Not only is the wide screen black-and-white "Angels" Sirk's best movie -- dramatically richer than his more popular '50s romantic melodramas, but just as visually beautiful -- it is the only film from a Faulkner story that the novelist himself liked and praised. [05 Jun 1997, p.8]

The problem with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is this: The closer the many-hands screenplay gets to the Christ-like sufferings and resurrection of Lord Aslan, the lion (voiced by Liam Neeson), the more conflicted the filmmakers' efforts become.

An impressive, often enraging feature-length debut from director Robert May, deals carefully and well with the so-called kids for cash scandal.

A vital and wily seriocomic odyssey. And Gere has never been better, more alive, on screen.

Having carefully and sensitively drawn an interesting character and put him in an interesting place, the filmmakers start painting with their fingers and ultimately provide a very familiar picture.

Tells an inspiring story, unknown or forgotten by many, while bringing the past to life and illuminating issues that persist today.

Mamet's movie has its moments of wit and warmth, but here he's mostly behind, not ahead of, the curve.

Mainly it's about fast and brittle talk, a lot of it peachy. The dialogue has one ear on the screwball '30s, the other on the way people actually speak when their minds are racing faster than their lives can carry them.

An exuberant, affectionate documentary.

It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless.

Emily the Criminal delves only so far into character on the page, but working from what writer-director Ford gives her, Plaza creates a woman defined by incremental degrees of economic stress and simmering resolve.

A functioning, funny, weirdly touching fable of artistic angst and aspiration, a meditation on fame and its terrors and the metaphoric usefulness of masks and huge fake heads.

Levinson invests his script with a richness of theme that helps make it a comedy classic.

A spellbinding piece of Japanese anime from one of the form's new masters, director-writer Satoshi Kon.

It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.

Much of the material in “Ennio” will be a revelation to the garden-variety American fan of film music (i.e. me).

With the exception of Amelie's voiceover narration in French, Fear and Trembling is entirely in Japanese. And the Japanese cast is superb.

A satisfying heist movie, animated or live-action, requires more selectivity and less clutter than this one. The movie dashes by door after door, but it lacks the key.

The movie -- simple, pure and powerful -- makes us feel the intensity of both life in transit and life lived, if only for a moment, in another's skin.

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

Jarmusch's whole method consists of reversing expectations. The problem with that method is that you quickly begin to expect the reversals; the unpredictability becomes predictable. Jarmusch is a talented filmmaker, with an original sense of humor and a sharp and distinctive visual style, but he won't be a great filmmaker until he stops approaching his material from the outside.

It takes something like a miracle to unlock the magic in his exquisite aggravations, the essence of the human comedy. This film is indeed something like a miracle.

Like "Control," the recent Anton Corbijn treatment of rock star Ian Curtis' short life, the powerful British drama Boy A announces its gravitas with a look--organically achieved, with cinematography, production design and direction working together--you are meant to notice.

We know where The Order is going; the actors ensure our interest en route.

John Wayne as the gutsiest sarge and top kick on Iwo Jima, in one of his most prototypical war yarns. Vintage Duke. [09 Jul 2000, p.23C]

The third and least of the three great Kelly-Donen MGM musicals--but that's no knock, considering the others were "On the Town" and "Singin' in the Rain." [27 Jan 2006, p.C7]

The acting in Durkin's feature is excellent. Olsen is utilized largely as an object for camera adoration, but not in the usual glamorizing way. Olsen, Hawkes and company play slippery figures with lovely assurance.

The definitive Sunday ride/Sunday race motorcycle film. Released in 1971 by famed surf documentary pioneer Bruce Brown, it showed the broad expanse of the motorcycling experience in the America of that time, from serious racers to enthusiasts such as movie star Steve McQueen. [07 Nov 2014, p.C6]

There's good pulp and bad pulp, and for most of its duration, Joy Ride is quality stuff.

This young writer-director's film seems more real and more moving than many recent political dramas from the Middle East - on either side.

Delivers a surprising, moving portrait of contemporary womanhood.

It’s a modest film, but a very good one, and by the end I was quite moved by its valiant belief in decency and in the duo’s eternal appeal.

Always vivid on screen, that quality also existed in her life and self-expression offscreen.

The movie's benumbed by its own parade of bad behavior. Like some of Scorsese's other second-tier works — "Casino," "Bringing Out the Dead" — the gulf between virtuoso technical facility and impoverished material cannot be bridged. It's diverting, sort of, to see DiCaprio doing lines off a stripper's posterior, but after the 90th time it's like, enough already with heinous capitalistic extremes.

The film's most memorable performance is in another supporting role, by Alan Cumming as hapless Frandsen, Olaf's sympathetic neighbor and a hopelessly inept farmer.

It’s reassuring to see Hopkins return to form, after several years of authoritative coasting. As for Pryce, his affinity for morally comprised men of high achievement (“The Wife,” etc. ) keeps his portrayal of the film’s clear moral paragon from hardening into sainthood.

Like any good work of popular culture, Rob Reiner's film of Stephen King's best-selling book Misery functions on more than one level.

The film offers plenty of good screen company along the way.

Clean is above all a movie about making peace with uncertainty and doubt and living with the aftershocks of the choices we make. Not the easiest task, but it may be what redeems us in the end.

Director Fred Schepisi manages his outdoor and courtroom scenes with equal skill. But at the center is Streep, far less mannered than in some of her recent work. [11 Nov 1988, p.A]

This subtle, beautifully shot film is a gently ironic study of the relationship between a Turkish filmmaker, who has returned to his country home to make an independent movie, and his elderly father, whom he has recruited as an actor. [13 Oct 2000, p.L]

Heaven Knows What, will not appeal to the majority of casual moviegoers. Likewise, I have no doubts regarding the film's remarkable achievement.

Beautifully shot and filled with gorgeous music.

Stumbles a bit towards the end when it focuses too much on a convoluted robbery attempt, but overall, it is a slick and intelligent look at life in the passing lane.

This smart, hardscrabble, very likable film has a heart and spirit all its own: a rollicking, earthy flair and lusty intelligence.

A deliberately old-fashioned picture that succeeds in nearly everything it tries to do.

It's surprising how much of the old mood Leconte manages to recapture, how sumptuous he makes the black-and-white cinematography and timeless Parisian and Mediterranean settings look.

Few Hollywood action pictures are half as exciting or ravishing.

It’s an unnerving portrait in forbidden desire and matched wills, sometimes acting as one barely controlled organism, often at fierce odds.

Nothing in the movie is quite up to Scofield's Danforth. But what a mighty performance that is.

The National Society of Film Critics recently cited Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, the nuttiest lil' picture ever released in 3-D, as the best film of 2014, nosing out "Boyhood" by a single vote.

In his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting.

You can interpret Lost in La Mancha as a sort of triumph of the creative spirit. Gilliam's darkest gallows humor always comes with a smile.

One powerful, mesmerizing thriller, a masterful exercise in controlling an audience's attention. [19 September 1986, Friday, p.A]

It's hard to breathe in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs, a relentlessly taut Hong Kong cop thriller that, unlike many of its cinematic peers, doesn't burn off tension in choreographed action sequences.

As composite sketches go, it's a good one.

Perhaps the most typical of all the "Road" pictures: melodic, low-pressure, funny. [02 Apr 2000, p.C38]

Wiig's natural and savvy instincts to go easy, and let the audience come to her, serve her and Bridesmaids well.

The film itself is such a measured primer of talking heads and footage -- a broad, slick Tibet 101 -- that it seems better suited to the classroom than the big screen, despite its Himalayan scenery and rustic colors.

Even if you don't entirely buy this version of events, director Ralph Fiennes has given us a speculation that works as drama. It's an elegant bit of goods.

At its spiky, intermittent best, Tully is the best work Cody has done in the conventional feature format since “Juno.” And yet I’m all over the place on it.

The movie -- directed in such a frenziedly self-conscious style you often wonder whether the camera will topple over on his actors.

At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.

Darkest Hour pulls from both extremes of Oldman’s prodigious but often unexploited skill set, the subtlety as well as the flamboyance.

True to the egalitarian allure of the restaurant chain itself, Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat is both a touching farewell and a fond hello-again for those old enough to remember the salisbury steak, creamed spinach and peach pie behind those little windows of nickel-fed discovery.

The film's context and talking points are more interesting than the film itself, which settles for an earnest (though rarely dull) nudge in its chosen direction: PowerPoint cinema.

It's a thriller that comes at you with gut-clutching ferocity, spewing blood and sex, shaking you up and scrambling your responses.

Shrek is something of a poignant hero here and not terribly ogre-like; Myers obviously wasn't being paid per giggle generated. Diaz's Fiona feels increasingly fleshed out, while the "annoying talking animals" provide most of the laughs.

A masterpiece of wry violence and stylized mayhem, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi turns loose one of Japan's most brilliant film auteurs, Takeshi Kitano, on one of its most enduring pop legends.

A comedy of evil and strange redemption, Lady Vengeance makes sure that we feel the pain, that we know what it's like to unreasonably suffer, because those are the rules of its mad, wounding, vengeful world.

Through good scenes and derivative ones, Adams is disarming.

So well crafted, so original, that each overlapping scene swells with new life and interpretation.

It's a relief — even though the movie isn't much — to see Danner in a leading role on screen again.

Exciting, beautifully shot '60s political western. [10 Apr 1998, p.M]

The fun of Spy comes in watching the right actors mess with their own images, blithely.

Despite its charms, and the refreshingly non-traditional characters, Lilo & Stitch seems diluted and too derivative to be as effective as one wants it to be.

Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.

The stories we hear in 24 City belong to its specific place, but they are universal.

DePalma`s camera is relatively restrained-for him-and the result is a small movie that looks more like an outdoor stage play than an exercise in freewheeling combat. Penn`s performance has resonances of Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro in their Vietnam films; Fox gains credibility as the movie progresses.

John Wick 2 stages its gun-fu melees sleekly and sometimes well, from the catacombs of Rome to the subway platforms of New York City.

The Witnesses may be schematic, but it lets each character live and breathe. The film captures a time and place that seems very distant now.

Seeing "Dragon" in 3-D really is a must. Its formidable realm of Vikings and dragons and nerds (oh my!) should be enjoyed to the fullest extent theaters allow.

His movie isn't a surgical attack at this problem and that; it's a cluster bomb intended to reap destruction, make a mess and jolt all who see it to react.

I found it coldly gripping, as well as a mite ham-fisted. At its best, this vision of American end times, an election or two from now, sets aside its less persuasive “tell” for more persuasive “show,” without generic spectacle (though with a $50 million production budget, it’s Garland’s and distributor A24’s biggest gamble to date) or diversionary thrills.

With Rooney Mara as the woman in question — a poised, tense Manhattanite prescribed anti-anxiety medication by her psychiatrist with newsworthy results — Side Effects finds its ideal performer.

A film that sweeps us away into a world of spectacle, beauty and excitement, a realm of fantasy unimaginable without the movies.

That’s Blindspotting all over: an exuberant, brightly colored, zigzagging portrait of a city, an uneasy transformation and a friendship.

A delightful concert documentary that proves once more what a neglected masterpiece the Coen Brothers gave us last year in their Depression chain-gang odyssey, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Here is a film of staggering technical and visual virtuosity, filled with utterly amazing images, that's also entertaining and engaging for children and adults on several levels.

Salles' movie isn't fiery or didactic. It doesn't rage or storm. Salles romanticizes the youthful Ernesto.

The new film A Private War ranks higher than most, in the truth department and in cinematic storytelling. Whatever your personal interest or disinterest in Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin’s line of work, the way she did it — and the bloody global conflicts she ran towards, full gallop — makes for a tense, engrossing account.

Unnervingly good, Little Children is one of the rare American films about adultery that feels right--dangerous, hushed, immediate.

A good summer movie, directed with great verve and imagination and filled with innovative, eye-popping effects. Cameron never relinquishes his grip on the audience, smoothly segueing from action sequence to action sequence and topping himself each time. [3 July 1991, Tempo, p.1]

Politics hovers over every moment of Another Road Home, Elon's layered, loving and deeply personal documentary about her quest to find the Palestinian caregiver who raised her.

Even when Shanks hits the primary theme of his movie a little too insistently, the actors are vivid throughout. Brie, especially, is spectacularly effective in every emotional register, in the keys of D (Distress), E (Eh what’s going on with our suction-lips?) and C (Commitment is all).

Ozon’s style as a filmmaker favors smooth technique and easy proficiency, and his resume is full of comedy. That would appear to put him at odds with this material. But his handling of difficult subject matter carries a welcome, borderline-dispassionate restraint and a respect for each character’s value.

There is something inherently dishonest about Dark Days.

Pietro Marcello’s sweeping historical Italian epic Martin Eden is a whole lot of movie. It possesses a weight and heft, both cinematically and philosophically, that make it a rare treat. And at the center of the film is a whole lot of movie star: Luca Marinelli’s performance in the title role is an outstanding star turn for the Italian actor.