It’s tough-minded and tender-hearted in equal measure. It’s also slyly insightful on the theme of chance elements in solo travel, and unexpected, emotionally tricky connections along the way.

Graced with Nair's loving direction, Witherspoon's radiance and that great cast, it is a treat, if somewhat less so than the novel.

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.

What Baldwin does with words, Jenkins does visually. It’s what Blanche DuBois says in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” In “Beale Street” that magic can be crushing, and soul-stirring, sometimes simultaneously. Jenkins’ epilogue, not found in the novel, may go a little far in its embrace of the affirmative. But that’s hardly the worst thing you can say about any film, let alone one as lovely as this one.

It's a wonderful movie and a credit to all of Ireland and all of its people and pubs. The movie deserves a supreme compliment: It's so good it makes you want to go out at once and start a family of your own. [17 Dec 1993, p.B]

The main thing with Cedar's film, I think, is to approach it not as a farce, not as a drama, not as a mystery, not as any genre in particular. It's a comic nightmare, in the vein of the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man," and Cedar proves masterly at playing the stakes for real.

It Could Happen to You is the movie that "Sleepless in Seattle" wanted to be, an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic comedy for the '90s, brought candidly up to date for the post-sexual revolution era, yet shimmering with all the cockeyed satin-and-popcorn glamor of the past.

Bold and totally off-the-wall comedy.

Cronenberg knows what he’s doing, and this is his most assured act of science-fiction effrontery to date.

A seriously entertaining highlight of the fall season.

It's a movie full of bewitching images and timeless fun and beauty.

A compelling piece of press criticism as it probes the media as terror's conduit of choice, spreading message and validating violence in the 1970s and today.

The first film in a long time with a true gift of gab. A lot of the time people actually talk fast in it. Its wisecracks actually crack wise.

The Messenger is not itself grueling, which is practically a miracle. Rather, this pungent little chamber piece offers a full yet delicate range of emotions, and it humanizes its characters so that polemics are left in the background.

Hinds has been ready for a role of this size and shape for years; it was simply a matter of finding it, and its finding him.

You wouldn't think the darn thing would have such lingering power.

That great ex-Berliner Wilder's cynical, darkly funny look at postwar Berlin--a hive of bombed-out buildings, desperate citizens and black-market morality, run by the U.S. military with a slightly blind eye. [02 Jun 2006, p.C4]

Like all good horror films (though it's more of a psychological thriller with a teeming, festering wealth of body-horror preoccupations), this one takes its central theme — cannibalism — as a way into a variety of other matters, other indicators of a society and a psyche under extreme duress.

A triumph of ambience, Rachel Getting Married is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme that feels like a party--bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.

Kidman crafts a characterization of breathtakingly controlled artifice, dead-on timing, dizzyingly precise humor. Her part is a knockout--in every sense of the word. [6 Oct 1995]

Slick adaptation of Woody Allen's play.

Lerman's excellent as Marcus, capturing his principles as well as his bullheadedness. Sarah Gadon's Olivia is no less fine.

Not since “Out of Sight” has a sort-of-crime-thriller, sort-of-romantic-comedy led with its sensual interests over its violent ones. That’s my idea of a good trade, and Powell is more relaxed and easygoing on screen here than ever before.

It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.

Peter O'Toole, still a British cinematic lion at 74, performs another movie miracle in the Roger Michell-Hanif Kureishi film Venus.

Of all the many documentaries that take you along on a movie shoot, one of my all-time favorites is this delightfully scrappy, sometimes poignant, often hilarious show.

Everything in the movie is excessive, and if you have no taste for flamboyant or violent genre pieces, you may find much of it--and especially the amazingly protracted climax--a little ridiculous. But what's fascinating about "Strange Days" is both its sheer kinetic energy, the vitality of the actors and the density and detail of its crazy little world. [13 Oct 1995, p.C2]

It's a work that sears the heart and conscience. The events are annihilating, the way they're told both beautiful and terrifying.