, establish the rules, and follow them. The laughs happen when ordinary human nature comes into conflict with ridiculous developments.

Cold Pursuit moves forward with the assured and deliberate force of Nels’ massive snowplow. And with Neeson/Nels at the wheel, Cold Pursuit is one fantastically hot mess of a movie.

Jim Braddock is almost transparent in the simple goodness of his character; that must have made him almost impossible to play. Russell Crowe makes him fascinating, and it takes a moment of two of thought to appreciate how difficult that must have been.

Something Wild is quite a movie. Demme is a master of finding the bizarre in the ordinary.

Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.

Starts at the beginning and goes straight through to the inevitable end, unblinkingly. It doesn't relieve the pressure, as "Iris" does, with flashbacks to happier days.

Comedies open every week. This is the kind I like best. It grows from human nature and is about how people do their jobs and live their lives.

There is a kind of horror movie that plays so convincingly we don't realize it's an exercise in pure style. ''Halloween'' is an example, and John Dahl's Joy Ride is another.

Janeane Garofalo in this movie... is so likable, so sympathetic, so revealing of her character's doubts and desires, that she carries us headlong into the story.

The editing, with so many twists and turns and so many supporting characters needing their due, is without hiccups. And thankfully, there’s plenty of dark humor.

Dillon has the kind of acting intelligence that allows him to play each scene for no more than that particular scene is really about; he's not trying to summarize the message in every speech. That gives him an ease, an ability to play the teenage hero as if every day were a whole summer long.

[A] conventional yet fascinating documentary.

The point of the film is not to create suspense, but to capture the relentlessness of human greed, the feeling that the land is so important the human spirit can be sacrificed to it.

The plot of Point Blank, summarized, invites parody (rookie agent goes undercover as surfer to catch bank robbers). The result is surprisingly effective.

Whether the protest movement hastened the end of the Vietnam War is hard to say, but it is likely that Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for re-election was influenced by the climate it helped to create.

Sometimes we feel as if the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite, but sometimes it must have seemed to Frida Kahlo as if her life did, too.

Ben Is Back shifts gears and becomes as much a thriller as a family drama, and some of the developments stretch credulity. Through it all, though, there’s the magnificence of Julia Roberts, and the fine performances from Hedges, Vance and the rest of the cast. They do great justice to this finely constructed slice of fractured family life.

Aronofsky brings a new urgency to the drug movie by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel.

The point is that for the soldiers, it's a dead zone, life on hold, a cheerless existence. And this plain-spoken old woman reminds them of a lifetime they are missing.

This is director Atsuko Hirayanagi’s feature-length debut (based on her own short film), and it is a most impressive first effort. Oh Lucy! is quirky and offbeat and strange and sometimes quite dark — and yet oddly lovable.

With Campion’s native New Zealand standing in magnificently for early 20th century Big Sky Country, The Power of the Dog is a study in contrasts between the almost surreal beauty of the mountains and the sky and the vast land, and the nasty, petty and often unspeakably harsh manner in which people will treat one another — even their own kin.

What I respond to in the movie is its fundamental romantic impulse.

An imperfect but deeply involving and beautifully made Western.

Writer-director-producer Emerald Fennell (who is also an actor and plays Camilla Parker Bowles on “The Crown”) delivers a sensational first feature film with this well-crafted, bold, visually stunning and emotionally resonant gem.

This time capsule from 1970 feels, in 1990, like a jolt of fresh air.

If the rare vitality and wit of Irma Vep weren't enough to shake jaded viewers in their seats, its climactic blast of optically enhanced images will. The only new world Assayas is prepared to accept is a brave one. In and out of film, that's the only kind to pursue. [13 June 1997, p.32]

This is the movie to seek out.

This film has moments of uncommon observation and touching insight.

It may be that a relationship like the one here between Rosalba and Fernando is impossible in real life. All the more reason for this movie.

The closing scenes of the movie involve Szpilman's confrontation with a German captain named Wilm Hosenfeld -- Polanski's direction of this scene, his use of pause and nuance, is masterful.

This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay.

There is pain, humor, irony and sweetness in the character, and a voice and manner so distinctive, he is the most memorable movie character I've seen in a long time.

Movement and Location has some clear-cut parallels to the stories of immigrants who are in the States illegally and are trying to live quiet, productive lives without anyone asking too many questions. But it also works as a Rod Serling-esque sci-fi adventure of the mind, devoid of special effects but convincing us of its dimension-breaking elements through the use of dialogue, performance and music.

Paterson is a fable, brimming with symbolism and inside literary references and nods to playwrights and authors from decades and centuries gone by — but it’s also authentic and plausible, in its own weird way.

Rich with characters and flowing with music.

The Soderbergh version is like the same story freed from the weight of Tarkovsky's solemnity. And it evokes one of the rarest of movie emotions, ironic regret.

Lymelife doesn't have the sheer power of "The Ice Storm," but it's not just another recycling of suburban angst. By allowing their characters complexity, the Martinis spill open those tiny model homes as thoroughly as a dropped Monopoly game.

Someone like Abe could only prevail through the powers of denial and optimistic wishing, and Solondz makes that happen, as the film gradually slips into fantasy.

Given the nature of director/co-writer James Gray’s admirably daring, bold and ambitious, sure-to-be-polarizing, flat-out weird, crazy fever-dream space opera, it’s only fitting for the title to be so obscure and challenging.

LaBute has that rarest of attributes, a distinctive voice. You know one of his scenes at once. His dialogue is the dialogue overheard in trendy mid-scale restaurants, with the words peeled back to suggest the venom beneath.

The writing, acting and direction are so convincing that at some point I stopped thinking about the constraints and started thinking about the movie's freedoms.

What DOESN’T get lost in translation is what made “El Secreto De Sus Ojos” so effective: the visceral, devastating empathy we feel when a horrible injustice is committed and it ruins multiple lives; the haunted looks in the eyes of a trio of characters who will never be able to shake off the events of long ago; the lush and lurid film noir touches; and the air of melancholy hanging heavy over a pursuit of justice because we know there’s no such thing as true justice, not in these circumstances.

Bening is magnificent.

The use of 2:35 wide screen paradoxically increases the effect of claustrophobia. I would not like to be buried alive.

Linda is a truly good woman, and Rachael Harris' performance illuminates Natural Selection.

It plays like a classic military story about soldiers from various walks of life who bond as brothers.

It offers the rare pleasure of an author directing his own book, and doing it well. No one who loves the book will complain about the movie, and especially not about its near-ideal casting.

Has the high-octane feel of real life, closely observed.

The locker room scenes are totally authentic.

Racing With the Moon is a movie like Valley Girl or Baby, It's You, a movie that is interested in teenagers and willing to listen to how they talk and to observe, with great tenderness, the fragility and importance of their first big loves.

What a sad film this, and how filled with the mystery of human life.

Gradually the full arc of Toni Collette's performance reveals itself, and we see that the end was there even in the beginning. This is that rare sort of film that is not about what happens, but about what happens then.

The final chapters of Tully take us to a place I certainly didn’t anticipate, causing us to re-examine everything we’ve seen from the outset. It might not be a perfectly constructed journey, but it’s pretty close.