Tom has enlisted our identification and sympathy, but he seems hopelessly isolated within his own bubble of despair. How much that happens is in his mind?

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.

A movie with the nerve to end with melodramatic sentiment--and get away with it, because it means it. Expect lots of damp eyes in the audience.

John Trank's Chronicle grows into an uncommonly entertaining movie that involves elements of a superhero origin story, a science-fic­tion fantasy and a drama about a disturbed teenager.

This is a grand, confident entertainment, sure of the power of Adjani, Depardieu and the others, and sure of itself.

This moving, Oscar-nominated documentary is an odyssey of a tragic observer.

Mass feels like a staged play brought to the cinema, with unobtrusive camerawork that gives us the feeling of eavesdropping on this intense and emotional and hopefully cathartic gathering.

Perhaps some viewpoints WILL be changed by watching this documentary, which carries no distinct political slant and employs an old-fashioned “fly on the wall” technique, thus allowing the footage and the comments from participants on both sides to speak for itself.

The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment.

Cahill has not only made a thoughtful and compelling movie about science, but he’s also given us an intriguing story that delves into the age-old debate of faith vs. hard proof involving the possibility of a higher spiritual power.

Simply amazing.

The inspirational speech that Pa (Fess Parker) gives his son (Tommy Kirk) may seem sentimental because of its aw-shucks delivery, but there's nothing phony about its lesson: "Now and then, for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul off and knock him flat. … But it's not all like that. A lot of it's mighty fine." This is the type of straight talk that is missing from movies aimed at kids today. [24 May 2002, p.13]

Clint Eastwood's Firefox is a slick, muscular thriller that combines espionage with science fiction. The movie works like a well-crafted machine, and it's about a well-crafted machine.

Pearl isn’t really about the jump scares and tropes we see in so many horror films. It’s more of a case study of a disturbed mind going completely off the rails, filled with ghastly images (you can imagine what happens to a roast pig left on the porch for days) and exquisitely constructed tension-build moments.

Relic is the feel-dread movie of the year.

Giamatti's performance is one of those achievements. He is making a career of playing unremarkable but memorable men.

There’s a lot to admire in Cold in July, but its chief virtue is unpredictability. Most movies these days sleepwalk through their formulaic paces, but you’ll never guess where this one is going based on the way it begins.

Director John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” the “Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies) expertly juggles the various subplots while never losing his main focus, which is to showcase Jessica Chastain’s nearly infinite palette of acting shades.

Despite our narrow angle on Nepal, Manakamana peers into lives at close range.

Mississippi Grind is the cinematic equivalent of the unassuming, quiet player at the poker table who allows you to believe you have him pegged — and that’s when he springs the trap on you and shows you something you never saw coming.

The Equalizer features some gruesomely creative violence, but it’s equally memorable for the small, gritty moments set in that diner, or on the rough-and-tumble streets of Boston. And most of all, it’s got Denzel going for it.

An enormously entertaining movie, like nothing we've ever seen before, and yet completely familiar.

What an anguished story it tells, of a marriage from hell.

Lee uses visual imagination to lift his material into the realms of hopes and dreams.

The film is founded on three performances by Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts. All have rarely been better.

It has been a good long while since I have felt the presence of Evil so manifestly demonstrated as in the first appearance of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.

This is no ordinary musical. Part of its success comes because it doesn't fall for the old cliché that musicals have to make you happy. Instead of cheapening the movie version by lightening its load of despair, director Bob Fosse has gone right to the bleak heart of the material and stayed there well enough to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Unlike most remakes, the Nolan "Insomnia" is not a pale retread, but a re-examination of the material, like a new production of a good play.