How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much.

Siskel and Jacobs focus on the performances, which are inspiring and electrifying.

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

The Big Easy is one of the richest American films of the year. It also happens to be a great thriller.

The Wife is visually arresting, but Runge wisely opts for a straightforward approach overall, giving center stage to the dialogue and the actors.

In films of this sort, too often the camera records the fun instead of joining in it. However, that is certainly not the case in this magnificently photographed, intelligent, very funny film.

Not only does this second movie match the charm, wit, animation skill and intelligent storytelling of the original, I think it even exceeds it.

Still Bill is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did.

What is the use of a film like this? It inspires reflection... Mike Leigh's films realize that for most people, most days, life consists of the routine of earning a living, broken by fleeting thoughts of where our efforts will someday take us--financially, romantically, spiritually or even geographically. We never arrive in most of those places, but the mental images are what keep us trying.

The Disaster Artist is a breezy, entertaining and even affectionate movie about the making of “The Room.”

Here is a good and joyous man who leads a life that is perfect for him, and how many people do we meet like that? This movie made me happy every moment I was watching it.

This is not a film most people will enjoy. Its qualities are apparent only if appreciates cinematic style for itself.

A voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I longed for a freeze frame to allow me to savor a shot.

The film has an odd subterranean power. It doesn't strive for our sympathy or make any effort to portray Rosetta as colorful, winning or sympathetic.

Kandahar does not provide deeply drawn characters, memorable dialogue or an exciting climax. Its traffic is in images.

A movie like this lives or dies with its performances, and the actors in My Beautiful Laundrette are a fascinating group of unknowns.

It’s a fine brew, equal parts cynical and whimsical, dark and sunny. It’s fairly slight but nearly great.

You don't guess the true horror of the place, which is that there are no secrets, because everyone here knows all about everyone else, inside and out, top to bottom, and has for years.

The Sure Thing is a small miracle. Although the hero of this movie is promised by his buddy that he'll be fixed up with a "guaranteed sure thing," the film is not about the sure thing but about how this kid falls genuinely and touchingly into love.

What surprised me was how much I admired Kristen Stewart, who in "Twilight," was playing below her grade level. Here is an actress ready to do important things. Together, and with the others, they make Adventureland more real and more touching than it may sound.

What we sense in the film is the camaraderie among these hopeful dancers. They've all been through the process before, all been disappointed before, all know better than anyone else what it takes, all believe the best candidates don't always win the jobs.

The film's craziest, most easily mocked character emerges as the one most fully alive. Old Kiarostami, master of paradoxes, is set in his ways, but his ways are never set.

Why should anyone care about a movie about two scabrous vulgarians? Because the subject of a really good movie is sometimes not that important. It's the acting, writing, and direction that count.

The whole plot smells fishy. It's not that the movie is hiding something, but that when it's revealed, it's been left sitting too long at room temperature. Inside Man goes to much difficulty to arrive at too little.

The music is terrific. Idania Valdes dubs Rita's sensuous, smoky singing voice, and the film is essentially constructed as a musical.

Assayas looks back on the values and priorities of the time with a vision that’s both wry and tender.

In the flat-out hilarious 1970s period piece “Dolemite Is My Name,” Murphy is the funniest he’s been since we last saw Sherman Klump and family in the early 2000s — but he’s equally effective in the handful of relatively low-key, dramatic moments. It’s a fully realized performance.

It’s filled with a kind of giddy energy that leaps off the screen. It’s corny, it’s dopey, it’s sincere, it’s romantic, it’s thrilling and it leaves one anticipating the next adventure of these heroic goofballs.

This is a parable about modern Iran, and like many recent Iranian films it leaves its meaning to the viewer. One of the wise decisions by Rafi Pitts, its writer, director and star, is to include no dialogue that ever actually states the politics of its hero.

Lore belongs in the inspiration-and-control camp. It makes dizzying flourishes out of moments that would pass as filler in other films.

Jesus' Son surprises me with moments of wry humor, poignancy, sorrow and wildness. It has a sequence as funny as any I've seen this year.

What makes it special, apart from the Ephron screenplay, is the chemistry between Crystal and Ryan.

In America is not unsentimental about its new arrivals (the movie has a warm heart and frankly wants to move us), but it is perceptive about the countless ways in which it is hard to be poor and a stranger in a new land.

For almost all of its length, Escape from Alcatraz is a taut and toughly wrought portrait of life in a prison. It is also a masterful piece of storytelling, in which the characters say little and the camera explains the action. It's one of those very difficult exercises in which large emotions, like the compulsion to be free, are reflected in minute actions, like the chipping away at stone with a pocket nail clipper.

The film takes the form but not the feel of a comic thriller. It's quirkier than that.

Has maturity and emotional depth: There are no cheap shots, nothing is thrown in for effect, realism is placed ahead of easy dramatic payoffs, and the audience grows deeply involved.

There is hardly a moment in the whole film when I knew for sure what was going to happen next, yet I didn’t feel manipulated; I felt as if the movie were giving itself the freedom to be completely spontaneous.

Red Rocket is the latest blazingly original gem from director/co-writer Sean Baker, who in films such as Tangerine and The Florida Project has displayed an uncanny ability to carve out offbeat slices of life in the American subculture.

James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence.

He's (Fukunaga) a director with a sure visual sense, here expressed in voluptuous visuals and ambitious art direction.

It is enormously ambitious -- maybe too much so, since it ranges so widely between styles and strategies that it distracts from its own flow.

It aims straight for our hearts, sometimes hitting the target, especially in some of the quieter scenes with Conor and his mother. But then the preachy tree rears its thorny head, and it keeps on talking and explaining, long after we get it, we get it, we get it.

What I was left with was the goodness of Buck Brannaman as a man. He was dealt a hand that might have destroyed him. He overcame his start and is now a wise and influential role model. He does unto horses as he wishes his father had done onto him.

I like the way the slacker characters maintain their slothful gormlessness in the face of urgent danger, and I like the way the British bourgeois values of Shaun's mum and dad assert themselves even in the face of catastrophe.

It’s an uneven but memorable tale about a young man with impressive survival instincts and a conscience that shifts to fit the circumstances.

An endlessly fascinating movie.

This profound and immensely touching film in only 75 perfect minutes achieves the profundity of an epic.

A formula thriller done as an elegant genre exercise. Johnny Hallyday was brought in by To as a last-minute sub for Alain Delon, and could have been the first choice: He is tall, weathered, grim and taciturn.

As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it.

The film would have benefitted by being less encompassing and focusing on a more limited number of emblematic characters -- Meinhof and Herold, for starters.

Here is an entire movie about looking cool while not wiping out. Call it a metaphor for life.

Making great use of 21st century technology, this latest version is the most visually sweeping and impressive version yet, and it comes close to matching the original for its visceral, gut-punch effect.

It is nearly flawless.

Coppola's new film is not so much about the car as about the man, and it is with the man that he fails to deliver.

A provocative, visceral, sometimes heartbreakingly relevant drama/thriller.

The film's second half is the most touching, because it shows that our lives are not merely our own, but also belong to the events we set in motion.

Certain events are rearranged from the factual timelines, and yes, The Trial of the Chicago 7 exercises poetic license. This is not a documentary; it’s a dramatization of events that resonates with great power while containing essential truths, and it’s one of the best movies of the year.

The Lunchbox,” Indian director Ritesh Batra’s debut, is a witty and perceptive film that reveals the hopes, sorrows and regrets of ordinary people.

Ivan Reitman's direction and Gary Ross' screenplay use intelligence and warmhearted sentiment to make Dave into wonderful lighthearted entertainment.

A direct, spare, touching film.

As well-directed a film as you'll see from America this year, an unsentimental and yet completely involving story of a young man who cannot see a way around his fate.

The ending of the film is as calculated and cruel as a verbal assault by a Neil LaBute character.

Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.

Munch's screenplay is tenderly observant of his characters. He watches them as they float within the seas of their personalities. His scenes are short and often unexpected. The story unfolds in sidelong glances.

A fascinating study of behavior that violates the rules.

May be the most intimate documentary ever made about a live rock 'n' roll concert. Certainly it has the best coverage of the performances onstage.

Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches.

With Smollett, Howery and Merkerson infusing life and depth into the adult characters, and the young actors Blake Cameron James and Gian Knight Ramirez turning in natural and affecting work, “We Grown Now” will resonate with you for a very long time.

Even with my misgivings about some of Randi’s methods, anyone who can challenges faith healers, psychics and mediums who claim a special bond with the dead — and often wins those challenges — deserves a standing ovation. An Honest Liar is an honest portrait of just that man.

Here is a tense and sorrowful film where common sense struggles with blood lust.

What's Love Got to Do With It ranks as one of the most harrowing, uncompromising showbiz biographies I've ever seen.

Here was a great artist. She enjoyed her life. She didn't complain at the time, she didn't complain when she went cold turkey, she didn't complain in her 80s.

The result is a raw and sometimes chilling and often darkly funny adventure filled with just enough nods to social media, e.g., we sometimes hear the familiar Twitter sound effect when something is posted.

Like that damn disembodied hand, Talk to Me will keep you in its grips throughout.

It’s refreshing to find yourself immersed in a film that zigs and zags between genres — and occasionally zaps your senses with an electric charge of shock and awe.

The central performance in Brothers is by Connie Nielsen, who is strong, deep and true.

Some women are simply sexy forever. Helen Mirren is a woman like that. She's 64. As she enters her 70s, we'll begin to develop a fondness for sexy septuagenarians.

Filmmakers Cristina Constantini and Kareem Tabsch have fashioned an illuminating and insightful documentary/biography.

Margin Call employs an excellent cast who can make financial talk into compelling dialogue. They also can reflect the enormity of what is happening: Their company and their lives are being rendered meaningless.

Philip is one of the most unlikable but also one of the most fascinating characters of the year.

World on a Wire is slowed down compared to most Fassbinder. He usually evokes overwrought passions, sudden angers and jealousies, emotional explosions, people hiding turmoil beneath a surface of pose. Here there's less of that emotional energy. But if you know Fassbinder, you might want to see this as an exercise of his mind, a demonstration of how one of his stories might be transformed by the detachment of science fiction.

Director Patty Jenkins’ origin story is packed with heart and empathy, and we have Gadot’s endearing performance to thank for that — but it’s also a byproduct of the timeline.

Here is a rare movie that begins by telling us how it will end and is about how the hero has no idea why.

Though the original is superior, this glossy entertainment is far more popular with audiences. [25 Dec 1998, p.13]

A film that with quiet confidence creates a fragile magic.

With the jazzy score by Jonny Greenwood setting the tone for the cacophony of sounds in Diana’s inner world, Spencer is an exquisitely designed, beautifully photographed and at times hauntingly surreal story, set primarily on the estate where Diana was born.

Tries hard to be a good film, but if it had relaxed a little, it might have been great.

The Revenant is a visceral sensation, filled with unforgettable visuals and memorable set pieces.

House Party is silly and high-spirited and not particularly significant, and that is just as it should be.

It’s yet another instantly immersive, richly layered and beautifully shot chapter in one of the most impressive directing careers of our time.

Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess.

It is a straightforward and of course inspirational and at times profoundly moving tale, and even though we can predict just about every note it will strike before the opening credits roll, Green and screenwriter John Pollono and the outstanding cast elevate the material and make it something special and memorable.

Takes advantage of the road movie genre, which requires only a goal and then permits great freedom in the events along the way.

Even though events have been compressed to fit a 22-hour timeline into a 94-minute movie, and some conversations and characters are fictional, there’s never a moment when it feels as if events have been amped up or overcooked.

Reviewing The Naked Gun... is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield - you can get the words but not the music.

Strangely haunting, often heartbreaking.

Dafoe’s Vincent is a tormented, almost childlike soul who is never comfortable in his own skin, and veers from being monumentally needy to frighteningly rash. It’s a mesmerizing performance in an inconsistent and uneven film.

Because the film is well-acted and written with intelligence, it might be worth seeing, despite my objections. I suspect my own feelings.