The Watermelon Woman is quite smart, remarkably sophisticated filmmaking for a first-time director.

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

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

A weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going, an opus for film geeks that rang my personal bell. A bizarre minimalist epic that will either transport or infuriate, it's defiantly, exquisitely eccentric.

All of these folks are damaged souls, trying their best to find purpose and forgiveness.

The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.

One of the best of its streamlined, over-produced, double-clutch kind: a high-speed, slicker-than-slick car-chase movie with unexpected deposits of character and comedy.

Jenkins and The Visitor”make lovely music together. It’s a case of a veteran character actor slipping on a leading role like the most comfortable pair of pants in the world.

A mad, resplendent peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made during those giddy years.

Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung is telling his own story here. The rough outlines and even some of the specific details are autobiographical and filtered through his memories of childhood. But he’s also considering these themes from his perspective now as an adult with a child of his own . . . and he straddles the two sides of this line so well, with wit and nuance, but also with such cutting precision.

It’s a lovely sort of chemistry that develops in fits and starts over the course of the film, with both Helms and Harrison giving carefully modulated performances that are full of delightfully specific verbal tics and terrific comedic timing.

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

For its influence alone, this is a movie that more than deserves its classic status. [23 June 2000, p.M]

One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.

A highly satisfying miniature. Its subject may be adolescence, and some of its pot-smoking, kick-back humor is adolescent too--in a good way. But the film's calm and witty visual rhythm offers a rueful awareness of time passing and of time wasted, in ways that people tend not to appreciate fully until long after they've wasted it.

The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).

This is a film driven by what makes its characters and conflicts tick. It’s freely fictionalized, and some of it’s overpacked. But “The Woman King” feels human-made, not machine-learned.

Without playing with anyone’s life, A Photographic Memory makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries.

The Crow imbues its comic brutalism with emotion and satire. Too raw and pulpy, it probably shouldn't be regarded as a memorial to Brandon Lee. But as an obsessive rock 'n' roll comic book movie shocker of loony intensity, it stands, or flies, by itself.

It's a terrific, kinetic experience, and it's also a brilliant showcase for a crackerjack ensemble of great actors.

Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.

A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]

A true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year.

Sometimes, it's exciting to watch a movie formula jell on screen-and that's what you can see happening in The Client, the latest, and best, of three successive films adapted from legal thrillers by John Grisham.

If it doesn't make you laugh, nothing will. [28 June 1991]

Most of all, it's a film for moviegoers who love powerful stories and ravishing imagery: timeless, eternal, the kind of tales handed from one generation and culture to the next -- and alive in all of them.

There are many tragedies and accomplishments here, without the engineered uplift afflicting any number of lesser documentaries.

Whatever its flaws, Funny Girl is one star vehicle that works perfectly for its subject.