Ferrara is a master at luring the viewer into his sinister underworld, where survival of the fittest is the only rule. It's refreshing to find an auteur whose storytelling isn't enslaved by plot conventions. Putting substance second to style isn't always a sin, and King of New York has a style that's a joy to behold through many viewings. [8 Aug 1993, p.5]

The film's appeal is in the details. This is one of [Merchant-Ivory's] best films.

Mean Girls dissects high school society with a lot of observant detail, which seems surprisingly well-informed. The screenplay by "Saturday Night Live's" Tina Fey is both a comic and a sociological achievement.

What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingenue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother.

A real movie, rich and atmospheric, savoring its disreputable characters and their human weaknesses.

The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess.

And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease.

Sidewalk Stories weaves a spell as powerful as it is entertaining.

The movie plays out like a thrift-store version of Adam McKay’s “The Big Short,” in that it takes us through the looking glass into a world so complex and nebulous, even the major players sometimes seem utterly befuddled — but does so as if we’re taking a thrill ride in a Financial Theme Park.

The Good Dinosaur is wildly uneven, but you have to give it points for trying to be something different.

Did this movie have to be so lockstep, so trapped by its mechanical plot, so limited by a murder mystery? What the movie has to say is so pale and limited that, ironically, the most interesting character in the movie is the victim.

Williams delivers another in a series of great performances in a supporting role, but the weight of the film rests on the shoulders of John Boyega, who alternates between moments of heartbreakingly quiet introspection, and startling fits of anger and rage as Brian Brown-Easley, who in January of 2017 walked into a Wells Fargo Bank in Marietta, Georgia, withdrew $25 from his sparse bank account and then handed the teller a note saying, “I have a bomb.”

Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose, one of the best biopics I've seen, tells Piaf's life story through the extraordinary performance of Marion Cotillard, who looks like the singer.

Even though “Smaug” moves at a faster pace than the first part of the journey, it feels overlong. I still feel this whole Hobbit tale could have been told in one great, three-hour movie.

What's impressive is how well this film joins its parts into a whole.

For most of the ride, Mid90s feels like an accurate time capsule — and a relatable journey even if you’ve never been on a skateboard in your life.

Swimming With Sharks was written and directed by George Huang, who was himself a personal assistant in Hollywood, and whose networking must have paid off, since he got a movie out of it. His plot may be overwritten and the ending may be less than satisfying, but his eye and ear are right.

This is a more thoughtful film, and its action scenes are easier to follow in space and time. If we didn't really need to be told Spidey's origin story again, at least it's done with more detail and provides better reasons for why Peter Parker throws himself into his superhero role.

It takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. Tragedy requires the fall of a hero, and one of the achievements of Nixon is to show that greatness was within his reach.

You're looking for depth and profundity, this is the wrong movie. But under the direction of David Koepp ("Secret Window," the screenplays for "Mission: Impossible" and "Spider-Man"), this is an expert and spellbinding adventure.

Director Jim Mickle, who co-wrote the film with his star Nick Damici, has crafted a good-looking, well-played and atmospheric apocalyptic vision.

Tommaso has an appealing, casually messy, docu-style approach, as if we’re eavesdropping on these lives.

This good movie is buried beneath millions of dollars that were spent on "production values" that wreck the show.

You won’t find much subtlety in the solid period-piece drama Marshall, but you will find plenty of crowd-pleasing courtroom theatrics, some wonderful performances from the main players — and yes, all sorts of reminders of how far we’ve come in terms of race relations since the early 1940s, and how very, very far we still have to go.

Disappointing then, that the movie introduces such an extraordinary living being and focuses mostly on those around her. All the same, it’s well done, and intriguing.

Ron Howard’s claustrophobically intense and captivating “Thirteen Lives” is one of those movies where you find yourself marveling at the daunting logistics involved in re-creating one of the most famed and complex rescue efforts in recent history—but with an excessive running time of 147 minutes, by the time the story wraps up, we’re almost too exhausted to fully appreciate what we’ve just experienced.

Made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it.

There is a kind of music to their conversations, now a lullaby, now a march, now a requiem, now hip-hop, and they play with one another like members of an orchestra. The movie's so good to listen to, it would even work as an audio book.