This is simply marvelous entertainment that breathes life into a genre that I thought had been dead for a decade-the prison picture.

Wistful Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde romantic noir. [04 May 2007, p.C2]

This is one of those films that encapsulate most of its maker's key thoughts and feelings while also connecting us vividly to a fascinating past. No one who loves French film (or movies in general) should miss it.

Maiden is a grand adventure, the likes of which we don’t always see too often anymore.

Gripping, visually assured and working far above its summer-sequel paygrade, War for the Planet of the Apes treats a harsh storyline with a solemnity designed to hoist the tale of Caesar, simian revolutionary — the Moses of apes — into the realm of the biblical.

Duma, at its best, reminded me exactly why we loved movies as children: because they told stories like this, with images just as rhapsodically colorful and exciting.

A sweaty, vital masterpiece that's always one step ahead of its audience.

In every design detail, the physical production and realization of You Won’t Be Alone really does take you somewhere. However unsettling, it’s a film that knows what it’s doing.

Ron Howard's first-rate dramatic comedy Parenthood, with Steve Martin headlining a first-rate cast in a most clever script about the joy and pain of being both a parent and a child. [4 Aug 1989, p.A]

Sophisticated management of tone makes Two of Us rich and nuanced, complex and utterly heartbreaking. Within the folds of the film, simultaneously a love story, thriller and tragedy, nearly anyone can find an anchor, or a wound. It illustrates with devastating clarity what a mess secrets can make, and how one errant, unpredictable thread can unravel any carefully calibrated lie.

If this all sounds very heavy, well, it is, but it's also very, very funny. Cronenberg may want to say something important about violence, but he's also head over heels for it, ending each gunfight and neck-breaking with a close-up on the victim, blood either pooling behind his head or brains spilling from his face. Big laughs.

It balances bloodshed with charm, spectacle with childlike glee. It's a near flawless movie of its kind.

This one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.

A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.

Rye Lane celebrates Black romantic adventure, simply by finding new avenues (literal and figurative) to explore. Director Allen-Miller works extensively in commercials, and it shows, but her compositional eye is very effective.

Few Alfred Hitchcock movies are more fun to watch than To Catch a Thief. [15 Jun 2007, p.C7]

Everything within the film connects to neighboring elements, performance to performance to cryptic absurdity (the opening is one of the strangest of the year) to surprisingly heartfelt acknowledgment of the power of love. Whether things work out or not.

Clean up the language, and this little roach of a movie could play the bottom half of a double bill with Rowan and Martin's “The Maltese Bippy.” [26 March 1999, Life, p.9E]

The movie has a grotesque charm, a pie-eyed magic. With its crack-brained, spidery-limbed, Edward-Gorey-eyed crew of dashing skeletons, Frankenstein ladies, mad scientists with detachable brainpans, swivel-headed two-faced politicians and big bad bug-bag monsters, it comes at you like a Saturday afternoon kiddies' special gone pleasantly berserk.

A rough-edged, talking-heads documentary, directed with skill if not polish by Jennie Livingston, that has found a topic almost unbelievably rich in cultural paradoxes and interpretive possibilities. [09 Aug 1991, p.C]

A movie about the passions of simple people, and it's done with such extraordinary empathy and commitment that it all but pulls you under. [29 November 1996, Friday, p.A]

This French documentary gives us unprecedented intimacy and sweep.

Steering clear of phony melodrama and indie pretense, Baumbach captures a crisis in one family's life that, though it shakes the foundation, leaves all four Berkmans drifting toward highs and lows unknown, each of them only dimly aware that, no matter what the movies tell us, we never really come of age.

The movie is the cinematic equivalent of a near-perfect three-minute pop song. It makes you laugh, smile and tap your toes over a brisk 88 minutes, and when it's finished, you're ready to hit repeat.

It’s full of life, guided by first-time screen performers portraying versions of themselves. And because Esparza’s a dramatist, not a melodramatist, the experience of watching Life and Nothing More becomes truth, and nothing less.

Breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertaining.

It's permeated with a sweetness and vulnerability unusual for any crime movie. [29 May 1998, p.N]

There’s a dreamy and poetic side to the visual texture in The Unknown Country, as photographed, often gorgeously, by Andrew Hajek. The Badlands, the snakelike highways, the rippling sunsets step right up and strike their poses, but unselfconsciously.

My favorite moment, an encounter between Regan and one of the monsters in a cornfield, plays with sound and image and tension, creatively. Other bits are more shameless.

What the writing and filmmaking sometimes overdo, the actors mitigate beautifully. Benesch is a powerhouse of subtlety and focus, and the camera stays as close as possible to her watchful, at times disbelieving eyes.

Brims with intelligence, compassion and sensuous delight in the textures, sights and sounds of life--all the way from the Taj Mahal to Pearl Jam.

You may watch Frances Ha relating to little of it, or a lot of it, but this "road movie with apartments," as the director (shooting here in velvety black-and-white, recalling Woody Allen's "Manhattan" in its texture) so aptly put it, is informed by a buoyant, resilient spirit.

This is a droll and extremely well-acted tale of a family in crisis, and in progress.

Perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination.

It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.

A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.

I can't imagine Anvil! not appealing to anyone interested in any aspect of showbiz, and the drug of fame, and the lives people lead in pursuit of the next fix.

The Trip isn't much, but it's more than enough.

Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the script, has captured the human element deftly. Here are human beings as they really are, refreshingly life-like, piteously real, and often hilariously funny. [16 May 1955, p.15]

With Cuaron leading the way, Harry has burst from the printed page to soar on-screen.

Both sides of the story -- the larger context and the intense and intimate drama -- are painted with an absolutely unswerving sense of truth. And, as we watch this movie, full of violence, injustice and compassion, there is barely a moment that seems calculated or contrived.

Michael Clayton is a here’s-how-it-happened drama, cleverly but not over-elaborately structured.

Downfall, whatever its shortcomings, bears strong witness to great evil. That is its triumph as a film.

Even with some padding, it’s a whodunit canny enough to take the human stakes inside the artifice seriously. And that allows a fine ensemble of side-eye champs the leeway to make Knives Out funny, too.

The Spectacular Now is rare: a coming-of-age movie featuring a teenage couple about whom you actually give a rip.

La Cava was famous for improvising his scenes; My Man Godfrey is the most brilliant, unbuttoned example. It's a champagne farce, sparkling and bubbling from the depths of the Depression. [08 Jun 2007, p.C9]

Not everything here is perfect; the musical score, by Norwegian composer John Erik Kaada, favors ambient sonic wanderings that smooth over the conflicts on screen. But by the end, you feel as though you’ve truly gotten to know a full range of Kabul residents through their daily routines, joys, recreational diversions (kite-flying, slingshots, the international language of soccer) and bone-deep skepticism about the future.

This is one of the real finds of 2008.

An invaluable document, both for its hard questions and for the sickeningly unflinching interviews that provide the answers.

The Mirror may not be the easiest place to start your Tarkovsky education, but its sublime images (including a memorable shot of a burning barn in the rain), are sure to whet your appetite for more. [26 May 2000, p.M]

It’s one of the essential titles of the year so far, if only for its sheer kinetic assurance.

The movie, a formidable technical and design achievement, has everything going for it except a sense of Jobs' inner life.

It all flows from the shum. The man's musical and political influence was no illusion.

This film--one of the best and most memorable documentaries of the year so far--brings that truth-teller to us once again.

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."

Does Kaurismaki believe in his own fairy tale? The movie, a humble delight, suggests the answer is yes.

This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.

The movie’s a little sketchy and underwritten, and it feels sometimes as if scenes have been pared away or cut altogether to concentrate on Ahmed. But Ahmed really is terrific. Director Marder has a knack for both observing and igniting human behavior, through character. And supervising sound editor Nicolas Baker’s work astounds, period.

Hitchcock's first thriller and the film that established him: A moody silent melodrama based on Marie Belloc Lowndes' tale of a mysterious lodger in fear-crazed London, who may be a modern Jack the Ripper. [04 Jan 2002, p.C1]

The musical score by Emile Mosseri of the band The Dig, is very fine stuff, supple and surprising in its blend of classical, jazz and pop strains. It adds to the otherworldly quality established and sustained so well by Talbot, and by the actors.

Its social impact is part of what makes this movie memorable. But as with almost any exceptional, truthful war picture, Days of Glory moves us because we know the soldiers -- because we share their fear, triumph and pain.

It's all very mesmerizing, for them and us.

What’s frustrating about this worthwhile movie is pretty simple: All Anderson needed to do, really, was to let more of the characters, dog and human, female and male, have a say in how the story gets told.

A finely written, superbly acted offbeat thriller.

The Russian film The Return is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness - a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness.

It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.

They're lifelike, I suppose, in that you believe and become invested in what happens to everyone. But they're poetic, too, in that Reichardt and her first-rate ensemble find intersections of the mundane and the mysterious all around this broad, blustery landscape.

It's an open, closely observed and nicely detailed film that attains an authenticity beyond the standard social worker formulas. [5 June 1987, p.B]

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

A study of junkie culture from the inside (not a fashionable point of view these days), Drugstore Cowboy is funny, depressive and strangely noble, often all at once. [27 Oct 1989]

Do not expect dynamic filmmaking from Love Is Strange. It's about other things, and Lithgow and Molina are splendid, their eyes full of wisdom and experience.

Wiseman's film allows everyone their say, so that In Jackson Heights becomes one of the truest images of gentrification and its costs on film.

One of those welcome visitors, a movie that turns out to be much more than we expected.

Sweeps us back into a terrifying and desperate string of events and makes us feel them - and, more crucially, understand them as well.

For a while, I resented the sexist, cruel behavior in the film, much of it revolving around the hazing of underclassmen. But gradually, I saw the movie turn into a brash expose of stupid adolescent traditions. [24 Sept 1993]

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.

The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find.

An exorcism movie for the rest of us, the gripping German drama Requiem contains not a single special effect. It doesn't need one. It has terrific actors fully invested in a casual-seeming, docudramatic brand of storytelling, notably Sandra Hueller.

It’s consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny in its open-hearted embrace of the DIY spirit, legal or otherwise.

It is, however, just about perfect in its wrenching emotion, expressed by an actor clearly up to the challenge of acting in a Paul Greengrass docudrama — which is to say, acting with as little capital-A Acting as possible.

It boasts the filmmaker’s usual high level of unassuming craft; a superb cast; and a couple of limitations, though not flaws, worth noting.

A genre movie with an agenda that's too packed. Inevitably, some of the many balls it's juggling get dropped -- (but it's) one of the most entertaining and original actioners in several years.

It’s a hearty stew of influences and rewards and, yes, some gristle.

The American distributor of John Woo's amazing Hong Kong feature, The Killer, is taking the easy way out and selling the picture as camp. But this movie is no joke: It's one of the most intense, passionate pieces of filmmaking you are ever likely to see. [10 May 1991, p.H]

Best of all: the musical score by Alfonso de Vilallonga. It's terrific — witty, symphonically lush and shrewdly informed by flamenco strains throughout.

The wondrous cinematography is by Gokhan Tiryaki. It is not an easy picture. Not many masterpieces are.

The great Christmas western with Duke Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey Jr. as three fugitive outlaws, who, by caring for an abandoned baby, unwittingly become sagebrush equivalents for the Three Wise Men. [04 May 2001, p.C1]

The ending is a stunner. Like those '30 classics it suggests, Gilles' Wife seduces us with true cinematic magic: rich characters, great acting and that rapturous old French blend of realism and theatricality.

Tone is everything here. While likely influenced by Chilean absurdists of another era, such as playwright Egon Wolff, in The Maid Silva treads an ultra-fine line between caricature and character, leaning toward the latter without weighing down an essentially featherweight creation.

The concerts are hypnotic, the music is swell, and the entire package moves along at just the right pace.

Sick provides no easy answers but stands as a strangely powerful testament of a man who laughed in the face of terminal illness and fought for his life using the tools of self-destruction, including the occasional hammer and nail.