Often remarkable and often exasperating.

For a movie that is about a collection of oddballs, it can sometimes feel rather generic. But at its core, the film is not a comedy at all. The eccentricities issue from real adversity.

The emotional stakes are large-scale, and Farhadi honors them by delving into their intricacies.

Damon is an agile comic performer, and Soderbergh knows how to serve him up without losing sight of the ultimate seriousness behind it all.

Has the stately picturesqueness of old-fashioned “quality” British cinema. At its center, though, is a performance that cuts right through the decorum.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

In addition to being a beloved author and illustrator, Beatrix is also presented as an early feminist and environmentalist who took control of her literary empire and saved vast acres of luscious farmland from greedy developers, eventually bequeathing property to Britain's National Trust.

It all seems like a stunt, especially since Beaven has also written a just-published book about his experiences, but he and Conlin are an engaging pair who don't let zealotry get in the way of humor.

Although Howard doesn’t go in for a lot of musicological analysis of Pavarotti’s genius, which would have enriched the presentation, he compensates by giving us an ample dose of the singing.

Dano and Cusack never let us forget that Wilson is human before he is anything else – genius, icon, legend. The film provides him with the succor that was so lacking in so many aspects of his life. I would like to think that the real Brian Wilson, looking at this film, would be OK with it.

I think the film overreaches in casting Simone as a standard-bearer against racism and sexism, but it’s filled with mesmerizing clips from throughout her performing career as well as numerous interviews with Simone, both audio and on film.

It's all something of a stunt - "Speed" on a shoestring - but very well done.

Garrone's messy storytelling compounds an already messy history. He's a powerful filmmaker, though, and a fearless one.

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.

Their chief adversary is the greedy, heedless BP executive played by John Malkovich in his finest slinky-slimy mode. At its best, the movie is like “The Towering Inferno” but without all the sudsy subplots that doused that film’s fires.

It brings the nature versus nurture debate into shattering focus.

One of the main rallying points of The Messenger is that birds have “something to tell us” about the environment’s mounting ecological hazards. The canary in a coal mine phenomenon, according to this film, has assumed global proportions.

Sheen is startlingly good here, and so is Timothy Spall as Clough's trusted and much abused lieutenant.

Best where it counts the most - in its recognition of how difficult it will be for Dan and Drey to turn their lives around.

The movie is small, sincere, and riveting from start to finish. [06 Jan 1995, p.10]

Brit Marling, who starred in and co-wrote Cahill’s debut feature, “Another Earth,” is very good as Ian’s lab assistant and eventual wife, and a young Indian girl named Kashish, a nonactress I would guess, is unforgettable.

If there's anything missing from Bailey and Thompson's searing documentary, it's a consideration of the possible arguments against Campbell and Freeth.

Too much of this film is attenuated and vague, but it has moments of deep melancholy.

The film, refreshingly, is less concerned with how Nathan performs in the competition than in how he navigates his way through the bramble of human interactions leading up to it.

Alternately discursive, philosophical, agitprop, and accusatory, the film itself is a species of essay.

At first I thought Breathe would play out like a Gallic version of “Mean Girls,” but it’s more troubling than that.

This is a movie of high innocence, set at a time in life when romantic love is still a frolic and the seaside is a balm that quells all ills.

The sunniness of Fastball leaves out a lot, but watching it can be as pleasurable as an afternoon at the ballpark.

While almost entirely family-friendly, the film deserves its PG rating: One plot point near the very end would have totally freaked my tender childhood sensibilities.

It makes you nostalgic for the pangs of young love.

His greatest legacy, however, as this film documents, was his courage in the endgame of his life.

Clarke started out as a dancer studying with Martha Graham, and much of Ornette has a dancelike swing and propulsion. What it doesn't provide is a cogent look at Coleman's artistry. This is not a jazz film for people who want to sit back and get mellow. The film itself is a species of jazz. It's offbeat without missing the beat.

The real star here is the big, unmanned freight train sparking through Pennsylvania at 70 m.p.h. while carrying hazardous cargo. Best of all, the train doesn't have any dialogue.

One of those stranger-than-fiction documentaries that just gets weirder and weirder as you’re watching it.

The film could have been improved by dropping a few battles, and I wish Caesar were not the only ape with the power of human speech. I, for one, would love to hear what Maurice the orangutan sounds like spouting the King’s English.

Kore-eda has a gift for portraying goodness that is quite rare. He does so without a whisper of banality.

It’s a great introduction to French cinema for all those who have yet to make its acquaintance.

As fiercely unsentimental as Disgrace is, it offers by the end a measure of hope, and because that hope is so hard-won, it has the ring of truth.

What the film is ultimately about is the extent to which love and caring can help turn a life around for a person deemed beyond reach.

It's a classic example of how a movie can be great without, strictly speaking, being good. But when something is this funny, who wants to speak strictly?

Beverly Hills Cop is an action movie and an Eddie Murphy vehicle first, but Brest's dramatic intelligence surfaces often enough to make a welcome difference in what could have been an ordinary crowd-pleaser. [13 Dec. 1984, p.35]

It ranks high on the Cronenberg scale as one of his more disturbing forays into depravity.

Craig makes you aware of something that the Bond series, in its pursuit of steamy sex and cartoon action, quickly lost sight of: 007 is a killer. That's what he's licensed to do.

Eastwood has made an honorable movie about honor, but the naivete of the conception - which some will call purity - keeps "Flags" at arm's length from greatness.

Zvyagintsev would have done better, I think, to include more of the beauty that has gone out of this world, if only to heighten its loss.

Melissa Leo is startlingly good...You feel like you're watching a life, not a performance.

The living-apart scenario is contrived – there was no way for these men to share a space somewhere? – but the two actors are so good that it doesn’t much matter.

The movie confirms what most of us have known all along: Electability is all about staying on message.

Not nearly as great as Herzog’s films, or as monumentally deranged as Coppola’s, it nevertheless casts a spell of its own. It’s one of those films that, at least for me, grows in the memory.

Michael Winterbottom, who also directed “The Trip,” is known for his avant-garde cinematic ways, but with these films he wisely sets down the camera and for the most part lets the actors play out their improvs.

Family home movies and photos and archival clips round out the film, which holds its hero-worshiping to fairly tolerable levels.

The best of it has the comradely, free-swinging bawdiness of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

Tom Hooper, who directed "The King's Speech," is not great with action and big set pieces, but he gets the job done. What makes Les Misérables work are the up-close moments when he can focus on performance and song.

Most middle movies in a trilogy simply mark time. Not this one.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

It's minor, but powerfully so.

More than awe, the film provokes gratitude for what this man did.

As was also true of Pixar's last movie, "Cars," Ratatouille is better at pleasing the eye than the other senses.

Has its pleasures, foremost being its look – a sophisticated puppet primitivism backdropped by near-psychedelic colorations.

It's an expertly engineered popcorn movie - hold the butter substitute - but it also tries (and fails) to be a love story for the ages.

Alternately inspirational and disheartening, galvanizing and wearying.

With all this working against it, Les Cowboys strikes a fresh chord. The rise of jihadism has infused this revenge scenario with (all too literally) new blood.

The marvelous Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda shows a strong affinity for the humors and longings of childhood. It's an adult movie about children that feels made from the inside out.

This enjoyable Dreamworks animated comedy is well timed.

I rue the day when this becomes a Broadway musical.

Tries mightily to make the case that Spitzer was brought down by his political enemies.

Shoot the Moon doesn't reach the eccentric emotional heights of John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, perhaps the best family drama ever made. But flaws and all, it towers over most of the kiddie movies that have dominated the cinema scene for too long. It will be taken very seriously for a very long time. [28 Jan 1982, p.18]

Throughout the film there are small, rapturous moments.

The movie captures so well the push-pull of family dysfunction that, after a while, even the Fangs’ extreme eccentricities seem routine. And that’s the point: The filmmakers are trying to demonstrate that, no matter what we think our family dynamic may be, we’re all on the same strange spectrum.

The role of Deb is not written with any great depth, but Miller gets into the character’s psychological complications in a way that almost compensates for the lack.

I wish the entirety of Polisse were as good as its parts, but perhaps its free-form, mood-swing approach was unavoidable, given the subject. The audience is put through the same wringer as the cops.

The odyssey goes on a bit too long, and I suppose a taste for extra dry British comedy is a requirement, but this "Trip" is well worth one.

This may seem like a stunt, but the experience, with many of the sitters tearing up, or smiling beatifically, is overwhelming to watch.

There are wonderful sequences strewn throughout, like the moment when Lazhar, at a school dance, begins to slowly sway to the music as if in a trance.

The film is a dual portrait in courage.

The gifted Zhang Yi-mou directed this gripping and colorful drama, which mingles beauty and perversity in equal proportions. [15 Mar 1991, p.12]

Very difficult to characterize and that's why I like it. The best I can do is to call it a sunny tragedy.

At his best, Costner both exalts and complicates the strong and silent types who crowd, often to diminishing effect, so much of our American movie mythology.

While I don't entirely rule out the possibility that Bruce is a hoaxster, it seems more likely that his story is one of those weird scientific anomalies that more frequently turn up as an Oliver Sacks case history.

Danes doesn't quite fit into the mindscape – she's too bland for a human star – but Cox comes of age quite convincingly, De Niro is a hoot, as is Ricky Gervais as a slimy tradesman. Pfeiffer has a field day.

Bad Words does to spelling bees what “Bad Santa” did to Santa Claus.

Chronicles the eerie and oddly inspiring story of Johnston's ongoing battles to survive - both as artist and human being.

Here at least the gobbledygook is entertaining.

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.

In all, A Cry in the Dark is one of the year's most engaging films, well acted (by everyone except Sam Neill, as Streep's deeply religious husband) and made with a clear sense of social awareness as well as movie-style drama. [25 Nov 1988, p.27]

Positioned somewhere between sitcom and piercing human drama, The Kids Are All Right, is both overtly familiar and cutting edge.

Director Andrew Wagner, adapting a novel by Brian Morton, is sometimes understated to a fault, but his work with the actors, who also include Lili Taylor as Leonard's daughter, is impeccable.

The filmmakers are clearly on Wise’s side, but they are also eminently fair.

What separates Charles Ferguson’s Time to Choose from the many other documentaries about climate change is that, after dutifully presenting many of the usual horrifying climate statistics, it lays out a series of possible solutions, already available, to the crisis.

Splendid acting helps Jordan achieve most of his goals, although some may find the romantic and religious elements an uneasy mixture.

Montenegro, the star of "Central Station," and her daughter make a remarkable pair. They hold your attention even when the emptily portentous story does not.

Although simpler and less mysterious than the great Hayao Miyazaki movies, the gently melancholic From Up on Poppy Hill is still a must see at a time when family entertainment is too often synonymous with blandness.

I can agree that the power brokers in this scenario, who effectively broke Barnes's will, have far more interest in tourism than in masterpieces. But casting this story as a battle between the elites and the philistines mischaracterizes the situation.

Ultimately, the blight is so overwhelming that the film collapses from corruption overload.

Despite much of the turmoil depicted, there is a sweetness to parts of this film that is reminiscent of the 1961 British movie "A Taste of Honey."

Rosen­thal serves up a hilarious documentary of his travails developing "The Voroniny," or, as it was known in development, "Everybody Loves Kostya."

What makes the movie a superior specimen of traditional screen storytelling is largely the exquisite care director Armstrong has taken to make every shot as radiantly appealing as possible, bathing even the melancholy aspects of the plot in a glow that's as pleasing to the eye as it is warming to the heart. [23 Dec 1994]

[Cameron] may not be a great artist, or a visionary, but in its look, and its feeling for family, this behemoth enterprise still has an ardent, cornball grandeur to it. I look forward to “Avatar 3.”