Howard does a fine, loving job tracing who he was as a gay Jewish boy growing up in Baltimore; as an aspiring playwright and theatrical impresario, schooled at Boston University, Goddard College in Vermont, the summer theater program at Tufts University, and a graduate student at Indiana University; and as a hungry young New York City transplant, eager to make his mark.

Actually, if "Fast 6" shows any new ambitions, it's by enthusiastically embracing its inner-Telemundo, its heated, knotty "Game of Thrones" melodrama.

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]

It’s somewhat challenging and methodical in its pacing, but if you respond to it — as I did — this ghost from Iran’s 1970s New Wave is a reason to give thanks.

The tensions inherent in Honnold’s singular life are many. Free Solo gives you just enough of that life on terra firma to make the heights truly dazzling.

These girls can cook, and Yamashita captures them with an austere, unhurried visual style that has been rightly compared to rock aficionado/filmmakers Aki Kaurismaki ("Ariel") and Jim Jarmusch ("Mystery Train"). [8 Dec 2006, p.2]

Thanks to Echer, Nettelbeck and this delicious movie, I was able to hear "Country" and the other Jarrett tunes in scene after scene - heightening moods, lyricizing action and making Hamburg seem like a wintry love song. Predictable or not, that's often as good as it gets.

The performances are all superb, but special mention should go to Melanie Lynskey, a first-time film actress, who brings a frightening calm to the role of Pauline, and Sarah Peirse as Pauline's mother, whose main fault seems to be exhibiting too much care and concern for her strong-willed and imaginative daughter. [25 Nov 1994, p.M2]

One of those sweet, intelligent, nicely made films.

So well cast and well captured is Touching the Void that it suspends disbelief, making us feel as if we're actually watching Simpson's own icy version of Dante's "Inferno."

A harsh, spellbinding tale.

A movie likely to rally huge audiences who want to take another roller coaster ride. And though it may disappoint a few of them, it's also a film that gives you something to think and feel sad about. It smashes you -- gently.

Some of the Indian imagery in the film is arch, but the story, the acting and the tension level are of the highest order. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

The film is really just a documentary about nomads masquerading as a feature about camels. Which is why it's okay to be distracted by the details, and perhaps why its subtext--about the younger generation's real and inevitable loss to modernity--is more effective than the storyline about the camel.

The best teenage comedy since last year's "Risky Business."

Ethics aside, the filmmaking by DePalma is stylish and alternates between shocking surprise and hold-your-breath quiet.

An extraordinarily truthful and piercing drama.

Robust, delicate, sublimely acted and a close cinematic cousin to the theatrical original, director Denzel Washington's film version of Fences makes up for a lot of overeager or undercooked stage-to-screen adaptations over the decades.

Possibly one of the biggest reasons Frozen River stands out among bad-decision movies is that Ray never really tries to justify her actions.

It’s a beautiful film to soak up as a visual and musical memory of a place that remains, and a time long gone.

The film works, whatever your ethical stance on Snowden, because it's more procedural than polemic.

Gordy barely is mentioned, even though he was the artistic leader who presumably profited most from the Funk Brothers' labors. Discussing Motown solely through the prism of the musicians is like assessing Picasso's works on the basis of the paint quality.

Trainwreck is all kinds of funny, and like any talent showcase worth its salt, the tone of the humor adjusts to suit the talents on screen.

Minor but irresistible MGM musical capturing '20s college life through the prism of the jivin' '40s era. [18 Jan 2008, p.C2]

One of the year's most thought-provoking, hard-hitting films, gutsily opening up a subject rarely done with this kind of all-out chutzpah.

Regardless of your interest in the technical side of filmmaking, however, if your taste runs slightly to the dark side, you'll have a very good time with "Trouble in Mind." [21 March 1986, p.AN]

The movie is zippy, laugh-out-loud funny, persuasive and at times horrifying, as Spurlock undergoes his unpleasant changes with good humor and bad tummy aches.

It's virtually non-stop action, though director David Yates, who has taken good care of these final four, ever-meaner Potter adventures, does a very crafty thing, following adapter Steve Kloves' screenplay.

Lightyear’s dazzling first half showcases the wittiest comic action from the Pixar folks in many years.

The Wild Pear Tree may be the one film out there with the uncanny, gorgeously ruminative ability to take you away from everything cluttering a Chicagoan’s head space right now.

An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.

Finally, a teen sex comedy that's funnier than both its trailer and its outtakes. More important, Eurotrip -- with its laser-guided sex toys and infectious theme song, "Scotty Doesn't Know" -- just might be the best comedy so far this year.

Led by Wilson and Cotillard, the ensemble makes the most of the material that works, and makes the best of the rest of it.

Amazingly cynical and howlingly funny. [13 Jan 1994, p.10]

The wild L.A. romance of a museum curator and a parking lot attendant. [09 Jan 1998, p.C]

It's a lovely, terrifying sight.

A Thousand and One, this year’s top jury prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival, puts you through it, but with real feeling, real stakes and an authentic vision guided by a fiercely commanding performance by Teyana Taylor as Inez.

The Harder They Fall was Bogart's final movie, and something of a lost classic. But unlike most boxing stories, this isn't about a fighter looking to overcome personal demons or beat the odds. This is an excoriating look at the underbelly and the unscrupulous wheelers and dealers behind the scenes. [19 Aug 2016, p.C3]

It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense.

A superb entertainment, it also has something to say.

Sissako has an unusual camera eye, patient and alert to the ebb and flow of both the courtroom sequences and the outside scenes. The music is wonderful as well.

Jim Walton, Ann Morrison and other original cast members talk about what the show meant to them, and how it felt (in a word: lousy) to have their dreams crash into a brick wall of harsh reviews.

Until it develops a bad case of verbosity toward the end, it improves upon its predecessor in almost every way, delivering flashier thrills while digging deeper into its characters and adding an overlay of wit.

It's a great film that, sadly, may be ignored by all but the most dedicated, knowledgable filmgoers.

Thompson clearly loves this story, and, even though, she's playing the less spontaneous of the older Dashwood sisters, responsible Elinor, you can feel her spirit rising out to embrace the part. It makes her beautiful to watch. [13 December 1995]

Isn't merely joke-funny. It's texture-funny.

Blithely sophisticated, would-be French naughtiness, sleek as a bolt of silk. [08 Jan 2004, p.N1]

A languorous, catlike psychological puzzle from one of the essential international masters, Lee Chang-dong.

The movie is awash in great performances by actors known and otherwise.

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [18 Apr 1999, p.34C]

Where the previous sequels have been mostly dour gun blasts, The Dead Pool is a thriller with wit and humor and tension. [15 Jul 1988, p.A]

Quite similar to the first film, but this is one time when a reprise is welcome. Ages 7-11, but actually, it's for everyone. [27 Oct 2006, p.C5]

A gripping documentary.

Much of Melancholia plays, effectively, like a slice of late 20th century Dogme-style realism, in the vein of the film "Celebration" by von Trier's fellow Dane, Thomas Vinterberg.

A lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.

Like "Lincoln," written by Tony Kushner and directed by Steven Spielberg, DuVernay's Selma ushers us into the world of the backstage, back-room and back-scratching political process, dramatizing how the sausage was actually made.

It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.

In what is essentially a three-human story (they’re outnumbered by their animal co-stars), Rapace brings the heart and soul to every close-up.

Tommy Lee Jones is marvelous in the film. He has one scene in particular, a simple two-person encounter, that's as good as it gets in the realm of American screen acting.

Hampton and Wright have been more than sensible when it comes to Atonement. They’ve responded intuitively to a tale that is half art and half potboiler, like so many stories worth telling.

Pulls you into a well-observed world and its characters.

One of the most clever, most enjoyable historical fantasies to hit screens in a long time, The Emperor's New Clothes is a sumptuous showcase for Ian Holm, who delivers not one but two great performances.

Outrageous-plus, but often hilarious.

It places a modern lens on complicated questions of art, love and perspective in storytelling, in an entertaining and intelligent thriller of intimate proportions.

The new Lassie is faithful to Knight's story, capturing its sweep, Dickensian social contrasts and high emotion. All that is enhanced by a splendid cast.

Turning Red is pure Pixar in its imaginative clash of genres and impulses. Yet it’s something new, too, its own cultural- and gender-specific creation. I’m eager to see what Shi does next, metaphorically and every other way.

Raimi knows how to modulate his technique, as with the coolly controlled morality tale "A Simple Plan," but he's a firm believer in the power of an active, expressive camera, as well as the value of insinuation.

A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive.

As Assayas himself has pointed out, the passing years have magically transformed a movie made in 1994 into a seeming product of post-1968 cultural turbulence and unresolved matters of the heart. It feels honest, in other words.

The tone and feel of Wild Reeds keeps shifting between irony and sentimentality, violence and tenderness, rebellion and acceptance. And those oscillations fit the volatile nature of its subject: young love and friendship. Together with his attractive and excellent cast, Techine recalls and invokes the mood swings of youth, the intensity and bursts of near-delirious passion.

Stuart Heisler's fascinating (but not biographical) backstage Hollywood drama about a fading Oscar-winning actress, co-starring Sterling Hayden and Natalie Wood. [19 Jul 2005, p.C3]

A surprisingly emotional, simplified version of the Victor Hugo novel.

The moral conundrums aren’t particularly thorny, since Balram’s revenge is well-earned. Yet Bahrani works so well with the individual actors, they seem like people, not archetypes or stereotypes.

James Cagney, wielding gats and grapefruit, became a star playing the murderous young Irish-American hood Tom Powers, a character modeled on Capone rival Dion O'Banion, in this classic, grim, unusually violent gangster film. [26 Jun 2009, p.C5]

It's based on a novel by a real chain-gang inmate, but the movie itself often seems slick and arch, like a conformist's yearning tribute to non-conformity. Yet the cast is superb: Paul Newman as the rebellious Luke, George Kennedy as his brutish sidekick, Strother Martin as a jailer ("failure to communicate") and about a dozen supporting actors who became widely familiar faces over the next decade. [16 Jan 2009, p.C6]

Though The burbs is hardly an actor's film, Hanks continues to demonstrate the ease and maturity that has been his since Big, while Dern, Ducommun and Feldman lend broad but effective support.

A virtuoso piece of dark storytelling.

Mafioso is shaped like a comedy, and it is one, but its intentionally jarring clashes of tone and rhythm are truly out there.

The payoffs here begin and end with Oduye, and as we see this character confront her obstacles with bravery, grace and resolve, "Pariah" exhibits many of the same traits, for which filmgoers can be thankful.

Twilight is a great samurai film in the way that "Unforgiven," "The Gunfighter" or "Will Penny"--all muted, somber films about aging gunfighters--are great westerns.

Varda's touching day-in-the-life of a Parisian pop star. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

With his usual consummate visual skills and his flair for the nauseatingly audacious, David Cronenberg’s written (spottily) and directed (stunningly) a movie that often makes you feel as if you'd lost contact with reality: a twisted, nightmarish tale of futuristic reality games and a couple on the run. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.D]

Yet the film, no more than the novel, shouldn't be described as depressing. Both of them shine with heightened vision and poetics. [01 Nov 1996]

Documentary filmmakers can make any number of rookie mistakes with their first features. Casting too wide a net is one of the most common. "La Camioneta" avoids that pothole, beautifully.

Censor is a bold artistic statement, inspired by the history of its own genre, though it’s not an uncritical assertion, posing complicated questions about media effects without offering easy answers.

I hoped for a movie relatively free of Hollywood hogwash and melodramatics, and got it. What I didn’t expect was the calm brilliance of scenes such as Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, playing two of Weinstein’s 1990s targets, telling their stories so truthfully, with such economical emotional punch, that it’s both heartbreaking and enough to make you seethe.

It's a strong reminder of the times, then and now.

The result is an act of partial, tenderly observed guerrilla filmmaking. It works; it takes you somewhere, quietly but evocatively, and it’s affecting without pulling at your heartstrings with both hands.

Star Wars is not a great movie in the sense that it describes the human condition. It simply is a fun picture that will appeal to those who enjoy Buck Rogers-style adventures. What places it a sizable cut about the routine is its spectacular visual effects, the best since Stanley Kubrick's "2001." [27 May 1977]

Quiz Show becomes not just a nostalgic tale of a Camelot warrior and two Faustian eggheads, or a flashy social message drama like the "Golden Age" TV plays of that same era, but a scary precursor of our own time, when the power of TV-and its influence over national and personal life-has grown. [16 Sept 1994, p.C]

Fletch is more than funny; it's funny and exciting.[31 May 1985, p.A]

As entertainment, Nicotina manages a bracing balance. It arrests with violent bursts and anxious pauses until its three plots merge in a satisfying resolution; its laughs caught in my throat like smoker's cough.

So much of Pamela, a love story is about a woman searching for love from men who saw her as a person to be obtained — and then controlled. The best love story might just be the one she develops with herself.

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

A very fine and strongly acted, if somewhat stagebound, adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's great, moving African-American family drama. [06 Apr 2007, p.C8]

It’s not straight-up realism; nor is it the usual moralizing, candy-coated melodrama. It’s just very, very good, and the scenes between Tenille and Perrier are very, very easily among the plaintive screen highlights of this new year.

The most assured and satisfying of the five so far.