The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. This is very skillful filmmaking, and Mad Max 2 is a movie like no other.

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

Thanks in large part to the winning chemistry between Ali and Mortensen, and a pretty darn inspirational true-life story as its foundation, this was one of the best times I’ve had at the movies this year.

But what's most visible in the movie is the engaging acting. Murphy and Aykroyd are perfect foils for each other.

One hell of a thriller. It's not often that I feel true suspense and dread building within me, but they were building during long stretches of this expertly constructed film.

The film proceeds like a black comedy version of "The Godfather," crossed with Oliver Stone’s "Nixon."

Madness abounds in The Accountant, an intense, intricate, darkly amusing and action-infused thriller that doesn’t always add up but who cares, it’s BIG FUN.

Rod Lurie has made a first-rate film of psychological warfare, and yes, I thought it was better than Peckinpah's. Marsden, Bosworth and Skarsgard are all persuasive, and although James Woods has played a lot of evil men during his career, this one may be the scariest.

The mission of Eating Animals isn’t to get you to swear off meat (though I’m sure the filmmaker and the narrator would applaud that). It’s to raise your consciousness about the good, the bad and the ugly of animal agriculture.

The result is a superior police procedural, and something more -- a study in devious human nature.

This movie is remarkable in that it seems to be interested only in facts.

In going revoltingly over the top, Belvaux and company are out to shake up people's cozy, passive, detached relationship with violence - on and off the screen. By indulging in sensational footage, the real-life filmmakers can't help being part of the problem themselves - particularly since they wouldn't know a consistent viewpoint if it bit them. [14 May 1993, p.38]

Guncrazy is a consistently sharp and observant retooling of Joseph H. Lewis' 1949 B classic, Gun Crazy. Davis has a gift for breathing quirky new life into an old genre and not overstating her American themes. She also makes wonderful use of her settings and gets first-rate performances from her cast. [12 Feb 1993, p.39]

The plot is as good as crime procedurals get, but the movie is really better than its plot because of the three-dimensional characters.

A well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it's all too believable.

More than anything else, I responded to the performances. Feature films may be fiction, but they are certainly documentaries showing actors in front of a camera. Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have been risk takers, as anyone working with von Trier must be. The ways they're called upon to act in this film are extraordinary. They respond without hesitation. More important, they convince.

It's nimble, bright and funny. It doesn't dumb down. It doesn't patronize. It knows something about human nature.

It's not the kind of movie that depends on the certainty of an ending. It's more about how things continue.

The cast is uniformly superb. But it is the palpable erotic tension between Solness and the mysterious, bewitchingly nubile Hilde (who he may have sexually abused or at least titillated a decade earlier) that drives the film.

The entire film, in fact, seems much more real than the usual action-crime-chase concoctions we've grown tired of. Here is a movie with respect for writing, acting and craft. It has respect for knowledgable moviegoers.

Gaffigan’s a regular guy holding up a mirror to our everyday world, and turning those reflections into laughs and bigger laughs — and sometimes best of all, smiles of recognition.

A demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze style, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance that's defiantly uncouth.

As you’d expect, Ridley Scott’s sweeping, decades-spanning and magnificently filmed epic Napoleon is a stylized and violent interpretation of the life and times of one of the most famous and infamous military commanders and political leaders history has ever known — but it’s also a surprisingly funny indictment of a sniveling brute of a man who is utterly unaware of his shortcomings, so to speak.

An important film as well as an entertaining one.

Emily is played by Maggie Cheung with such intense desperation that she won the best actress award at Cannes 2004.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is the kind of movie that raises as many questions as it answers. It’s also the kind of film where you want to budget some time for discussion afterward. You won’t be able to shake this one off easily.

Thanks to the stylish direction by Paul Feig, a whip-smart screenplay by Jessica Sharzer (adapting Darcey Bells’ novel) and performances that pop from the screen, A Simple Favor is a sharp-edged delight.

I got a little lost while watching Mysteries of Lisbon and enjoyed the experience. It's a lavish, elegant, operatic, preposterous 19th century melodrama, with characters who change names and seemingly identities, and if you could pass a quiz on its stories within stories, you have my admiration.