Everybody Knows finds Farhadi (working with longtime editor Hayedeh Safiyari) consciously going for quicker-than-usual cutting, rarely lingering over anything, always setting up the next part of the mystery. The acting’s uniformly strong, always at the service of a knotty story.

There's no question that Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking. What's questionable is whether it's more than that.

Liman's sensibility isn't sophisticated enough to tease out the nuances of what must be a pretty interesting marriage; the movie is more about texture and surfaces and surface tensions.

Brimming over with affection and humanity, this memory drama about the destruction of one family and the birth of another is nostalgic in a good sense: funny, bittersweet, poignant.

Coppola and her brilliant cinematographer, Harris Savides, keep the action simple, but the perspective is perfect.

The film is entertaining and disingenuous, which doesn't make it wrong.

A slow starter. But what appears to be the cliched "uptight nerd liberated by flighty sprite" tale--done better in films from "Bringing Up Baby" to "Barefoot in the Park"--evolves into something deeper, darker, more resonant.

The movie is an odd mix of tones and styles, and the thriller plot is casually introduced, shoved aside and reintroduced. But, like all Duvall's work, Assassination Tango breathes with humanity.

It's a particularly great pleasure to encounter Quick Change, a wonderfully loose and graceful character comedy. [13 Jul 990, p.C]

It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

It's closer to the hammering "Transformers" aesthetic than expected. Yet the weirdness around the edges saves it from impersonality.

What Ewing and Grady have accomplished here is remarkable--capturing the visceral humanity, desire and unflagging political will of a religious movement.

On the whole, though, it is funny and compassionate, silly and sweet. [26 Aug 1994]

There is no mythology, no irony, no real soul--just a Charles Bronson simplicity about the whole affair.

The creator of the original "Mad Max" trilogy has whipped up a gargantuan grunge symphony of vehicular mayhem that makes "Furious 7" look like "Curious George."

Think of the Slocumbs as distant relatives of "The Royal Tenenbaums," only more dysfunctional and far from attractively "quirky."

Copying Beethoven, at its best, is a sort of grand cinema opera of the composer's life and music.

Ever since she took "The Grifters" by storm, Bening has been a spectacular if often ill-used actress. Here, it's a marvelous fit of performer and role, and she makes Dorothea a dozen things at once: warm, chilly, open, wary, worldly, insecure, grave, blithe.

What’s effective and touching in A Compassionate Spy relates directly to the satisfaction of getting to know Joan Hall, a terrifically vital and reflective presence. We get, among other things, a glimpse of a long-lived marriage hounded by secrets and surveillance, but an abiding mutual trust.

What you might not expect is how moving this whole story actually is. It’s not just the fun of figuring things out among this cast of colorful characters, rendered with a storybook look, it’s actually a tale about the importance of finding, and tending to, a flock.

Sollett works easily and well with Cera and Dennings, and lends a touch of awkward realism to what, from a screenwriting perspective, is pure formula.

Likable comedy about ordinary people stumbling badly and then triumphing.

If the film is more solid and satisfying than terrific, so be it.

This cynical film paints a hugely unflattering portrait of life in Hollywood's fast lane. I have no way of knowing exactly how much is exaggeration, but I've got a creepy feeling that the film is closer to the mark than I want to believe.

Sweet and flinty in roughly equal measure, the movie's a big hit in its native country.

This toweringly ambitious picture confronts a brilliant director, Atom Egoyan, with a major historical event and a profound theme.

Director Lizzie Borden sticks to the business of trying to elicit natural performances from a cast that includes Off-off Broadway actors, actors with almost no credits and, among the men, some who are not actors at all. To a remarkable degree she has succeeded, particularly in the case of Louise Smith, who plays Molly. [13 Mar 1987, p.D]

It's a fascinating bundle of contradictions -- authentic in a million details, deeply romanticized in others. Cool, calm and collected, this is more love story than gangster picture.

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.

The film is distinguished by the grubby velocity of his foot chases, and the effectiveness of its craft.

The movie rips and roars.

A movie that celebrates and mourns heroism and friendship, while reminding us how seldom we truly see either on our big screens.

Delpy has always challenged Hawke to find a simpler, more direct form of acting in Linklater's films, which gives them their unique suspense and rolling tension.

The new Bad News Bears may not make you cheer, but it should provide laughs and a good time. Isn't that what some movies are all about?

Reginald Owen stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, the Christmas-hating curmudgeon who finally gets the spirit in this 1938 adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic. [05 Dec 2014, p.C2]

Stuffed with smart Internet gags, silly movie references and a happy energy that makes you forgive the sequences that don't work.

The performances reveal precisely what Rivette wants to reveal, which is to say, in conventional psychological terms, not a great deal.

Clueless is no "Fast Times" when it comes to character development or the merging of comedy and drama, and it might have worked better if it had been more story-oriented and plot-centered. But thanks to Heckerling's spirited direction and cutting-edge script, it is, "like . . . majorly and furiously golden." [19 July 1995]

A welcome family film that extols noble values and offers first-class animation.

By design, the dialogue from the (fictional) play comments directly on the central, shifting power relationship in the film, sometimes elegantly, sometimes a little awkwardly.

While Represent could’ve used another 20 minutes to flesh out its unguarded moments, this is a strong feature-length directorial debut. Regional politics is local politics is national politics. It’s revealing to see how the sausage gets made, and who gets to make it.

Maybe the problem with Analyze This is that it isn't enough of a Ramis movie. [5 Mar 1999]

This is a rare gem tripped over while making a run-of-the-mill rockumentary about a band's new album.

On a direct line with the whimsical small-town comedies of the '40s and '50s.

The film works best when it pays specific attention to how hard it is to write a rhyme worth hearing.

The story isn’t complicated, and it’s one we know well, rendered with spooky, atmospheric aesthetics and intensely gnarly violence that provide cover for the thin premise, nagging plot holes and flimsy characterization in the script, which traffics in poorly explained archetypes. It’s sufficient enough, but the strength of the filmmaking is not in the writing, but in Barker’s command of style, pace and performance.

Nothing elegant about Adams here, but she's terrific -- a sparkling screen presence. Her Earhart hoists this big-budget sequel above the routine.

Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.

This one’s more than one kind of comedy, too. It’s a sweet yet nicely vinegary immigration fable; a deadpan fantasy; and a tale of two Brooklyns, one (1920) a repository of rat-infested factories and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the other (2020) the gentrified land of their progressive, pea milk-drinking great-grandchildren.

Holland provides the glue and the webbing for the latest Spidey outing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He’s physically nimble — he’s soon to play Fred Astaire in a biopic — quick-witted with his darting comic timing and an all-around easygoing presence. When the movie treats the mayhem and brutality for real, he’s there with the right degree of anguish.

Fascinating as Buzz often is, the film obviously was made with limited resources, transferred to film from DV, with grainy clips from the trailers for Bezzerides-scripted movies rather than snippets of the movies themselves.

A flawed film but an admirable one that tries to immerse us in a world of artistic abandon and political madness and very nearly succeeds.

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

The film, a sleek and oddly moving study in the cost of debauchery, has its gleeful excesses.

It's still worth seeing. This ambitious and powerful sphinx, a major force in a particular chunk of recent history, may not give away much. Watching and listening to how he doesn't give it away — that's the known known here.

Despite the holes in the script, Fatal Attraction writer James Dearden moves the action along competently and has two compelling young actors in Dillon and Young. [26 Apr 1991, p.C]

All the women turn in funny performances — it's great to see Pinkett Smith cut loose, and the charming and radiant Hall displays a faculty for physical comedy — but this is Haddish's movie, and will make her a star.

Right in the "Rebel Without a Cause" vein, of course, but grittier and less romantic. [16 Jun 2006, p.C8]

Home Again" is pure fantasy, all softly-lit, perfectly styled, looking like the cover of Sunset magazine. A world where a 40-year-old single mom is pursued by no fewer than four handsome men. But within that fantasy is also a wonderfully deft demonstration of feminine autonomy in matters of sex, love and marriage.

The film operates on a peculiar, somewhat languid rhythm, and there are times when the story’s needs take a back seat to the visual detail. But “Nightmare Alley” has nerve and relentless, fantastic style.

Part "Law & Order" morality play, part "Wall Street" with a dash of the more recent and topically pertinent "Margin Call," Arbitrage hums along, complicating its narrative without tying itself in knots.

An offbeat, genial western parody that has some surprisingly effective low-key humor. [30 Aug 1991, p.C2]

The Cats of Mirikitani seems all too short; it has enough meat to be turned into an excellent dramatic film.

Without insult to either film, Anger Management could be called "Punch-Drunk Love" for the masses.

Smith carries it, even after the story loses its nerve. This film is the opposite of “Transformers”: It’s all about the unsettling silence, not the noise.

In addition to being a good-looking movie with a pumping Foo Fighters anthem, "Score" is actually a philosophical argument against our culture of tests.

Proves to be more than just a gimmick, and it doesn't skimp on any of the quirky wackiness that you might expect from a film about blob-shaped, flightless birds battling pigs.

The plot's the same old thing. Mad, mad, mad, mad science; imminent apocalypse; parent/child issues; blah blah blaggidy blah. The tone of Ant-Man, however, is relatively light and predominantly comic.

The first hour is terrific; the second one, disappointingly, grows weaker and more conventional.

Spins a fairy tale web that is hard to escape.

The racial and sexual politics of Heading South may trouble some audiences; Cantet is definitely not a moralist in the usual sense.

Does it matter that Wolfs is about literally nothing except itself and its star packaging? Maybe not. On the other hand, Watts hasn’t written a single fleshed-out character. It’s about genre tropes, distilled to minimalist quipping amid maximalist mayhem.

This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.

Not everyone can act his material with ease. But Ejiofor, who brings a serene gravity to every exchange, was born to do Mamet.

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 moody psychological thriller with a stunning performance by Christian Bale at its core.

Garris, filming mainly in a bobbing and weaving, hand-held camera style, keeps the scenes pared down to their functional essentials, wisely substituting speed for nuance. Sleepwalkers gets the job done. [13 Apr 1992, p.5C]

The film's surprising, enveloping jazz score is often deliberately at odds with Niko's moody outlook.

Mingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months.

A lyrical work of sporadic great power, Neon Bible captures both the neon and the spirit, the heaven and hell.

Amos & Andrew, written and directed by E. Max Frye, relates the intersection of these two different destinies, in a style that ranges from roaring farce to biting satire. [05 Mar 1993, p.C2]

Flaws and all, it really does show a star being born.

A great movie? Hardly. Stallone as the next Brando? You've got to be kidding. A nice little fantasy picture? Maybe. That's the hype and reality of Rocky, the flatout schmaltzy saga of a Philadelphia club boxer who, on New Year's Day of our Bicentennial Year, gets a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. . . .

It’s a surprise and a small wonder, then, when The Best of Enemies starts getting good and pretty much stays that way to the end. This may be an apples/oranges comparison, but: For a true-ish story of racial animus, bone-deep prejudice and the American South in the civil rights era, it’s a better, more nuanced and more interesting feel-good movie than a certain, recent, less interesting Best Picture Academy Award winner we could mention.

Made with a flashy hit-and-run-style, the documentary too often tries to record too much of the overall campaign, instead of concentrating more on the details of insider baseball-or, as it were, the fun-and-war games.

When Aster lays off the easy comic despair in favor of more ambiguous and dimensional feelings, interactions and moments, Eddington becomes the movie he wanted. His script has a million problems with clarity, coincidence and the nagging drag of a protagonist set up for a long, grisly comeuppance, yet Eddington is probably Aster’s strongest film visually.

The Beguiled probably could've benefited from a little more energy in its telling. Still, Coppola offers some gorgeous images of the past made present.

Usually I am so turned off by mayhem that I turn away from the screen during knife attacks and the like. But for some strange reason I wasn't sickened by the violence in Dawn of the Dead. Even when one zombie gets his head lopped off by a helicopter blade...Dawn of the Dead has some staying power. [4 May 1979, p.3-3]

This is a comedy made for people who think, who like smart talk and who, like the Perelmans, know the score.

Quite entertaining.

Seems small in subject and scope, but it's large in spirit and implication.

Twenty minutes in, Hardy notwithstanding, you might be tempted to bail on Locke. Don't.

It's an occasion for Streep to play against a stereotype, and win. It's a rout, in fact.

It's one of those movies that are unfortunately so technically well done, it's hard to tune out on the senseless story.

Is it cute? Yes. Is it a crowd-pleaser? Yup. Is it classic? Nope. (Though it could have been.)

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

At this point, "The Corruptor" looks as if it's going to be just a rehash of an early Dirty Harry movie, but it surprises by taking us inside Chinatown, where we discover just how sinister and elaborate the relationships between the police and the businessmen can be. [12 Mar 1999]

The song remains the same, but it’s all in the way you play it. Karia, Ahmed and Lesslie prove that "Hamlet" still hits after all these years.