Scott is able to make it fresh and lyrical, as well as give us rousingly exciting scenes of nature in eruption. [02 Feb 1996]

Robust safari movie, partly remade from "Red Dust," co-starring Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. [23 Jun 2006, p.C2]

Takes a potentially explosive subject and does it subtly and perceptively.

Kim evokes everything from "Seconds" to "Nip/Tuck" here, but his sureness of touch and lack of melodrama make the themes pertinent and vivid. A heartening step up from Kim's previous film, "The Bow."

Fresh is Boyz N the Hood meets Searching for Bobby Fischer. Key to the success of the film is the solemn performance by young Sean Nelson. We stare at him in much the same way as we gazed upon that little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List, a human face walking through a tragedy.

The miracle is that even with a bit of dramaturgical clunkiness The Past is fluid, intimate cinema. Few directors today can shoot in such tightly confined spaces, with such a determined control over his actors' movements, and make the drama work so well.

The movie suffers a bit from the sentimental, violin-underscored valentine approach favored in Selznick movies, but the characterizations, particularly in delivering Dickens' cartoon grotesqueries, are plum. None is better than W. C. Fields, who might be faulted for bringing his own legendary screen persona to Mr. Micawber, but he does so superbly, without sacrificing Dickens' own creation. [13 Aug 1989, p.20C]

Do not expect dynamic filmmaking from Love Is Strange. It's about other things, and Lithgow and Molina are splendid, their eyes full of wisdom and experience.

Watching Jonathan Caouette's amazing autobiographical documentary Tarnation is like descending into a pop-music, underground-movie hell and heaven, the shattered and shattering landscape of a living body and mind.

It’s frequently gripping and finally very moving. The director’s innate decency and forthright sense of craft does justice to a painful subject — one with unexpected connections to the 2020 pandemic moment.

Volcanically funny. [23 Dec 2005, p.C7]

Most crime movies, even alleged indies, make it easy for the audience to take sides and establish clear rooting interests. Good Time is better than that: It’s not always easy to take, yet you can’t look away.

It's an unabashed pacifist movie that really works, emotionally and dramatically.

The National Society of Film Critics recently cited Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, the nuttiest lil' picture ever released in 3-D, as the best film of 2014, nosing out "Boyhood" by a single vote.

More than any previous screen role, this one affords Damon a chance to work his sly comic chops.

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.

Perry may never make a movie for the masses, whoever they are. But his truest work burrows into weird, blackly comic places few other filmmakers would dare explore.

A functioning, funny, weirdly touching fable of artistic angst and aspiration, a meditation on fame and its terrors and the metaphoric usefulness of masks and huge fake heads.

Throughout Becoming Astrid, August acquits herself brilliantly; the woman we come to know is a tangle of impulses and qualities, and feels vibrantly alive.

The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual.

Compared with the most recent Disney animated features, "Space Jam" is, at times, a hoot, especially when it has fun with Michael's less-than-stellar baseball career and the way his fellow players were starstruck. [15 Nov 1996, p.A]

Though Bertuccelli's film orbits around a lie, the story is really less about deception and suspense than it is a moving portrait of female and familial bonds.

Good and creepy, The Mist comes from a Stephen King novella and is more the shape, size and quality of the recent “1408,” likewise taken from a King story, than anything in the persistently fashionable charnel house inhabited by the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises.

Ghostbusters is a hoot. It's Murray's picture, and in a triumph of mind over matter, he blows away the film's boring special effects with his one-liners. Spotting a lusty, totally transformed, fire-breathing Slgourney Weaver, whose body has been overtaken by a spirit, Murray walks past her saying, "That's a new look for you, isn't it?" Thank you, Bill. And don't get outta here, you knucklehead. We like you in this kind of movie.

Jordan Peele’s Us begins so spectacularly well, and sustains its game of doubles so cleverly for most of its two hours, it’s an unusual sort of letdown when the story doesn’t quite hang together and “deliver” the way Peele managed with his 2017 debut feature, “Get Out.”

Joseph Cotten as a killer, Monroe as his adulterous wife slithering under the sheets and Jean Peters as the unfortunate witness in this taut Niagara Falls thriller. [09 Jun 2006, p.C7]

A tough-minded, empathetic portrait of dreamers on the edge.

Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic.