Bujalski’s script is smarter and much weirder (in a good way) than the standard romantic comedy. His characters are funny without ever trying to be funny.

Instead of staying on that safe, predictable level, it begins to dig into the awkwardness and hypocrisy of our commonly shared, attitudes about race.

The movie wants to be a laffaminit extravaganza like the Zucker & Abrahams productions, but with slyer humor, more inside jokes, throwaway references and just plain goofiness, as when the characters occasionally break into their own language.

The Serpent and the Rainbow is uncanny in the way it takes the most lurid images and makes them plausible.

Monsters, Inc. is cheerful, high-energy fun, and like the other Pixar movies, has a running supply of gags and references aimed at grownups.

In its own way and up to a certain point, 1492 is a satisfactory film. Depardieu lends it gravity, the supporting performances are convincing, the locations are realistic, and we are inspired to reflect that it did indeed take a certain nerve to sail off into nowhere just because an orange was round.

At what point did I realize The Ambassador was an actual documentary, and not a fraud? Perhaps when I realized that everyone in the film was just as dishonest, venal and corrupt as they seemed - including the director.

As for Madchen Amick, a stunning beauty with an edgy intelligence, Kazan has given her a role that grows more interesting as it deepens.

Would it be heresy on my part to suggest that Fiddler isn't much as a musical, and that director Norman Jewison has made as good a film as can be made from a story that is quite simply boring?

This is a deceptive film. It starts in one direction and discovers a better one. Cheshire is a dry, almost dispassionate narrator, and that is good; preaching about his discoveries would sound wrong.

An eccentric period melodrama with horror-flick overtones. Occasionally incoherent but never dull, the movie brims with weird imagery.

The film is a visual pleasure, using elegant techniques that don't call flashy attention to themselves. The camera is intended to be as omniscient as the narrator, and can occupy the film's space as it pleases and move as it desires. Here is a young man's film made with a lifetime of experience.

Yes. The movie works, and so we accept everything.

Clocking in a relatively breezy 125 minutes and featuring a dazzling array of VFX and CGI, “Quantumania” manages to tell an intimate family story against an enormously expansive yet subatomic background.

Bitter Moon is wretched excess. But Polanski directs it without compromise or apology, and it's a funny thing how critics may condescend to it, but while they're watching it you could hear a pin drop.

The film only wants to amuse. It's a reminder that Dogma films need not involve pathetic characters tormented by the misuse of their genitalia, but can simply want to have a little fun.

Writer-director Paul Solet serves up some intricately choreographed and creative action sequences and some gruesomely realistic violence.... Mostly, though, Bullet Head is about the characters and the crackling dialogue, and the first-rate actors giving just the right spin to their lines.

Thanks to the subtle brilliance of Reilly and Coogan, even someone who’s never heard of Laurel and Hardy would likely see how magical these two were together.

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.

I won’t divulge any more so you can experience the cool madness of The 11th Green for yourself. Suffice to say it’s out of this world.

Cut Throat City ends on a note that’s too clever by half, but that doesn’t undercut all the vibrant, rough-edged, impressive storytelling that led to that moment.

More than most films, it depends on the strength of its performances for its effect - and especially on Penn's performance. If he is not able to convince us of his power, his rage and his contempt for the life of the girl, the movie would not work. He does, in a performance of overwhelming, brutal power.

A raw, wounding, powerfully acted film, and you cannot look away from it.

Parker succeeds in making the prison into a full, real, rounded world, a microcosm of human behavior; I was reminded of e.e. cummings' novel The Enormous Room. The movie's art direction is especially good at recreating that world, as in a scene where Hayes and his friends try to escape down an old cistern. And there are visions into the inferno, as in a scene in the madhouse where the inmates circle forever around a stone pillar. The movie creates spellbinding terror, all right; my only objection is that it's so eager to have us sympathize with Billy Hayes.

This is a good film, involving and wonderfully acted. I was drawn into the characters and quite moved, even though all the while I was aware it was a feel-good fable, a story that deals with pain but doesn't care to be that painful.

I’m not buying every chapter of this Marriage Story, but there’s enough material here to warrant a look.

A valuable and unique rewind glimpse of what it was like to be a teenage celebrity in the pre-Instagram era.

Director Burr Steers...does a nifty job of rocketing from period-piece romance to gory bloodshed, with sprinkles of dark humor here and there.