Smart and well-crafted, and it boasts complex characters, effective star turns and evocative photography of a small Alaskan town in summertime, when the sun never sets. It's a solid Hollywood thriller.

What the movie occasionally lacks is dramatic juice. A reader of the novel will have a greater sense of the obstacles keeping Lily and Lawrence apart than fresh viewers of the movie will.

Lafosse's frustrating, yet beautifully elegiac coda emphasizes the point that his production and storytelling style have been making throughout: Private Property is about processes, not conclusions.

The cast is excellent, particularly Riley and Morton and, as Joy Division’s brash manager, Toby Kebbell. He’s a great character, bitter and hostile and a scoundrel: a born manager of talent destined to tear itself apart.

Gregg Toland's cinematography here makes you yearn for what he might have done on a Ford Western. [17 Oct 1996, p.11]

It’s a pretty good time, and often a pretty good movie for the nervous blur we’re in right now. It’s cozy.

BlackBerry doesn’t sermonize or push the comedy or falsify the dramatic dynamics of wildly contrasting personalities. It’s a small but quite beautiful achievement, which you could also say about the smartphone that could, and did. For a while.

At times, though, the appealing but uneven film seems rather disjointed, with Anders not quite getting a handle on her material, which is weakened by a sometimes-murky storyline (some of the minor characters drift in and out for no apparent reason) and pretention (there is a lot of talk at the end about the desert being a kind of metaphor for hope and renewal). Still, Anders decidedly is a director worth watching. [6 Nov 1992, p.J]

Because the characters are richly realized and their dialogue rings true, we stick around, rooting for something like a happy ending.

Rarely does any film, animated or otherwise, immerse you in such a vivid landscape and engage your senses so strongly.

The film has undeniable power, but it's an unusual and unsettling power, a product of a collision between red-hot material and the cool serenity with which Kubrick observes and accepts it. [26 June 1987]

The suspense is pulse tearing, but Hitchcock, in a movie made explicitly for the war effort, gives it an extra edge. Also, in his favorite and most ingenious cameo role, Hitch solves the problem of appearing in a film with no extras -- the cast consists only of the other shipwreck survivors -- by having himself photographed before and after losing 100 pounds on a special crash diet. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

It's a brutally convincing movie about two hell-bent young Turkish-German lovers dancing on the edge of destruction in a Hamburg underworld of drugs and casual sex. Yet it's also compassionate and even tender.

There are moments of genuine charm and solid invention, but it's a film that doesn't believe enough in itself. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

A sometimes silly, occasionally hilarious, and often sophomoric spoof of airline disaster films in which a passenger tries to land a disabled plane. Some of the jokes are tasteless, but there is a general air of good cheer as the script laughs most of all at the already laughable "Airport" movie series. [11 July 1980, p.3-8]

A movie which, like all the best blues, makes good times out of bad times, makes smiles out of hurt, makes tears taste like honey.

In teasing out the complex relationship between life and death in relationship to birth and “Frankenstein,” Moss presents a provocative existential quandary and reminds us that horror stories have been women’s stories all along.

It’s a specific sort of achievement, without the full dimension or larger resonance of a classic. That’s a lot to ask of any film, especially one that does so much so rigorously and well.

Glory has a genuine moral basis, and it makes all the difference in the world. [12 Jan 1990, p.A]

The acting is amateurish at times, but always convincing.

In the end, grips us precisely because its actors are so utterly absorbed in their roles, so unfettered and nakedly expressive. This is the kind of acting we always look for, but rarely see.

The storytelling is episodic, and the film takes a little while to get going, but it hits its stride.

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.

This is an exceptional film about nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. You will come out the other side of it a markedly enriched filmgoer.

There are moments in the second half of After Yang when some of the narrative beats get a little confusing or vague. Kogonada’s steady, often still, but never static compositions may not be enough for some viewers. Whatever. Clearly, actors respond to what he’s after.

A film of great spiritual intensity and haunting minimalism that enlarges your concepts of movies and of life. Like the monks of the Carthusian order, it distills something intoxicating through a style that's pure and rigorous.

A dreadlocks-wearing Moises Arias renders a career-best work, and his first in a Spanish-language feature, in the soiled shoes of Bigfoot, who appoints himself dictator when the chance arises to go rogue in the jungle. The Colombian American actor nails the demanding part procuring the larger-than-life persona of a deranged leader confident beyond his size: a toned Napoleon in briefs and black paint.

While the film's patient, moody progression into personal nightmare territory won't be for everyone, it's a genuinely evocative creation.