I Am Love makes no apologies for its style. None needed: The film, a two-hour swoon, is a cry for romantic freedom, perched on the edge of self-parody, as all good melodramas are.

David Fincher's film version of the Gillian Flynn bestseller Gone Girl is a stealthy, snake-like achievement. It's everything the book was and more — more, certainly, in its sinister, brackish atmosphere dominated by mustard-yellow fluorescence, designed to make you squint, recoil and then lean in a little closer.

An unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice.

This hip, highly partisan biography of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a surprisingly entertaining movie about the perils of studying sexual behavior in a sexually uptight culture--our own.

If all this potent drama recalls Bergman, the beautifully articulated staging and setting suggest that master of operatic social-sexual drama, Luchino Visconti ("The Leopard").

Finally, the film answers a question that obviously haunts Nachtwey: Is it immoral, callous or irresponsible to win fame and recognition from images of the terror, death and suffering of others?

A noir masterpiece with Oscar-caliber performances, Sexy Beast slowly turns up the heat until we squirm.

The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.

There is no question that this film is flawed by the inclusion of the party scene and Ratzo's dream, but I cannot recall a more marvelous pair of acting performances in any one film. Dustin Hoffman deserves the Oscar for a role that is prickly on the outside, but tender on the inside.

Dear White People isn't perfect. And yet the flaws really don't matter. This is the best film about college life in a long time, satiric or straight, comedy or drama.

Released one year after John Carpenter's Halloween, Nosferatu was a last gasp for the elegant horror film. It is deliberately paced and virtually bloodless. A feeling of inexorable dread is vividly etched in images such as a skeletal cuckoo clock, an army of rats invading a village, and plague victims enjoying "what little time we have left" by drinking and dancing in the square.

A dark subject certainly, but in Murray's bouquet-bearing hands, it can still hand us a laugh.

Nick Kroll is shrewdly cast as the Lovings' ACLU lawyer, green but enthusiastic; my favorite of the supporting turns comes from Sharon Blackwood, as Richard's rock-solid midwife mother.

The easiest thing you can say about Silence is that it's a labor of love, made by a valiant soldier for his chosen storytelling medium.

The movie is held together by the scenes between Thomas and Zylberstein, which are superbly acted.

In its 98 minutes, film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s documentary Moving Midway records an amazing architectural feat, and that’s the least of its virtues.

There's a tremendous amount of material here, and the script covers too much of it, often confusingly.

Another of his (McElwee) beguiling "personal chronicle" movies.

A kinetic delight, Reprise comes from director Joachim Trier, born in Denmark but raised in Oslo, Norway, and it’s a highlight of the filmgoing year so far.

A pleasure to watch and also serves as a reminder of a time when "right over might" was at the core of a powerful country's credo. [28 May 1999, Tempo, p.5]

A witty and psychologically perceptive look at the Parisian literary scene.

Not a zingy marvel of narrative momentum. But it's not trying for that.

Drive begins extremely well and ends in a muddle of ultraviolence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening, which won't be any sort of deterrent for those who like its looks.

It's all about the pictures. Those images create a vision of nature that even a strip miner would want to conserve.

This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5]

An off-center but exceptional boxing film I prefer in every aspect, especially one: It feels like it comes from real life as well as the movies.

Had this ambitious head trip come to pass, it might've made Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" look like "Go, Dog. Go!"

I never felt emotionally exploited by the terrors on screen. Rather, Beasts of No Nation is an act of gripping empathy.