A commercially compromised but often brilliant updating of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. [27 Sep 2013, p.C6]

The Marx Brothers in one of their messiest, sloppiest, greatest Paramount comedies. [27 Feb 2015, p.C5]

A great, velvety, beautiful anachronism. It's a movie almost drunk on romance, literature and cinema, a splendid period picture that keeps rashly breaking rules and boundaries [17 Sept 1993, Friday, p.A]

Superb crime thriller. [07 Sep 1998, p.1N]

Busby Berkeley's finest hour comes in this flabbergasting Warners musical, with James Cagney as a Berkeley-like choreographer who directs, for a string of Broadway theaters, a series of "preview" dance numbers that blow your socks off.

An exciting World War II romantic triangle drama about a young woman (Tatyana Samoilova) caught in war's turmoil, "Cranes" was hailed by 1950s U.S. critics for its humanism. But what burns this movie into memory is its stunning visual style: the rich, mobile camerawork of Kalatozov and genius cinematographer Sergei Uresevsky. [22 Feb 2008, p.C2]

The film strongly asserts Ronstadt’s rock ’n’ roll bona fides as a trailblazing and wildly successful solo female artist in the man’s world of late ’60s and early ’70s country rock.

A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.

It is enraging yet nuanced, an elusive combination for any documentary.

The Sun sheds only so much literal light on its chosen subject; it's a film of shadows and silence, the calm before and after the storm. But everything you see and hear carries weight and an eerie poetic undercurrent.

Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story.

It's full of cinematic invention, rich verbal and visual poetry, packed with raw life and nonpareil acting. [Dirctor's Cut]

This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.

More than a great love story. It's both a lighthearted and deeply impassioned inspirational lesson about life. [4 April 1986]

Sold as a romance, but actually is one of the funniest pictures to come out in quite some time. [15 Jan 1988]

It's a joy. Altman does Dallas the way he did "Nashville" in Nashville or Hollywood in "The Player."

One of the most beautiful of all recent films on the problems of old age -- and on the interplay of theater and life.

What happens in Night of the Kings is a piece of traditional oration and impermanent art, significantly marked by both its temporal and improvisational qualities. It’s both a power struggle and a ritual practiced by the collective within a microcosm of society housed under the oppression of the state, and a powerful demonstration of the transporting, and liberating, power of narrative.

Maiden is a grand adventure, the likes of which we don’t always see too often anymore.

For all its cynicism, the movie floats on a darkly exhilarating brand of escapism. It’s one of the year’s highlights in any genre.

Of all the movies that try to take us into the mind and viewpoint of a child, Carol Reed's 1948 The Fallen Idol, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story, is one of the most ingenious.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful.

Paths of Glory is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's The Green Berets or Sylvester Stallone's Rambo. [25 Feb 2005, p.C2]

A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.

Among its many excellences, Vera Drake functions superbly as a pure thriller; the last half is reminiscent in structure and detail of Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man."

Not since Robert Altman took on “Popeye” a generation ago, and lost, has a major director addressed such a well-loved, all-ages title. This time everything works, from tip to tail.

That sort of depth is rare in most movies; it's the trademark, however, of John Cassavetes.

The funniest -- and almost the saddest -- silent comedy. [20 Apr 2001, p.C1]