The film does succeed in making the story universal, giving us the drama as well as the history, the fire as well as cool examination. It's a movie that haunts you afterward.

Another masterpiece from one of the world's more neglected great directors, a master artist who here reveals the soul of another.

The film is intimate without feeling particularly deep or complicated. Not that it needs to be.

This film carries us so touchingly into their world, it would take a heart of stone, finally, to ignore them.

Marlon Brando returns to the movies with one of his funniest performances as, in essence, Don Corleone with a screw loose.

Too much of “John Wick 4″ mistakes grandiloquence for excitement. But yes, as bloody diversion goes, the audience gets its money’s worth.

To miss this film is to cheat yourself and your family of a memorable moviegoing experience.

This is not a raucous family takedown; nor is Karam’s tale a matter of artificial family conflicts, tidily resolved. The Humans gets a lot done in a short amount of time, in a single, two-level setting, plus a few fraught intimations of what’s down the hall or around the corner.

As the title character — a professional gambler with a lot behind him, and not much impulse to dredge it up — Oscar Isaac makes for a magnetic sphinx indeed. His is not the only good performance. But it’s the crucial one.

Bigelow's is a synthetic talent, in the good sense of the word: She draws together a rich, imaginative range of cultural references (the film noir, the Western, the horror movie, the love story) and narrative styles (the lyrical, the expressionist, the action-based, the psychological), making something new out of the traces of the old. [2 Oct 1987, p.A]

A strangely powerful yet meandering film that takes a long time to make its point.

It's an exciting but brainy, cross-cultural thriller about modern London and life in a contemporary urban pressure cooker, and it depends more on plot, character and atmosphere than it does on chases and gunfire.

Told with such sadness and exaltation, such mastery of image and sound, that watching it makes you feel renewed and hopeful.

An Adam Sandler movie with class, and if that sounds like an oxymoron, so be it. The movie is a happy nightmare of silly-smart movie comedy that defies category - and challenges expectations involving Sandler and his pictures.

Diamond Men's potential as a diamond in the rough turn out to be more "rough" than "diamond."

Chungking Express is a breezy little Hong Kong movie that has more life, energy, humanity and sheer visual zing than most other shows you'll see in a month or so. And, an hour after watching it, you may indeed be hungry for more. Not necessarily because the show is shallow or unsatisfying, or doesn't leave a strong impression, but because the spontaneity and high energy of it is what's so much fun.

The Princess Bride wants to be sweet and warm, but it doesn't want to take the chance of seeming uncool -- and that is an attitude far, far removed from innocence. [9 Oct 1987]

It is the aviation scenes that make the movie memorable. The story around which they are built is just another story, similar to, but not so gripping as "The Rough Riders." But any lack here is made up for in the airship maneuvers. They are magnificent. [01 Nov 1927, p.37]

One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life.

Regardless of your interest in the technical side of filmmaking, however, if your taste runs slightly to the dark side, you'll have a very good time with "Trouble in Mind." [21 March 1986, p.AN]

After Dark, My Sweet does capture Thompson's characteristic mood - a sort of lurid fatality, where moral questions have long since dropped out and there isn't much use struggling - but it doesn't have much of his distinctive, disruptive texture. The film is much too smooth for that, much too professional and much too carefully executed. [24 Aug 1990, p.H]

Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

This is a superb picture, sharp, open-minded, wised-up and cinematically accomplished.

After the Wedding defies the odds: For once, the bigger the emotion, the truer the moviegoing experience.

Now comes The Dark Knight Rises, which makes "The Dark Knight" look like "Dora the Explorer" and is more of a 164-minute anxiety disorder than a movie.

This is a really good film. It just isn't the traditionally rousing one many will expect, and the trailers promise.

It’s the time travel conceit that keeps “Endgame” hopping, and the trial-and-error sequences recall some of the best parts of the first “Iron Man” 11 years back.