Of course, on some level, no movie about this subject can fail to move us, and Son of Saul has its share of powerful sequences. I wanted it to be great, though, with a largeness of vision to match the awful immensity of its subject.

The wistfulness in this movie is large-souled. Theodore may worry that his love for Samantha makes him a freak, but Amy knows that “anybody who loves is a freak.” All this may sound touchy-feely in the worst way, but Jonze is trying to get at how we seek romantic connection in this brave (or not so brave) new world. Like Theodore, he risks looking foolish.

Children may enjoy it, aside from the youngest, who might find it too weird for comfort. Its main audience is adults, though. And not just any adults, but those in the mood for venturesome fare that's both surreal and hilarious.

Ultimately “Ex Libris” demonstrates that libraries are about people, and what gives the film its great and accumulating force is that people are infinitely complex.

The Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley set out to make a straightforward documentary about her mother, Diane, who died when she was 11, but by the time Stories We Tell was finished five years later, it had become unclassifiable.

Brando made one of his most indelible impressions in this relentlessly dramatic, ever-controversial tale of loyalty and betrayal in the world of working-class unions.

What comes through so powerfully in this movie is a portrait of an entire generation making its way from death throes to new beginnings.

Waltz With Bashir is a supremely courageous act, not only as a piece of filmmaking, but much more so as a moral testament.

Baker is a humanist – there is nothing exploitative about what he does here. He’s after deeper emotional truths.

The actresses are so expert, especially Colman, with her grievous, hardbitten woe, that you may not care, but if one is to mock this sort of historical extravaganza, I much prefer the nutbrain Monty Python approach to all this deep-dish folderol.

This poetic and compassionate drama by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan combines the intricate structure of his earlier movies with an emotional power that raises his remarkable career to a whole new level.

Has social, psychological, and ultimately mystical overtones that raise it leagues above most other teen-centered comedies.

To call it “immersive” is an understatement.

The pessimism pervading this film is summed up by Shalom, who says, speaking of the decades of occupation: "The future is very dark."

All told, he's (Linklater) one of today's most versatile American filmmakers, and Before Sunset finds his light shining as brightly as ever.

The story raises hard moral questions relating to the relative value of human lives and the overwhelming debt that may be felt by those who benefit when others sacrifice. But the movie falls short of excellence because it doesn't so much explore these issues as finesse them in an action-filled climax.

Parts of the film are flatly directed...It certainly keeps the audience guessing, though, and few movies explode so many stereotypes. [31 Dec 1992]

The action sequences, at least as feats of engineering, are mightily impressive. But Miller is so caught up in all his hardcore allegorical hoo-ha that he never lightens up. Does he think maybe he’s Homer?

Granik filmed in actual locations and enlisted many locals as actors. They blend unobtrusively with the professionals in the cast.

Helen Mirren gives the mostly subtly expressive performance based on a living historical figure that I've ever seen.

This is the second documentary he has made about tragic jazz artists who died young – the first was “My Name Is Albert Ayler” – and he clearly has an abiding fascination with them. But what draws him most of all is the music, and that’s as it should be.

Often remarkable and often exasperating.

Filmed and acted to near perfection, it's one of the year's most innovative and exciting pictures.

The eroticism is all in the fittings of fabric and the power plays of a couple who make Mr. and Mrs. de Winters in “Rebecca” seem like Ward and June Cleaver from “Leave It to Beaver.”

This territory is familiar if you remember the great BBC miniseries "Upstairs Downstairs," but Altman gives it a new twist with his restlessly roaming camera and incisively satirical approach. He's still near the peak of his powers.

It takes time to grow accustomed to the docu- drama's stylized approach, influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard. But this nearly six-hour movie is generous with time.

The openness of these people is often astonishing – and a sign of hope.

In Panahi's case, he is insuperably handicapped by his current constraints. And yet, despite everything, here is This Is Not a Film, which is emphatically a film – and an extraordinary one.

Brilliantly acted, sumptuously filmed, and overflowing with mellifluous music.

The film is an indictment of a cultural tragedy; a testament to the steadfastness, against all odds, of the Indigenous community; and a plea for healing.

(Jonze and Kaufman's) work is so bold, funny, and original that it's hard to believe they aren't wide-screen veterans.

Sharper and smarter than any animation since "Shrek 2," making it one of the season's supermovies.

What grounds the overflow of incident are the many human touches that personalize both the anguish and the stray glimpses of freedom.

Fugit gives a starmaking performance as the teenage reporter, and Crudup and Lee are excellent as the band's lead guitarist and singer, respectively.

Perhaps inevitably, it falls short of its ambitions. But it’s bracing to see a studio movie these days, particularly one with such huge scope, that at least attempts to serve up more than recycled goods.

What struck home the most forcefully for me in Cold War is its depiction, insidious and unrelenting, of how artists under communism suffered for their art. At its best, the film is like a bulletin from a benighted world.

Weir's offbeat directing makes the most of Andrew Niccol's inventive screenplay, which includes large doses of surprisingly sardonic satire aimed at today's entertainment trends.

The film drags a bit and Irglova's inexperience as an actor sometimes leaves her costars in the lurch. But it's a sweet little film just the same.

The extraordinary tact and compassion with which Victor dramatizes Agnes’s assault and its aftermath allows us to see this story for what it truly is – a diary of personal reclamation.

Driver’s low-key charisma in the role rescues it from terminal dullness, and there are a few fine sidelights.

This great masterpiece of German film is evocative and inventive from its first shot to its last.

What United 93 demonstrates, as if we needed proof, is that it is too soon - it may always be too soon - to sort out the feelings from that day.

A compulsively watchable movie that's also a provocative inquiry into the ability of the criminal-justice system to determine culpability and truth.

The film suffers from late-stage Scorsese-itis – wacky, low-slung, high-octane melodrama with lots of yelling and overacting.

The film's final seven-minute shot is one of the great denouements in film history.

Still packs an entertaining punch with its blend of old-movie formulas, new-age philosophies, and video-game visuals. A small amount of new material, added for the 20th-anniversary reissue, is fun to look for but doesn't make much difference to the story or its impact. [Special Edition]

Thoughtful and reflective, it stands with the most exquisitely crafted films in recent memory, joining eloquently conceived images to an uncommonly literate screenplay. [17 Sept 1993, Arts, p.11]

A complicated story that demands your full attention; Mr. Gondry unfolds it at a mind-bending pace. This alone makes it a hugely refreshing respite from ordinary multiplex fare.

This is epic filmmaking on a profoundly human scale, directed to perfection and magnificently acted by everyone in sight.

Jesse Moss’s documentary The Overnighters is being hailed as a modern-day “Grapes of Wrath,” which, up to a point, it is. But it’s far more complicated than that.

I don’t get the enthusiasm for this movie, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, which is such a cooked-up piece of claptrap that I half expected Darth Vader to pick up the baton. We’re supposed to think that Terence’s tough love is more “honest” than the usual pussyfooting tutelage, but in any sane society this guy would have been brought up on charges long ago.

The director is fortunate to have cast actors who fully embody their roles. Muehe, who once played Josef Mengele in Costa-Gavras's "Amen," has the ability to let you see far beneath his masklike countenance. Koch, dashing and intense, is entirely believable as a man of the theater; Gedeck exudes a sensuousness that this covert society cannot abide.

It's great, fantastical fun.

In a series of deft vignettes, the Dardennes offer up a microcosm of an entire working-class contingent, and each vignette is a universe all to itself.

An honorable try, the movie nevertheless doesn’t fully capture the enormity of the tragedy. At best it’s a sorrowful, necessary dirge. Other times, it’s like “Goodfellas” on the range but, understandably, without the spring-coiled momentum of that film.

Frederick Wiseman’s documentary National Gallery is for art lovers, movie lovers – basically for anybody. Ostensibly a film about London’s famous museum, it’s really about the experience of art in all its manifestations.

Petit, by the way, is still very much alive and spry. I saw him at a screening of the film at the Sundance Film Festival where he spoke to the audience afterwards. On his way up to the podium, he tripped.

Too much repetition and an unconvincing finale take a toll on the film's overall effectiveness.

The film pays off in the end when, almost imperceptibly, the rush of emotions it stirs in us rises to a soft crescendo.

Cumulatively, the everyday voices of those who waited in vain for help that never came, mingled with the concern of prominent national figures, presents a poignant picture of official blunders and personal loss, and provides important national lessons if another threat this size hits an American city.

I hate to sound blurby, but Borat is the funniest comedy I've seen since I don't know when.

This delicate, hand-drawn marvel is lyrical and heartbreaking in ways that most live-action movies never approach.

Perhaps the most cogent and straightforward dissection of the Bush Administration missteps leading up to the current Iraq nightmare.

Gunda is one of the most immersive and eye-widening documentaries I’ve ever seen.

The overall effect is about the same -- slow start, then escalating suspense and violence. Today's shock-movie fans will enjoy shrieking at it, and others should skip it. In space, no one can hear you ask for your money back.

The Artist is full of homages to many other films. I suppose it will be fun for cinéastes to pick out the references, but not all of them – like the ones from "Citizen Kane" or "Sunset Boulevard" – are especially germane.

Although the action tends to become melodramatic and even overwrought at times, the imaginative power of Campion's images and emotional insights (especially with regard to the heroin) rarely allow the story to seem artificial or exaggerated. [12 Nov 1993]

The linkages between these mostly brief snippets is somewhat haphazard, but, given the waywardness of her travels, that’s appropriate.

It probes the attitudes of French men and women toward love, sex, and promiscuity through the story of a self-centered intellectual who strays from his middle-class girlfriend to pursue a nurse with unconventional ideas about relationships. Jean-Pierre Leaud gives one of the most memorable performances in his remarkable career. [19 Dec 1997, p.13]

This pungently filmed 1947 melodrama doesn't rank with Clouzot classics like "Diabolique" and "The Wages of Fear," but it's full of hard-boiled charm and has a musical score that adds extra dimensions to its impact.

Wong has acquired a loyal cult following over the years, and Dupont's exquisitely filmed episodes show why.

Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima is his companion piece to "Flags of Our Fathers" and in almost every way is superior.

The wonder, the astonishment, is that these puppets are invested with a full range of human emotion.

Piccoli gives one of the most nuanced performances of his distinguished career, but the primary star of the movie is de Oliveira, who unfolds the story with unfailing skill and sensitivity.

It's a rousing movie within its limitations. [13 May 1982, p.18]

The film medium has often been discussed in academic terms as a vehicle to contain the passage of time. But “Three Minutes” does much more than that. Although it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of the film image and how it can affect us, it is also the least theoretical of movies. We are bearing witness.

The film's approach is highly instructive, deeply moving, and geared to deploring the racism that breeds violence rather than reactivating old hatreds.

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

The central conceit of The Death of Stalin is that what is funny is not always just funny. In this sense, the film is closer in spirit to “Dr. Strangelove” than, say Mel Brooks’s “The Producers.” The latter was a jape; the former was a cautionary howl.

It would be too convenient, I think, to write this movie off as a study of untreated mental illness. The performance of Jean-Baptiste (who was so memorable in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies”) transcends the clinical. She shows us what lies beneath Pansy’s suffering. This woman who can’t abide other people is terrified of being alone.

McDormand is a bit too spartan and sealed off in the role. Her steeliness doesn’t have enough emotional levels.

This restraint of acting and filmmaking results in a story that's all the more powerful. While many films try to force the audience into laughing and crying in the right places, Au Revoir les enfants invites us simply to watch, think, and feel according to our own perceptions. The result is touching in a way no manipulative film could equal. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

Huppert never loses sight of the fact that Nathalie’s wounded heart often overrules her steel-trap mind.

Gustave’s protégé, the “lobby boy” Zero Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori and as an adult by F. Murray Abraham), is as much an enigma as Gustave.

The paradox of Train Dreams is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living.

Winter Sleep, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or in Cannes, runs almost 3-1/2 hours. These will be some of the best three-plus hours you will spend at any movie this year. I’ve seen movies half that length that felt twice as long.

The surprise is that, at least for its first half, this newest A Star Is Born is so powerfully fresh.

The larger point in Citizenfour is that dictatorships have always relied on the massive gathering of information in order to control their populations. In this brave new cyber world, it is all too easy for democracies to cross the line, too.

Cantet has rich insights into this material, and brings them alive through sensitive acting and powerful filmmaking.

Given the subject, the movie is too romanticized, and Christie's eyes remain too sharp here to convincingly convey someone whose memory is fast slipping away. Much of it is powerful anyway.

It's a marvelous performance in a marvelous movie, one that sneaks up on you while you're watching it.

With scrupulous fairness, Ferguson meticulously lays out for us the whole sordid mess.

Everybody connected to this movie appears to be operating on the same wavelength: They want to do justice to the lives of the people that we see. To a remarkable degree, they do.

The suspense isn't exactly breathtaking, but there are some mighty fine laughs in this clever Claymation cartoon.Family fun for all.

The director's cut of this 2001 cult fantasy is a deliriously subtle exploration of storytelling possibilities, and a deliciously wry teen-pic to boot. Brilliant.

A remarkable movie about a remarkable friendship. It honors the audience's intelligence, which makes it a double rarity.

A lean, efficient modern Western that is so satisfyingly constructed I’m tempted to say it’s just about perfect. There’s a special pleasure in watching a movie that knows exactly what it’s after and then, in scene after scene, gets it.

As a piece of poetic compression, it ranks with the opening of Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons."