There’s no trace of Hollywood glamour or gloss to the story, no hint of actor-y flourishes in the deeply resonant performances. Just a lean, finely crafted, memorably real story announcing the presence of a major new filmmaking talent — and a young actor with the promise of limitless potential.

The film leaves no doubt Ted Hall was a brilliant man, and that he and Joan had a beautiful marriage. His legacy beyond that remains a subject of intense debate.

What’s missing is musical or cultural context for the Beatles’ explosion.

The way this unfolds is surprisingly engaging.

Clocking in at a bloated 2 hours and 20 minutes and featuring a VERY slow build before we get to the good stuff, the gorgeous and weird and ludicrous horror film “Midsommar” tests our patience more than once before delivering some seriously grisly and wonderfully twisted material in the final act.

It is a stunning work of visual style - the best version of a comic book universe I've seen - and Brandon Lee clearly demonstrates in it that he might have become an action star, had he lived.

The Stepfather has one wonderful element: Terry O'Quinn's performance.

A demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break.

Koyaanisqatsi is an impressive visual and listening experience, that Reggio and Glass have made wonderful pictures and sounds, and that this film is a curious throwback to the 1960s, when it would have been a short subject to be viewed through a marijuana haze. Far out.

Bacon is a strong and subtle actor, something that is often said but insufficiently appreciated. Here he employs all of his art.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.

Keke Palmer, a young Chicago actress whose first role was as Queen Latifah's niece in "Barbershop 2," becomes an important young star with this movie. It puts her in Dakota Fanning and Thora Cross territory, and there's something about her poise and self-possession that hints she will grow up to be a considerable actress.

The Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris is famous for its "erotic chic" revues, but I found nothing either erotic or chic in this reduction of body parts to geometrical displays.

This movie leaves me looking forward to the director's next film; we can say of Rian Johnson, as somebody once said about a dame named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "You're good. You're very good."

Death and the Maiden is all about acting. In other hands, even given the same director, this might have been a dreary slog.

This is more of a do-over — a mulligan — than a reboot, with writer-director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) delivering a darkly funny, blood-spattered, cheerfully gross, violent and bat-bleep crazy mashup of wisecracking humor, elaborate and CGI-infused action sequences and even a rom-com interlude that ends with one of the participants quite dead while the other expresses regrets but there was no other way, this being a Suicide Squad movie and all.

A lightweight rom-com elevated by its performances. It is a reminder that the funniest people are often not comedians, but actors playing straight in funny roles.

It's hard enough for a director to work with actors, but if you're working with your own family in your own house and depicting passive aggression, selfishness and discontent and you produce a film this good, you can direct just about anybody in just about anything.

To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply.

Passes the time pleasantly and has a few good laughs.

What adds boundless energy to Walk the Line is the performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.

Adapted with unusual faithfulness from John Guare's much-heralded 1990 play, the movie, directed by Fred Schepisi with a screenplay by the playwright, is nothing if not frenetic. And yet it attempts to explore a slew of profound ideas -- about race, social class, art and the whole nature of experience among a very particular and unusually sophisticated segment of contemporary urban American society. [22 Dec 1993, p.48]

Antal's visuals create a haunted house where the lights are off in most of the rooms and there may, indeed, be a monster in the closet.

Movies about high school misfits are common; this is an uncommon one. Terri, so convincingly played by Jacob Wysocki, is smart, gentle and instinctively wise.

You might think a documentary about the obituary writers at the New York Times would be a depressing, sobering, scholarly work — but it’s anything but.

One reason for the fascination of Woody Allen's Match Point is that each and every character is rotten.

Moore delivers a performance that should win awards. We believe every inch of the performance, every movement of Moore’s eyes when she gets the news of her condition, every scene in which she experiences another level of deterioration. It’s beautiful work.

Pour a cup of cheer and toast filmmaker Dana Nachman for telling the stories of some of these elves and the families who have benefitted from the fruits of their tireless volunteer labor in Dear Santa, a sprightly feel-good documentary that comes at a time when we could use a lift — and serves as a reminder there are an awful lot of truly good people in this world.

Truly, Madly, Deeply, a truly odd film, maddening, occasionally deeply moving.

A brave, funny, affecting film.

What's best about the movie is the sense of madness and mania running just beneath its surface.

What are we to make of this existence? Doc sees himself a messiah of surfing, clean living and healthy exercise. We might be more inclined to see him as a narcissistic monster, ruling his big family with an iron fist.

Mulan is an impressive achievement, with a story and treatment ranking with "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King."

The Weavers of 2003 did not sing as well as they did in 1982, or 1952, but if anything they had more heart, because more memories.

The film is funny, energetic, teeth-gnashingly venomous and animated with an eye to exploiting the 3-D process with such sure-fire techniques as a visit to an amusement park. The sad thing, I am forced to report, is that the 3-D process produces a picture more dim than it should be.

What's exceptional about The Silence is its style.

Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony is one more bravo for the iconic masterpiece.

The only reason I’m not giving Eileen a higher rating is because there are a couple of cheap and manipulative jump scare moments that only serve to take us out of the story and feel frustrated. Other than those hiccups, this is a first-rate period piece thriller with hauntingly memorable performances.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

Great World of Sound, a Sundance hit, is Zobel’s first film, a confident, sure-handed exercise focusing on the American Dream, turned nightmare.

The Rainmaker, unlike most Grisham films, doesn't have to drag a high-paid superstar around and give him all the best lines. DeVito's role is in the fading tradition of the star character actor.

Mikhalkov has made a new film with its own original characters and stories, and after all, it's not how the film ends, but how it gets there.

Elisabeth Moss delivers the best performance of her film career, carrying the story every step of the way.

This is an urban-based Batman saga, and though the citizens of Gotham City have yet to fully appreciate it, they are lucky to have him patrolling their streets, their sewers and their skyline.

What we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy.

What makes the movie special is how it's made. Nolte and Murphy are good, and their dialogue is good, too - quirky and funny.

Real Genius contains many pleasures, but one of the best is its conviction that the American campus contains life as we know it.

Undefeated is an emotional and effective film.

Thymaya Payne's Stolen Seas is a documentary of such ambitious scope that you might need a remote control and a notebook to keep up with it.

Whatever happened to the delight and, if you'll excuse the term, the magic in the "Harry Potter" series? As the characters grow up, the stories grow, too, leaving the innocence behind and confusing us with plots so labyrinthine that it takes a Ph.D from Hogwarts to figure them out.

Snappy graphics channel the info flow like a sugar rush. Scary music cues are overused. Narrator Katie Couric wisely stays offscreen. That keeps Fed Up from feeling like an Oprah special.

This is a serious movie about drinking but not a depressing one. You notice that in the way it handles Charlie (Aaron Paul), Kate's husband. He is also her drinking buddy. When two alcoholics are married, they value each other's company because they know they can expect forgiveness and understanding, while a civilian might not choose to share their typical days.

We go expecting to be inspired and uplifted, and we leave somewhat satisfied in those areas, but with reluctant questions about how well the story has aged, and how relevant it is today.

Swimming is above all about a young woman's face, and by casting an actress whose face projects that woman's doubts and yearnings, it succeeds. The face belongs to Lauren Ambrose.

Manito sees an everyday tragedy with sadness and tenderness, and doesn't force it into the shape of a plot.

One of the joys of Waking Ned Devine is in the richness of the local eccentric population.

This movie takes a lot of delight in being more psychologically complex than it has to be. It contains fights and shootouts and big chase scenes, but they're all firmly centered on who the characters are and what they mean to one another.

Romero finds still new and entertaining ways for unspeakably disgusting things to happen to the zombies and their victims.

Chabrol as always shows a tenderness toward the lives of people who are exceptional only because crime touches them.

It is a first film by a young British director who exhibits in every scene a complete mastery of the kind of characterization he is attempting. This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and that is a statement I doubt I will ever have cause to revise.

The situations are more or less standard (fights over sleeping arrangements, emergencies that have to be solved, moments of truth and confession), but the dialogue and the acting bring the material up to another level.

Backstage at the Muppet works, we see countless drawers filled with eyeballs, eyebrows, whiskers and wigs. It's the only world Kevin wanted to live in, and he made it.

Director Silver delivers a visually arresting melodrama with some stunning dramatic turns, and Lindsay Burdge is nothing sort of sensational as the sad and lost and potentially dangerous Gina.

There is a whole genre of films about childhood friends still living in the old neighborhood and going down the drain of crime and drugs. Few of them capture the fatigue and depression, and the futility, as well as this one, in which the characters hold on to their self-respect by obeying the very rules that are grinding them down.

It’s a Hollywood story of a spectacular rise to the top that was quite apparently a real-life horror story all along.

The film works as well as it does due to the genius of Benedict Cumberbatch and the way he has inhabited Alan Turing’s persona.

A love story about two strong-willed people who find exhilaration in testing each other. It is not about sexual love, or even romantic love, really, but about that kind of love based on challenge and fascination.

In an uncanny way the movie works as a gangster movie and we remember that the old Bogart and Cagney classics had a childlike innocence, too. The world was simpler then. Now it's so complicated maybe only a kid can still understand the Bogart role.

This Is Elvis is the extraordinary record of a man who simultaneously became a great star and was destroyed by alcohol and drug addiction. What is most striking about its documentary footage is that we can almost always see both things happening at once.

While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights.

Like most British family films, Water Horse doesn't dumb down its young characters or insult the intelligence of the audience. It has a lot of sly humor about what we know, or have heard, about the Loch Ness monster.

Gets off to a start that's so charming it never lives it down. The movie is all anticlimax once we realize it's going to be about gimmicks, not characters.

Movies like Wonderland invite me into the screen with them. I am curious. I begin to care.

David Gordon Green's second film, is too subtle and perceptive, and knows too much about human nature, to treat their lack of sexual synchronicity as if it supplies a plot.

An intelligent, upbeat, happy movie.

I praised "Lovely & Amazing," which also features a romance between an adult woman and a teenage boy. But "Lovely & Amazing" is about events that happen in a plausible world (the adult is actually arrested). Tadpole wants only to be a low-rent "Graduate" clone.

Bahrani, as director, not only stays out of the way of the simplicity of his story, but relies on it; less is more, and with restraint he finds a grimy eloquence.

If what you’re after is insane, mind-bogglingly violent martial arts action, “The Raid 2” is quite possibly the ultimate.

Shang-Chi gets a little bogged down in the grand finale, which features an overlong and typical MCU battle featuring all manner of otherworldly creatures and bombastic special effects — but the journey to that final destination is fantastic.

Director Enrico Casarosa is making his feature-length debut here, and he and the vast Pixar animation army have delivered a gorgeous and lovely coming-of-age fantasy with plenty of slapstick laughs, the obligatory heartwarming family moments and a friendship for the ages.

With Midthunderr’s blazing screen presence in “Prey”—moving with athletic grace through the wild, delivering her lines with power and wit and style, there’s little doubt we are witnessing the ascension of a true star.

Directed with just the right amount of stylistic flair (including terrific and helpful graphics) by the talented Muta’Ali, “MoviePass, MovieCrash” is a worthy companion to documentaries such as “Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga,” “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,“ and the Fyre Festival documentaries.

Working from a clever if sometimes ridiculously over-the-top script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, the British director Mark Mylod (“Game of Thrones,” “Succession”) teams with a well-cast ensemble to deliver a deadpan spoof of “Cabin in the Woods” type horror films, draped in a “White Lotus” setting.

A movie so strange that it escapes entirely from the family genre and moves into fantasy. Like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," it has fearsome depths and secrets.

Has no ragged edges or bothersome detours, and flows from surprise to delight. At the end, when just desserts are handed out, it arrives at a kind of perfection.

Simple enough to delight a child and complex enough to baffle a philosopher.

Petzold, who also wrote the script, doesn't make level one thrillers, and his characters may be smarter than us, or dumber. It's never just about the plot, anyway. It has to do with random accidents, dangerous coincidences, miscalculations, simple mistakes. And the motives are never simple.

Astin's performance is so self-effacing, so focused and low-key, that we lose sight of the underdog formula and begin to focus on this dogged kid who won't quit. And the last big scene is an emotional powerhouse, just the way it's supposed to be.

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

Here is a satire both savage and elegant, a dagger instead of a shotgun.

For the first 45 minutes or so of this well-filmed and creatively staged production, “The Heretic” flashes the potential to be one of the most memorably insane horror films of the year; unfortunately, it all comes crashing down via some increasingly outrageous, credibility-smashing twists and turns, and a disappointing reliance on well-worn horror movie tropes in the stretch run.

Romero loses momentum in the closing passages because he has too many loose ends to keep track of. Somewhere within this movie’s two hours or so is hidden an absolutely spellbinding 90-minute thriller.

One of the best qualities of Map of the Human Heart was that I never quite knew where it was going. It is a love story, a war story, a lifetime story, but it manages to traverse all of that familiar terrain without doing the anticipated.

We’re left with the feeling that while Rock Hudson enjoyed an often-spectacular career and a rich and full and glamorous life, the real Roy Fitzgerald was never able to truly emerge from the shadows. The world wouldn’t allow it.

Jennifer Aniston has at last decisively broken with her "Friends" image in an independent film of satiric fire and emotional turmoil. It will no longer be possible to consider her in the same way.

The movie has many scenes of delicious comedy, Clooney and Zeta-Jones play their characters perfectly in an imperfect screenplay.

We find we cannot take anything for face value in this story, that the motives of this woman and her husband are so deeply masked that even at the end of the film we are still uncertain about exactly what to believe, and why.

When it's all over, you'll probably have the fondest memories of Robert Downey Jr.'s work. It's been a good year for him, this one coming after "Iron Man." He's back, big time.