Although the documentary is something of a patchwork affair and lacks the late singer's ineffable smoothness and rhythmic brilliance, it emphatically makes the case that here was one of the four or five all-time great female jazz voices – or "song stylists," as she called herself.

The humor is broad, the jokes not of the first freshness, and the cast, especially Bousdoukus, is hammy. And, for the record, the upscale menu, which is supposed to be scrumptious, doesn't look as tasty as the downscale one.

The results are far more exciting than most Hollywood espionage thrillers.

Three short documentaries about photography made by one of France's finest directors.

It's an engrossing and inventive drama despite its flaws.

The movie makes up in sweep and splendor what it lacks in psychological depth and dramatic impact.

A triumph of psychological drama, owing as much to Ms. Bier's sensitive style as to Anders Thomas Jensen's smart screenplay, based on Bier's own story idea.

The Last Station isn’t all that it should be, but whenever these two actors are onscreen, it’s like a great night at the theater.

It's all fairly entertaining but also confusing for anybody who doesn't get the Wall Street lingo. Irons, as the company's chief executive officer, seems to sympathize with us: He keeps asking his minions to explain the impending problems in plain English.

The best parts of Wonder Woman are frivolous in the best way.

Because we know almost from the get-go that things will turn out bad-to-bittersweet for them, the movie is like one long autopsy of what went wrong, starting with Day No. 488.

A mixed package, but often fun to watch.

To the film’s credit, Diana’s gilded-prison desperation is not displayed as a martyrdom for which she is blameless. This royal can be a royal pain, and Stewart doesn’t flinch from the more unsavory aspects of Diana’s woe.

One of the best pictures so far this year, marking a high point of Rudolph's career and reconfirming the extraordinary talent Mr. Campbell has shown in earlier films. Dentistry will never seem the same.

What The Revenant attempts but fails to do is create a larger vision from all this survivalist mayhem. It’s a useful how-to guide for how to stay alive after a bear attack – or a human attack, for that matter – but it doesn’t soar. It crawls.

What makes this small-scale drama so compelling is Pontecorvo's treatment of the main character.

Too much of this movie is a conventionally rendered gloss that, in its own way, also attempts to cast Bauman as an inspirational icon. He is, but we can see in Gyllenhaal’s looks of grief and panic the makings of the more complex movie this might have been.

The movie makes up in sincerity and goodwill what it lacks in originality and style.

The action isn't as consistently funny or surprising this time, but there's a lot of laughter to be found between the merely crude moments. [2 Dec 1988]

One of the great achievements of this movie is that, in the end, Van Gogh’s words enter into our soul with the same force as the paintings.

Dench and Winslet give strong and creative performances, and Broadbent is positively brilliant as old Bayley.

Rollicking documentary that will have your toes tapping and your ears sizzling whether you're a die-hard Motown fan or not.

What Tim’s Vermeer is really about is two geniuses, of very different sorts, communing across time and space.

Along with some creaky plot mechanics in the last third of the story, this reduces the film to ordinary dimensions - a sharp but no longer resonant show.

Coming on the heels of the Taviani brothers’ quasi-documentary “Caesar Must Die,” about the staging of “Julius Caesar” in a maximum-security lockup, Reality gives credence to the notion that Italian prisons are hotbeds of acting talent.

The Loneliest Planet is not a perfect work of art, but it gets at something powerful: the way that life can turn us around in a flash, without warning.

Raw, unsettling account of a working-class London family beset by poverty, drug abuse, and domestic violence. The screenplay by filmmaker Oldman is based on his own youthful experience in similarly distressed circumstances, and his directorial debut has the virtue of authenticity if not of understatement. [20 Feb 1998, p.B2]

The Secret of NIMH is exciting, engaging, and often magnificent to look at. Add it up, and you have what is probably the best cartoon since the bygone heyday of the Walt Disney studio.

It’s the most sheerly pleasurable movie I’ve seen so far this year.

Nanking, directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, does justice to this tragedy even though it makes the mistake of mixing the testimony of actual participants with staged readings from actors subbing for real people.

For those who love chess, Fischer will probably always be its premier player, a fact his mental illness cannot expunge.

Low point would be Knightley's hysterical opening sequences in which she appears to be trying to trying to contort herself into a Moebius strip. Overacting this gross can only have been enabled by a director. Didn't Cronenberg look at the rushes? Or did he think he was back in "Dead Ringers" territory?

Although the filmmakers try to avoid roteness, the conflicts tend to play out along circumscribed lines. This gives the film a seesaw sameness. It's all a bit too diagrammed.

Stillman brings his usual sharp wit to this exploration of upper-middle-class angst, completing the comic trilogy he began with "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona."

Often best around the edges. Without making a big deal about it, Scott reveals how the Mafia, while putting up a businesslike front, deplored the incursion of black gangsters into the drug trade.

Anderson's cinematic style gets more adventurous from one movie to the next, and he begins this story with bursts of originality that leave his respected "Rushmore" far behind.

By turning the loner Louis into a nutcase – if he blinked at all during the movie, I missed it – the movie becomes a species of horror film.

“Lunana” demonstrates, as few films ever have, how inspired schooling can break through even the most abject obstacles.

More so than with some of his recent films, like “The French Dispatch,” or even such earlier celebrated works as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” not only did I marvel at its color-coordinated craftsmanship, but I also found parts of it to be emotionally moving – a rarity in the Anderson canon.

As teencentric franchises go, I much prefer The Hunger Games to the blessedly expired “Twilight” films. For one thing, they employ much better actors. My favorite: Amanda Plummer, one of the best and most underused actresses in America, as one of the Quell contestants.

It's also a mistake, I think, to have Oliver and Jordana be so emotionally flat. No doubt Ayoade was reaching for a hipper-than-thou vibe here, but their inexpressiveness is more annoying than cool.

You can laugh at her, but the film doesn’t encourage you to do so. Giannoli, with his co-screenwriter Marcia Romano, is asking us to take Marguerite’s passion as a value in itself.

I greatly enjoyed Nouvelle Vague, but will anybody besides cinemaniacs and Breathless devotees appreciate it? I think the answer is yes. That’s because it’s not simply a movie about how a landmark maverick movie got made. Its true subject is the exhilaration that comes from being part of an artistic escapade. It’s about how art – the making of it and the appreciation of it – can free you.

Rothemund's use of the recorded testimony, while it gives his film a startling veracity, also limits his imagination. It prevents him from delving too deeply into the psychology of these activists.

This offbeat Chinese production is at once an innovative art film, a traditional suspense yarn, and a moody voyage through Shanghai's gritty back roads.

The picture has fine ensemble acting and superb Italian scenery. It would have more power if it were shorter and tighter.

Denzel Washington is stellar, and so is Tak Fujimoto's cinematography, which is as edgy and antsy as the story it tells.

Director Azazel Jacobs knows what he has in Winger, but her intensity is too much for this goofy grab bag of a movie.

Even if you sympathize with his troubles, it’s hard to actually like the guy. At best, he’s uncomfortable to be around; at worst, he’s irritating and even reprehensible.

The key to the film’s effectiveness is the casting of Rapace, who, while not mapping quite exactly to the book’s physical descriptions, is riveting.

Based on William Faulkner's novel "Pylon," this 1958 melodrama gains much of its dark power from Douglas Sirk's visually rich directing, which transforms basically sordid material into a moral tale of love, loss, and redemption. [27 Jun 1996, p.14]

Gripping, intelligent, provocative drama...Incisively directed by newcomer Roland Joffe, although the story sags in spots and the beginning is draggy.

Spiritual redemption is a big theme of Narnia, but on a purely entertainment level, the movie also goes a long way in redeeming the current sad state of children's fantasy filmmaking.

Although substantially shortened for its United States release, this violent drama still has the feel of an epic, as director Sergio Leone explores the seamiest byways of urban Americana through the story of two gangsters who start their partnership as Brooklyn kids in 1921 and tragically end it in the late '60s. Yet the story has gaps and many of the incidents have a flatness which suggest deeper flaws than cutting and trimming probably account for. [U.S. theatrical release]

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.

The story lacks the imaginative surprises of the best fantasy tales. Encanto compensates with gentle humor – there’s something deeply hilarious about the indifferent expression of a capybara – and Indiana Jones-like action sequences.

The Japanese love affair with insects takes many forms, but most of them are, by Western standards, exotic. To Oreck's credit, she doesn't attempt to play down the exoticism by pretending to go native.

Even with Gere’s standout work, a little of Norman goes a long way, and this film offers up a lot of Norman.

The movie's most striking assets are its lyrical visual style, which forms a silky counterpoint to the plot's turbulent emotions, and Beat Takeshi's smooth and expressive performance as a senior warrior.

What counts isn't the convoluted plot or exotic characters -- it's the brilliance of Suzuki's cinematic style, articulating the action with eye-boggling color and split-second editing effects.

Kennedy documents their efforts with skill and compassion, almost entirely avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentality and victimology. He and his likable "cast" deserve a standing ovation.

Mamet's screenplay is full of savvy satire and the cast couldn't be better.

As the pushback to Gerwig’s force field, Kirke may at times be too mousy for her own (or the film’s) good, but her stillnesses are often a welcome respite in this whirligig.

A tribute to the therapeutic powers of musicmaking and choral camaraderie.

The best of Rango is a lot like the best of the first "Pirates" movie – crazily funny and rambunctious.

Character is action, Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. It certainly is here.

One of those movies with a terrific premise left unfulfilled.

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.

The story is sweet by animé standards, although it has harsh elements as well.

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.

Heartfelt performances make up for some stodgy dialogue and corny moments, though. And it's nice to know some filmmakers still have a foot firmly planted in old-fashioned humanistic storytelling.

Intelligent, revealing, and sometimes hilarious.

Ellsberg, his full-scale personal trajectory laid bare, emerges as a more complex man than both the right and the left have generally given him credit for.

Durkin is a bit too fond of drawn-out scenes of ominous anomie, and he doesn't provide enough psychological ballast for Martha's misery. He doesn't need to. Olsen, with her angelic face and hard-bitten voice, provides it for him.

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.

Pedro Almodovar's Spanish drama is his most involving work since the comedy "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," but its mood of ironic melancholy doesn't hold up enough to make the picture a full success.

Heartfelt acting and a sometimes tragic but ultimately life-affirming story make this an unusually touching Israeli production.

It’s a rueful and respectful tribute that stands on its own because of the extraordinary performances of Steve Coogan as Stan and John C. Reilly as Ollie.

The film is almost three hours long and precious little of it feels new – not from Scorsese or from anybody else.

A slight but winning documentary.

James Caan is excellent as the writer and Kathy Bates is brilliant as his captor. Unfortunately, what could have been a seamless psychological thriller is interrupted by violence that's as gratuitous as it is sadistic.

It’s a truism, reinforced here, that actors often are the last to comprehend how they do what they do. No matter. What they give us is all that counts.

Can a misguided adult start afresh with a new set of values and priorities? This ambitious drama, directed by one of France's most resourceful filmmakers, explores that crucial question in depth and detail.

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]

Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg fill the British production with Dostoevskian ironies, and Owen is perfect as the antihero.

The story is as rambling as the characters, but superb acting by McTeer and Brown goes a long way toward redeeming it.

Leaves out portions of John Irving's novel that would have given it more balance and perspective, but the acting by Maguire and Caine is first-rate by any standard.

Although the story slips into clichés despite its offbeat subject, Leconte's cinematic style is fresh and vigorous, and Auteuil remains one of France's most engaging actors.

Has a mixture of strengths and limitations often found in historical epics: lots of eye-filling action and spectacle, little in the way of psychology or human interest.

Emotional, powerful, an important film to see.

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.

This is a sad and funny true-life tale that speaks volumes about the difficulties of independent filmmaking.

The innocence of the townspeople is weirdly uplifting. They love their Bernie so much that they seem even more blinkered than he is.

It's certainly not a "breakthrough" comedy, unless the breakthrough is that women will flock to slobby, heartfelt romps starring Kristin Wiig instead of Seth Rogen. It's progress, sort of.

Although the film's Guatemalan and Mexican portions include much effective storytelling, the long American episode is the most stirring.

The Invisible Woman at its best does justice to the complicatedness of its characters – just as Dickens did as a writer.

A privileged sanctimony clings to this movie that is not fully recognized by its filmmakers: After all, not every distraught new mother can afford a self-help guru.

Acted and directed with great energy and imagination.