Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it.

The strength of Leigh's film is that it is not a message picture, but a deep and true portrait of these lives.

BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee’s most accomplished films in recent memory, and one of the best films of 2018.

This is a brave, unflinching, sometimes virtually unwatchable documentary that makes such an effective case for both pro-choice and pro-life that it is impossible to determine which side the filmmaker, Tony Kaye, stands on. All you can conclude at the end is that both sides have effective advocates, but the pro-lifers also have some alarming people on their team.

Weird. Brilliant. Stunning. Under the Skin is by far the most memorable movie of the first few months of 2014.

In Gabe Polsky’s Red Army, the Iron Curtain surrounding the Soviet dynasty is pulled back to reveal an immensely effective but dehumanizing machine in which hockey served as an important propaganda tool, resulting in some of the most impressive teams ever to take the ice.

This is a love letter to journalistic bravery and to the First Amendment, and it is the best movie about newspapers since “All the President’s Men.”

Is something being hidden? No. It's more that something doesn't want to be known.

The new Japanese film Fireworks is like a Charles Bronson "Death Wish" movie so drained of story, cliche, convention and plot that nothing is left, except pure form and impulse. Not a frame, not a word, is excess.

A harrowing look at institutional cruelty, perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, and justified by a perverted hysteria about sex.

It brings the fantastic into our everyday lives; it delights in showing us the reaction of the man on the street to Superman's latest stunt.

A documentary with no pretense of objectivity. Here is Mike Tyson's story in his own words, and it is surprisingly persuasive.

It's an uneven film, with moments of inspiration in a fairly conventional tale of kidnapping and rescue. This is not one of the great Disney classics - it's not in the same league with Snow White or Pinocchio - but it's passable fun, and will entertain its target family audiences.

What works best in the film is the over-all vision. Branagh is able to see himself as a king, and so we can see him as one.

The style here is so seductive and witty it's hard to pin down. It's like nothing else I've seen by Hill, and at times, it almost reminds me of Jacques Tati crossed with Robert Altman. It's good to get a crime movie more concerned with humor and character than with blood and gore; here's one, as we say, for the whole family.

The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

It's one of the smartest and most merciless comedies to come along in a while. It centers on an area of fairly narrow interest, but in its study of human nature, it is deep and takes no prisoners.

Although The White Diamond is entire of itself, it earns its place among the other treasures and curiosities in Herzog's work. Here is one of the most inquisitive filmmakers alive, a man who will go to incredible lengths to film people living at the extremes.

The documentary shows outrageous behavior, none more so than when they and many others are directed to a nearby Navy base for refuge.

The formula has rarely been mined to such resounding success. This is one of the funniest movies of the year AND one of the most romantic movies as well.

The mood is somber, ominous and increasingly suspenseful throughout (despite an awkwardly handled final showdown), goosed along by an intense John Carpenter-esque electronic music score.

It’s a movie that fleshes out the people who entertain us, not with bemusement like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but with compassion.

Helena Bonham Carter may be Burton's inamorata, but apart from that, she is perfectly cast, not as a vulgar fishwife type but as a petite beauty with dark, sad eyes and a pouting mouth and a persistent fantasy that she and the barber will someday settle by the seaside. Not bloody likely.

Intervista is not a very organized movie, and long stretches seem pointless and uninspired. It would not be of much interest, I imagine, to anyone who was not familiar with Fellini's earlier films.

In writer-director Steven Knight’s mesmerizing jewel of film titled Locke, Tom Hardy is so brilliant we readily watch him drive a car and talk on the hands-free phone for virtually the entirety of the film — and it’s one of the more effortlessly intense and fascinating performances I’ve seen any actor give in recent memory.

Duvall's screenplay does what great screenwriting is supposed to do, and surprises us with additional observations and revelations in every scene.

Alexander Payne is a director whose satire is omnidirectional. He doesn't choose an easy target and march on it. He stands in the middle of his story and attacks on all directions.

A diabolical and absorbing experience.

Thanks to a charismatic, natural performance from star-in-the-making Michael B. Jordan, a script from writer-director Ryan Coogler that expertly navigates paying tribute to the franchise while creating an effective stand-alone film and fine work from Stallone...Creed is a terrific addition to the “Rocky” canon.

The movie is well cast from top to bottom; like many British films, it benefits from the genius of its supporting players.

One of the qualities of Monsieur Lazhar is that it has no simple questions and simple answers. Its purpose is to present us with a situation, explore the people involved and show us a man who is dealing with his own deep hurts.

Cage and Shue make these cliches into unforgettable people.

Diner is often a very funny movie, although I laughed most freely not at the sexual pranks but at the movie's accurate ear, as it reproduced dialogue with great comic accuracy.

Toni Morrison is an absolutely beautiful wordsmith and a beautiful force on multiple fronts, and if this documentary is an unabashed love letter to her life and work, I say: Why. Not.

Watching this movie is like daydreaming.

Has the sort of headlong confidence the genre requires. Russell finds the strong central line all screwball begins with, the seemingly serious mission or quest, and then throws darts at a map of the United States as he creates his characters.

Three varieties of love: unfulfilled, mercenary, meaningless. All photographed with such visual beauty that watching the movie is like holding your breath so the butterfly won’t stir.

With Powell and Arjona sizzling as the most electric romantic pairing of the year so far, “Hit Man” is pure escapist early summer fun.

Ghostlight becomes a love letter to the power of theater, to the power of the timeless written word, to move us, to make us feel, to change us.

The latest and one of the most harrowing films set along the religious divides in Israel.

Is the film watchable? Yes, compulsively.

Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed.

However much it conceals the real-life events that inspired it, it lives and breathes on its own, and as an extension of the mysterious whimsy of Tati.

The film most of all is about Hester, who stares out the window and smokes.

It’s a brilliant slice of life.

This is not a political documentary. It is a crime story. No matter what your politics, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will make you mad.

If the film is perhaps a little slow in its middle passages, maybe that is part of the idea, too, to give us a sense of the leaden passage of time, before the glory of the final redemption.

Like so much of his work, Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us has to be approached with a certain amount of imagination. Some movies are content to offer us escapist experiences and hope we’ll be satisfied. But you can’t sink back and simply absorb an Altman film; he’s as concerned with style as subject, and his preoccupation isn’t with story or character, but with how he’s showing us his tale.

You would imagine a film like this would be greeted with rapture in France, but no. The leading French film magazine, "Cahiers du Cinema," has long scorned the filmmakers of this older generation as makers of mere "quality," and interprets Tavernier's work as an attack on the New Wave generation which replaced them.

The Mexican drug cartels have inspired countless films, but never one as final as Natalia Almada's documentary El Velador.

Serkis is brilliant and memorable and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking as Caesar. The supporting players excel, with each getting a moment or two in the sun.

An astonishing film.

Like "City of God," it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year's best films.

It’s one of the best movies of the year and one of the truest portrayals I’ve ever seen about troubled teens and the people who dedicate their lives to trying to help them.

Ron Howard's Parenthood is a delicate balancing act between comedy and truth, a movie that contains a lot of laughter and yet is more concerned with character than punch lines.

Mr. Henson left behind a body of work that continues to endure today, but a great deal of his legacy remains on Sesame Street, and this film tells us exactly how he and everyone else got there.

Seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity. But think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character.

The best of three Star Wars films, and the most thought-provoking. After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.

Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.

All that beauty, Hitchcock's panache and a certain amount of cleverly suggestive, double entendre-filled banter between Grant and Kelly may be enough to keep To Catch a Thief entertaining for modern viewers, but it clearly falls short of the director's best work.

For about an hour, The Lobster is pure absurdist greatness, brimming with pitch-black shock humor and big, wild ideas. The second half of the film isn’t nearly as imaginative and startling, but I walked out of the screening with the surefire knowledge I wouldn’t soon shake off its most inspired sequences.

What a magical movie.

The director of the film, a veteran stop-action master named Henry Selick, is the person who has made it all work. And his achievement is enormous.

What I saw was a successful attempt by the outsiders to dramatize how success and status in the world often depend on props you can buy, or steal, almost anywhere - assuming you have the style to know how to use them.

Not many movies like this get made, because not many filmmakers are so bold, angry and defiant.

Jacques Perrin's Oscar-nominated Winged Migration does for birds what the 1996 documentary "Microcosmos" did for insects: It looks at them intimately, very close up, in shots that seem impossible to explain.

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid. Whales inspire major novels.

If quirky, independent, grown-up outsider filmmakers set out to make a family movie, this is the kind of movie they would make. And they did.

The movie deals with narrative housekeeping. Perhaps the next one will engage these characters in a more challenging and devious story, one more about testing their personalities than re-establishing them. In the meantime, you want space opera, you got it.

A Quiet Place doesn’t have the pin-you-to-your-seat originality of “Get Out,” or the psychological depth and pure scare impact of “Lights Out” or the wall-to-wall intensity of “Don’t Breathe,” but it is one of the smarter and more involving horror films of the last few years.

It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat.” In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.

Filled with witty dialogue and natural performances, Frances Ha marks a return to form for Baumbach.

While the movie contains delights and inventions without pause and has undeniable charm, while it is always wonderful to watch, while it has the Miyazaki visual wonderment, it's a disappointment, compared to his recent work.

The movie, based on the famous comic novel by Stella Gibbons, is dour, eccentric and very funny, and depends on the British gift for treating madness as good common sense.

Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity.

What a courageous first feature this is, a film that sidesteps shopworn stereotypes and tells a quiet, firm, deeply humanist story about doing the right thing. It is a film that avoids any message or statement and simply shows us, with infinite sympathy, how the life of a completely original character can help us lead our own.

The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man.

With Cillian Murphy’s quiet, almost small and yet grand performance carrying the story every step of the way, “Small Things Like These” is quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.

"How many bands stay together for 30 years?" asks Slash of Guns N' Roses, in a backstage interview. "You've got the Stones, the Who, U2 -- and Anvil." Yeah. And Anvil.

This is a great deal more entertaining than it sounds, in large part because the two actors are gifted mimics - Brydon the better one, although Coogan doesn't think so.

Is Prisoner of Azkaban as good as the first two films? Not quite. It doesn't have that sense of joyously leaping through a clockwork plot, and it needs to explain more than it should. But the world of Harry Potter remains delightful, amusing and sophisticated.

La Promesse was written and directed by the brother duo of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were previously known as documentary makers. They bring an unblinking realism to the story, but aren't limited by documentary-style objectivity. They tap into the interior lives of the characters with tremendous subtlety and originality. [22 Aug. 1997, p.36]

I don't know what vast significance Michael Clayton has (it involves deadly pollution but isn't a message movie). But I know it is just about perfect as an exercise in the genre.

Against the overarching facts of his personal magnetism and the blind loyalty of his lieutenants, the movie observes the workings of the world within the bunker. All power flowed from Hitler. He was evil, mad, ill, but long after Hitler's war was lost he continued to wage it in fantasy.

This is one of those movies where it looks like the immensely appealing cast had as much fun making the film as we have watching it — especially because so many of these familiar faces are playing against type.

Here is the best American movie of the year so far.

One of the treasures of 1930s screwball comedy.

The high-tech stuff is flawlessly done, but the intriguing elements of the movie involve the performances.

Shunning the tons of equipment ordinarily taken along on location, Brown used only what he could carry. The beautiful photography he brought home almost makes you wonder if Hollywood hasn't been trying too hard.

The young actors are powerful in draining roles. We care for them more than they care for themselves. Alfredson's palette is so drained of warm colors that even fresh blood is black.

For me, it is too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup.

Night Moves is one of the best psychological thrillers in a long time.

It's a tribute to The Celebration that the style and the story don't stumble over each other. The script is well planned, the actors are skilled at deploying their emotions, and the long day's journey into night is fraught with wounds that the farcical elements only help to keep open.

Broadway Danny Rose uses all of the basic ingredients of Damon Runyon's Broadway: the pathetic acts looking for a job, the guys who get a break and forget their old friends, the agents with hearts of gold, the beautiful showgirls who fall for Woody Allen types, the dumb gangsters, big shots at the ringside tables (Howard Cosell plays himself). It all works.

This movie does not describe the America I learned about in civics class, or think of when I pledge allegiance to the flag. Yet I know I will get the usual e-mails accusing me of partisanship, bias, only telling one side, etc. What is the other side? See this movie, and you tell me.

This is the kind of movie that baffles Hollywood, because it isn't made from any known formula and doesn't follow the rules.

The sweat-drenched and emotionally bruising “Challengers” from director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) joins the likes of “King Richard,” “Wimbledon,” “Final Set” and “Battle of the Sexes” as one of the best tennis movies ever.

It’s a rustic, poetic, occasionally funny, sometimes heartbreaking and wonderfully strange and memorable character study of a man who is in such tremendous pain he had to retreat from the world.