The director's return home here parallels that of Fernando, metaphorically and artistically. Our Lady of the Assassins is a film of clarity, feeling and electric intensity.

A beautiful and genuinely spirit-lifting film about poverty and education.

Ends up working like a charm.

It's good stuff: a non-fiction film on weighty issues that also manages to entertain.

It's the non-superhero elements of Spider-Man: Homecoming that make it a great movie, and a non-stop fun summer flick. There isn't an ounce of fat on this film, packing in so many story elements and characters, while finding room for small, funny asides and moments that make it an addictively rich, idiosyncratic and re-watchable movie.

Here's a funny, poignant oddball of a movie, existing on a galaxy far, far away from the likes of "Pacific Rim" or "World War Z" or anything whose computer-generated actions speak louder than words.

A film of fragile and esoteric pleasures, The Man in the Moon is not a movie that can be recommended to the general public and should probably even be protected from it. But for those who can respond to its tiny formal beauties, it is something to treasure. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

With an excellent cast and style, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is one gorgeous and dynamic fractured fairy tale.

Pictorially sumptuous and sexually provocative.

Eastwood's foursquare directorial aesthetic tends to heighten, rather than camouflage, a screenplay's shortcomings.

A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

Covino’s filmmaking is tremendously appealing, buoyant and playful, and in Splitsville, he dials everything up from The Climb, especially the comedy.

Some may find Results a little light on plot (it is). But with the Smulders character, we're treated to a refreshingly dimensional female lead. Kat isn't one of those aggravating Type A Katherine Heigl cliches. Nor is she a mere attractive doormat. She's prickly, a little lost, but running her own show, and on the road to something better.

Whatever you do, don't leave before watching the snippets that run during the closing credits--the self-referential, tongue in cheek "outtakes" are quite possibly the funniest part of this movie--a visual stunner that seems to have misplaced its heart.

Takes the raw truth and makes it jubilantly, terrifically entertaining.

Warts, entrails and all, I had a ball at Zombieland. It’s 81 minutes of my kind of stupid.

What really makes Alias Betty stand out, even from good recent French ensemble films like "Eight Women" and "Venus Beauty Institute," is that ingenious, Rendell-derived story. To kidnap an old phrase, it's a corker.

A fascinating examination of the joyous, turbulent self-discovery made by a proper, middle-aged woman.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Ferrari again sometime just for Cruz, and for a few of Mann’s most gratifying examples of classical Hollywood technique, done his way. The movie reinvents no wheels. But it sure knows how to film ‘em.

Frank's dialogue owes a little something to Elmore Leonard, but it's less comic and heavily brocaded.

Big moves with polish and assurance. It's too soon to tell whether Marshall has anything of her own to say, but Big is proof that she can handle the Hollywood machine, and that is no small thing.

From A.I. Bezzerides' "The Long Haul," with George Raft and Bogie as tough trucking brothers and Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino as the good woman and the bad.[06 Oct 2006, p.C8]

Keeps you off-balance as it establishes a world where every conversation is a flirtation, and trouble and heartbreak sneak in on little cat feet when no one's looking.

Love in the Afternoon is a 1957 romantic comedy by writer-director Billy Wilder that fondly re-created the atmosphere--the brio, wit, star personality and sardonic joie de vivre--of the great Hollywood-continental comic romances of the 1930s. And there's an obvious reason: It's a tribute from one movie comic master to the man who taught him how to do it. [15 Oct 1997, p.1]

One of the cinema's supreme, most outrageously eccentric and audacious technical experiments: the legendary single shot movie.

The performances of Holly Hunter and Ron Silver had something Stone’s and Carell’s lack: true drive and animal energy, a sense of athletic competitors who mean business even when they’re kidding, or saying they are.

Based on a true story, the movie has a hypnotic, documentary like appeal despite outlandish performances by Crispin Glover as the ringleader of the kids and Dennis Hopper as a wacked-out former hippie who offers them shelter. River's Edge is challenging to watch if only because it doesn't lecture. It simply presents these young people as wandering, stoned souls; shows a few of them grappling with moral responsibility, and allows the rest to fail. As we leave the theater, we can't help but wonder how common their behavior may be.

Bird has serious promise outside the animation realm; in "Ghost Protocol" he errs, I think, by shoving the camera too close to the bodies in the frame, so that the momentum and spatial relationships become awfully hard to parse.