It may not be a transcendent masterpiece of the Disney canon, but The Little Mermaid is still very heartening: It suggests the Disney magic isn't lost after all.

A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit.

The movie's excellence, a stylistic world apart from the strikingly photographed but rather hysterical 1967 film version of Capote's masterwork, is in capturing its subject without pinning him down.

Mordant in the extreme, and often hilarious, The Death of Stalin somehow manages to acknowledge the murderous depths of Josef Stalin’s regime while rising to the level of incisive, even invigorating political satire.

A Christmas season evergreen.

It’s beautiful work, and not just because it’s beautiful.

The filmmaker's documentary training pays off in detail after detail.

For a while it’s engaging but pretty thin. Then it gets more interesting, especially for the actors.

One of Anderson's cleverest and most gorgeous movies, dipping just enough of a toe in the real world — and in the melancholy works of its acknowledged inspiration, the late Austrian writer Stefan Zweig — to prevent the whole thing from floating off into the ether of minor whimsy.

I love it, not simply because I love Chekhov or because I've loved so much of Ceylan's earlier work. I love it because the director, having come into his own as a master international filmmaker years ago, gives us so much to see and think about, so many astringent observations about life's compromises and longings.

Cooper knows he has an audience willing to listen, and what he says is so beautifully, powerfully open-hearted, vulnerable and loving it's overwhelming.

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

One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

Director Thomas Kail’s filmed version of the blockbuster musical Hamilton, available Friday on the Disney Plus streaming service, surely is the greatest translation, democratization and preservation of any Broadway show, ever.

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

Of all the movies that try to take us into the mind and viewpoint of a child, Carol Reed's 1948 The Fallen Idol, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story, is one of the most ingenious.

This is the second feature from Maoz; his first, the superb “Lebanon” (2009), is one of the essential war pictures of the young century. Foxtrot qualifies as a war film as well, and as in all such pictures made by, and for, grown-ups, the psychic battles are no less intense than the literal carnage.

Matt Damon narrates, and I do wish the narration didn't end on such a generalized, throw-the-bums-out note, over footage of the Statue of Liberty.

A bizarre, thrilling, warmly funny spoof of the WWII Steve McQueen prison camp thriller, "The Great Escape" remade for a near all-chicken cast.

With 20 additional minutes of screen time, the director's cut of Richard Kelly's genre-splicing "Donnie Darko" offers new viewers a second chance to discover his mind-bending masterwork.

The actors, predictably, are superb in roles shaped by screenwriter David Seidler, and directed by Tom Hooper. Yet they are unpredictably superb as well.

The fans of their best work -- "Blood Simple, "Raising Arizona," "Barton Fink" -- now can add Fargo to the list, pushing the Coens to the first rank of contemporary American filmmakers. [8 March 1996, Friday, p.B]

What the movie has, above all, is a dramatic line, clean and straight. In its faces, its scenery and its plain satisfactions it makes us feel like we've been somewhere, when we get to the end of that line.

Some of the comic inventions are inspired: Muntz has a pack of dogs equipped with electronic voice boxes, which means they're talking dogs, only they speak as if they've learned English from a poorly translated Berlitz guide.

Curtiz holds you in his master grip, creating one of those WW II-era California noirs that keeps swinging you from darkness to sunlight, love to hatred, happiness to the pits of despair and death. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

This film may be fantastical, outré, at times bizarre, and sexually frank. But ultimately, Poor Things is a traditional heroine’s journey forging its own singular path. That Bella achieves a fully embodied sense of personal liberation makes it a truly radical — and feminist — fairy tale.

Few films have caught the special feel and rhythms of childhood so well, with such uncondescending warmth and humor. And few bring out more powerfully the themes of anti-racism and the virtues and joys of community and family. [20 Apr 2007, p.C5]

Braga isn't quite the whole show in Aquarius, but she's certainly a lot of it.

So what we have in the middle of Back to the Future, this seeming kids' movie full of screeching cars, special effects and lightning storms, is nothing less than an adult reverie. And if families could be persuaded to see this film together, it might touch off a long night of sharing between parents and children. [03 July 1985]

You can't ask for a family film to do more than Toy Story 2. It's smart and playful enough to entertain adults, yet it never aims above the heads of kids.

May Marvel learn its lesson from Black Panther: When a movie like this ends up feeling both personal and vital, you’ve done something right.

It's one of the most satisfying films of 2015.

Nobody Knows, by the often excellent Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is one of those special movies that can give us a new way of seeing.

An off-center, lighthearted but perceptive study of people following their dreams in the only way they know how, Life Is Sweet-the title is only somewhat ironic-is a warm and joyful piece, with the tossed-off hilarity smoothly giving way to poignance in its darker final segments.

This is one of the great alternative masterpieces of the American cinema. In many ways, Cassavetes' most important film.

Moviegoers should be almost as entranced by the teeming, glorious landscapes and dark, bloody battlegrounds of Two Towers: astonishing midpoint of an epic movie fantasy journey for the ages.

Like all the Dardenne s' films, L'Enfant embraces a peculiarly ascetic brand of what, in other filmmakers' hands, might seem like cheap melodrama.

Ozu's informal '50s-set remake of "I Was Born, But . . . ." Not as lyrical as its model, but just as penetrating, this one, made in bright colors and flat surfaces that suggest the era's television dramas, has another obstreperous brother-combo who stage gas-expelling contests and wage a war to get, coincidentally, a family TV. [25 Nov 2005, p.C4]

What Baldwin does with words, Jenkins does visually. It’s what Blanche DuBois says in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” In “Beale Street” that magic can be crushing, and soul-stirring, sometimes simultaneously. Jenkins’ epilogue, not found in the novel, may go a little far in its embrace of the affirmative. But that’s hardly the worst thing you can say about any film, let alone one as lovely as this one.

Birdman proves that a movie — the grabbiest, most kinetic film ever made about putting on a play — can soar on the wings of its own technical prowess, even as the banality of its ideas threatens to drag it back down to earth.

Armstrong and screenwriter Robin Swicord have pared the work's sentimentality and bolstered its intellectual content, [21 Dec 1994]

Ozu is often wrongly characterized as a "soft" director preoccupied with middle-class home life, but this late film tackles extreme subject matter--spousal abuse and abortion--with unflinching skill. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

All but sweeps you away with its dazzling technique and shattering emotion. [27 November 1996, Tempo, p.1]

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]

One of the great screwball comedies. [23 Jan 1998, p.N]

Wisely, Heller doesn’t inflate the tone or impart an overt message. But by the end, Can You Ever Forgive Me? has truly brought you into this woman’s life, head-space, longings and tastes, and I found the whole of it quite moving.

Another Universal classic, based on H.G. Wells' tale of an invisible madman. [13 Aug 2007, p.C6]

It still soars, but now it seems richer, more expansive. Amadeus reminds us that movies can be lyrical as well as vulgar, ambitious as well as playful, brilliant as well as down and dirty -- just like Amadeus himself.

Impure Chandler it may be, but it's pure Altman and one of his nose-thumbing '70s maverick classics. [25 May 2007, p.C5]

Egypt's foremost filmmaker Chahine directs and stars in the movie most beloved by Egyptian audiences: a vibrant, lower-depths saga of the working community at a Cairo train station: concessionaires, porters and baggage-handlers, beset by bosses and torn by inner conflicts. [09 Jul 1999, p.L]

The second, and finest, of Ford's cavalry trilogy. [17 Aug 2007, p.C7]

A film that can tear you apart emotionally; it's both one of the great movie soap operas and a powerful indictment of racism. Sirk's cool, elegant style--smooth as silk on top, jagged and hot with feeling below--has rarely been joined to a more perfect subject. [05 May 2006, p.C9]

Working with the legends of his long career to operationalize his past, Almodóvar crafts a singularly unique and medium-specific autobiography in which cinema is inextricably linked to his own story, to his heart, soul and body.

Extraordinary film, one that, like the museum itself, captures and shows three centuries of Russian culture and history in all its beauty, confusion, terror and majesty.

The characters in Gomorrah may lack an extra dramatic dimension: Garrone errs, if anything, on the side of detachment. Yet that detachment is also the key to the film's success. There's so little hooey and melodramatic head-banging here.

Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth’s life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time.

A deceptively simple French film about teaching that keeps enlarging as you watch it, becoming beautiful and inspiring in a way most films never touch.

The movie expresses so much, so delicately, about precarious young hearts, the storm clouds of nationalist politics and, most of all, the possibility and necessity of artistic freedom.

What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.

It's difficult to see, too, what exactly all of this has to do with the twilight of the '60s. With his frequent sentimental allusions to the end of an era, Robinson seems to be grasping for a profundity that his anecdotal reminiscences don't merit or really need. Marwood, the film implies, will leave this life behind and go on to great things, while Withnail will be mired in it forever, a forgotten Falstaff to Marwood's striding Prince Hal. Self- dramatization is one thing; self-Shakespearization is something else. [10 July 1987, p.C]

It treats Freddie not as a problem to be solved, but as a peripatetic life to be followed. What begins as two weeks in another town, in search of the past Freddie never knew, becomes a reminder that there are feelings, longings, connections in life that remain not impossible, but certainly elusive, and precarious.

One of the screen's great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men in their 20s, hit Italy like a comic thunderbolt when it was released there in 1953 -- and it struck the American art-house audience in much the same way when it premiered here in 1956. Now it returns, and unlike its five aging-boy protagonists, this movie hasn't lost its first youth.

Shimmers and glows. But it also stings a little -- like the lovely flame that dies and the smoke that, in yet another Cole song, gets in your eyes.

Like "Memento," Mulholland Drive is an amnesiac noir in the tradition that goes back to "Spellbound" and "Somewhere in the Night."

Some of it’s pleasingly old school in its reliance on formidable stunt work. Enough of it, though, gets a digital effects assist for the amazements to scale the heights of plausibility and then leap, like a gazelle, to the adjacent mountain of sublime ridiculousness.

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

The movie here is Treadwell's footage--some of it beautiful, much of it difficult to watch.

Seeing these actors, the late Boseman chief among them, relish the opportunity to try to get a daunting stage-to-screen adaptation right: That’s a privilege to behold.

Mixing moments of genuine terror with offbeat comedy, writers Tom Epperson and Thornton have created a script that jumps along wih the energy of "In Cold Blood."

McKay has worked mostly in episodic television in recent years, and “On the Seventh Day” marks his confident, neatly ordered but freshly observed return to feature filmmaking. He’s working with nonactors here, in a fruitful halfway point between documentary and conventional fictional narrative.

What this movie is about, and where it succeeds best, is the primordial level of fear. The characters, for the most part, and the non-fish elements in the story, are comparatively weak and not believable. [20 June 1975]

Even when informed by Douglas' characteristic intensity, Spartacus has no real identity apart from "the common man"; at his side, the beautiful Jean Simmons is never anything more than Spartacus' chick - the proof that he's a manly man, as opposed to those mincing Roman aristocrats. Whatever Trumbo's progressive leanings, he was not past equating homosexuality with unspeakable evil and perversion.

While there’s little or no outright expression of religious faith in Nomadland, Zhao and company have given us a glancing but evocative state-of-the-nation character study. In its own spiritual fashion, Fern’s story becomes one about the character of a nation, and an America desperately searching for the ribbon of highway (to quote Woody Guthrie) to take us all the way home.

Modeled on Martin Scorsese's engaging first-person documentaries on the cinema, this one has its own avid personality and scholarly charm. Whoever you are, you'll learn a lot.

For 40 minutes or so it's really good, in fact, as lovely and daft as the stop-motion animated W&G shorts that preceded it.

Uncommonly good ensemble storytelling.

Movies concerned with the life, the mind, the body and the dawning self-respect of a 15-year-old girl running every sort of risk — these are rare. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of them, and it's terrific.

It blends cinematic Americana with something grubbier and more interesting than Americana, and it does not look, act or behave like the usual perception of a Spielberg epic. It is smaller and quieter than that.

The film has a quietly relentless quality. Redford is fully engaged and vital. I'll leave it to others to read greatness into All Is Lost. It's enough that it's good.

The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.

Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship is compact, modestly budgeted, sublimely acted and almost completely terrific.

Above all, there’s Collette, who sometimes can overdeliver a dramatic moment or an aghast reaction, but in this storytelling context she’s fabulous. It’s a fierce performance with a human pulse, racing one minute, dead still the next.

I've already seen The Fugitive twice. I'll probably see it again.

This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.

It is a black comedy, among the blackest. It is also more grueling in some stretches than anything in "United 93."

Odd Man Out is the extraordinary thriller about a botched IRA bank robbery and the badly wounded and increasingly feverish rebel, Johnny (James Mason), who wanders Belfast with both his mates and the police on his trail. [29 Feb 2008, p.C8]

Takes a simple story and molds it into something eloquent and menacing.

Some scholars may scowl, some lowbrows may scoff. But, like wordwise Will, these filmmakers know how to win a crowd -- from the queen down to the groundlings, from the sky above to the stage below. Bravo! [5 December 1998, Friday, p.A]

It's a work that sears the heart and conscience. The events are annihilating, the way they're told both beautiful and terrifying.

Probing... haunting.

While there are plenty of influences afoot, ranging from Jenkins to Terrence Malick to Toni Morrison, “All Dirt Roads” is guided, fragment by fragment, by a new director’s way of seeing and listening to a woman’s life — in all its puzzle pieces.

A good and eloquent Wyoming-set love story with a great performance at its heart.

This is the first film the Dardennes shot in the summertime. Excellent choice of seasons. I'm not sure I could've handled Cyril's travails without it, or without de France's smile.

The story is spellbinding, the acting lusty and the spectacle everything you could expect from a Golden Age MGM production--though sometimes it's a bit too much on the monumental side.

It’s zippier than “Incredibles 2,” and nearly as witty as the first “Lego Movie,” with whom it shares a very funny screenwriter, Phil Lord.

Stripping “Macbeth” for parts, keeping the focus on the main narrative lines of political assassination and what Macbeth himself refers to as “supernatural soliciting,” Coen turns out to be ideally suited to a straight-ahead, let’s-get-on-with-it rendition.

Watching Jonathan Caouette's amazing autobiographical documentary Tarnation is like descending into a pop-music, underground-movie hell and heaven, the shattered and shattering landscape of a living body and mind.

This astonishingly beautiful documentary employs microphotography of overpowering crispness and detail to create one of the most stunning records of nature the cinema has given us. [11 Oct 1996, p.J]