The drama is a gentle, witty parable of the mixed feelings some people show toward free choice when it confronts them not in theory but in everyday life.

It's hard to find a current release that so effectively teases the mind and emotions.

Tasty while you take it in, but larded down with empty cinematic calories.

Moody, atmospheric, and bewitching, like other first-rate examples of modern Thai cinema.

Evocative and disturbing.

Sensitive acting and imaginative filmmaking help rescue the movie from potential excesses of its own.

The fine cast is also misused -- especially Kidman, who looks as unruffled at the end of her torments as before they began, and Zellweger, who does a job of overacting that might have gotten rejected by "The Beverly Hillbillies."

One of the sweetest and most heartfelt movies ever made about a life in the theater.

Blitz captures high school atmosphere well – not an easy thing to do – but overall the movie coasts on quirkiness.

Clint Eastwood’s second film this year, American Sniper, about the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, is considerably better than his first, “The Jersey Boys.” As a piece of direction, it’s as taut as anything he’s ever done.

The movie's basic message is that lying and conniving are perfectly all right - as long as you're a swell person inside, like the pert character we're watching here. Working Girl is a fun movie in many ways - don't get me wrong. [25 Jan 1989, Arts, p.11]

Less pretentious and more gripping than the overrated sequel, ''The Road Warrior,'' but viciously violent and awfully shallow.

The viciously anti-Semitic 1940 German movie “Jew Süss” is one of the most notorious films ever made...Today it is one of the few Nazi-era films that still cannot legally be shown.

It's a fascinating story, fascinatingly told.

My favorite character is not Nik but his 15-year-old sister, Rudina (Sindi Lacej), who takes over her father's bread delivery route in his rickety wagon and makes a go of it against all odds. Her pluck seems both Old World and New World.

Stay far, far away unless you can handle the copious amounts of blood--and agonizing psychological problems-- that its participants face on what seems like a daily basis.

Michell treats the Irish troubles of the 1970s with clear-eyed compassion, and Walters's performance ranks with her best.

Use of a loosely written screenplay and a nonprofessional cast in this picture weakens its dramatic appeal even as it lends authenticity and local color.

The story takes a while to get started, but the acting is lively, the special effects are snazzy.

Paints a sincere and serious portrait of the seductiveness of evil and the self-destructive nature of depravity.

At times, “Homecoming” resembles a very good after-school special embedded in a cacophonous franchise flick. That’s probably not the demographic the filmmakers were most hoping to please.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man, the real-life kung fu innovator who most famously trained Bruce Lee. His life takes in the upheavals in China from the 1930s through the ’50s, including the Japanese occupation.

This is Eastwood's first acting job since "Million Dollar Baby," and his range, like his raspiness, is fairly one-note.

By relying too much on snappy dialogue and by adhering to the philosophy that "steel should feel like steel and glass should feel like glass," the filmmakers have bridled their imaginations and created a movie about toys that are too blubbery and not rubbery enough.

The acting is amiable and the story is crisply told.

It's one of the season's most original and energetic movies.

Sincere acting and heartfelt filmmaking add energy to this unassuming Tunisian drama.

Almodóvar is attempting to create a continuum of genres as well, one that particularly involves the traditional Hollywood “women’s picture” and film noir. That he doesn’t altogether succeed is perhaps due to the fact that Almodóvar is too enraptured by old movie conventions to give them a new life.

Pure fun.

Nobody can play stupid better than Daniels – think "Dumb and Dumber" – and, as it turns out, few can play smarter. He's a sharp asset in a sharp movie.

The picture is ragged around the edges, but the acting is heartfelt and the raplike poetry sessions have astonishing vigor. [06 Nov 1998, p.B1]

Each man is sharply characterized, and the performances are expert, right down to the cook (Toby Jones).

Best not when it is preaching to us but, rather, in those moments when both King and Riggs drop their public faces and reveal the roiling underneath.

A very good thrill ride and Cruise is better than he's been in a long time.

Leconte reconfirms his growing importance to French cinema with this precisely crafted, marvelously acted drama, which makes a powerful statement on capital punishment.

Like many Altman movies, this is less a dramatic story to follow than an atmospheric environment to visit.

It's conventional in approach and sometimes sentimental, even corny, in its content. But there were so many fascinating overtones in Mr. Charles's life and career that any account of them is bound to be riveting at least part of the time.

We are treated to all manner of worshipy recollections from a stable of Thompson's admirers, including, believe it or not, Patrick Buchanan and James Baker. Who said gonzo politics doesn't make for strange bedfellows?

Black, who wrote "Lethal Weapon," makes his directorial debut, and he puts a fresh spin not only on that film but also on a whole slew of films noirs.

It marks a new artistic peak for director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Crossing Delancey is a warm and appealing visit with some warm and lovable people - and that's good reason to welcome this ``Moonstruck, Jewish-American Style.''

It’s a reminder that yes, it is a jungle out there. But we should still hold out hope for creating a better world, and not just for the haves, but the “have nots.” While that message may arrive at a place of cynicism when it comes to adults, it finds fertile ground among the youth.

Bowfinger is mediocre . . . can be irksome, tedious, and hard to sit through.

The idealization of the native American existence in The New World, precolonization, is a pleasing fantasy but also timeworn and ahistorical. Surely someone as sophisticated as Malick - who once taught philosophy at MIT and was a Rhodes scholar - understands that he is putting forth a fabrication.

Even if baseball isn't your favorite sport, or if you don't like sports much at all, you'll find something to catch your attention in this smartly made (if unblushingly vulgar) new comedy. [7 July 1988]

Sometimes they're truly hilarious; sometimes they're lazy enough to milk laughs from scattershot vulgarity.

This unusual romantic drama is sensitively acted by a well-chosen cast and subtly directed by Cox.

All give heartfelt, unflashy performances that help make Shattered Glass one of the season's most thoughtful offerings.

This is not storytelling by a confident artist. Even Zhang's former mastery of visual form has become shaky, with a pedestrian handling of dramatic scenes and a surfeit of picture-postcard landscape shots.

The film isn't quite excellent, though, since it sags in the middle and starts to seem repetitive.

Following the shows from rehearsals to Tony Awards night, she gets behind the scenes and does a good job conveying the incessant anxieties and glee of the talents involved.

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed. As the vampire's kindred Seven Deadly Sinner, wild-haired Kim Ok-vin looks like she's having a high old time.

For a while, it's like really cool, with lots of energy and stuff, but then it gets like major repetitious, and you wish it was like over, y'know? As if!

This delirious film is overflowing with energy and effects, but it lacks the heart and soul that would have made it important as well as impressive.

Amalric throws in flashbacks and flash-forwards between bedroom and courthouse (yes, there’s a murder), and I was reminded again why I prefer my noirs in the hardboiled American style rather than tricked up with all this faux Alain Resnais-style filigree.

It’s a truism that actors love playing scoundrels much more than goody-goodies – though Thompson excels at both. Here she goes full out into villainy mode, and she’s a hoot.

A change from summer fare, but it doesn't make the picture compelling to watch. You won't find the detail of the "Godfather" films or the psychological complexities of Martin Scorsese's gangster movies. The plot holes are big enough to hide Al Capone's illicit millions in.

It's no accident that this movie is named after both the filmmaker and his subject. It stands with the most thoughtful releases of recent months, and will linger in memory.

The movie is mostly a megadose of good-old-days nostalgia.

Cary Grant is irresistible as Dudley the angel, David Niven brings offbeat humor to the clergyman, and Loretta Young is refreshingly low-key as the title character. The picture is more witty than laugh-out-loud funny, but director Henry Koster serves up some fetching scenes, and there are snappy second-string performances from old pros like Monty Woolley, Elsa Lanchester, and James Gleason. [03 Jan 1997, p.15]

In the end, the film’s most nuanced summation comes from Wajdi, who says, “No one has a monopoly on suffering.”

Many of the interviews in the film – conducted with everyone from family members to Christopher Hitchens and Tom Hayden – look to be 10, even 20, years old. Together they concoct a complex portrait of an ultimately unknowable man.

At 88, Christopher is at the top of his game. He turns Getty into a dastardly miser with an aggrieved core. There hasn’t been such a lonely mogul in the movies since Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane expired with “Rosebud” on his lips.

I kept wishing that Still Mine had jettisoned the film’s true-story trappings and moved more deeply into the Craig-Irene duet unencumbered by bad-news bulletins from the building inspectors. Easily the best parts of the film are those in which husband and wife quietly summon up in often the barest of glances and touches a near-lifetime together.

Nasheed is no saint, and if he had remained in office, maybe, as with so many others, he would have capitulated to politics as usual. But his temper, if not his outcome, is inspiring.

We get to see film of daughter Tricia’s wedding (her father is a surprisingly agile ballroom dancer) and other oddities. We also hear more of the famous audiotapes than usual. You’ll be interested to know that Nixon, not in praise, referred to Henry Kissinger as a “swinger.”

It's an inescapable fact that Gould's singular musical insights – the way he brought out in Bach a mesmeric unity of sound – could only have arisen from a singular personality.

On the screen, Burton turns out to BE the ideal filmmaker for this deliciously bizarre yarn. He's given free rein to his fantasies in past movies, but rarely as wittily and consistently as he does here.

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."

Moore turns the camera on himself too often for comfort, but he provides an eye-opening array of facts and revelations.

Pungent, opinionated, outspoken.

The film is a disappointment, and at more than two hours' running time, a very long disappointment.

Suffers from touches of sentimentality in its last portion -- Many viewers may welcome this last-minute brightening, though. If so, All or Nothing could join "Topsy Turvy" and "Secrets & Lies" as one of Leigh's most widely enjoyed recent films.

This is a great companion piece to Hou's masterly "Flowers of Shanghai" and fresh evidence of his status as Taiwan's greatest filmmaker.

What distinguishes Girl With a Pearl Earring is its combination of refined filmmaking and Johansson's exquisitely understated acting. It partakes of Vermeer's spirit and style, and that makes it one of the year's best movies.

Controversy and all, JFK is one of the year's most powerful and provocative films.

The reason The Wedding Plan rises above its flippancies is not only because of the novelty of its Israeli trappings but also because Michal is such an ingratiating whirlwind.

Sisters on Track starts out as a flashy success story about headline-making kids but turns into something much more meaningful: a tribute to the value of being strong in spirit.

Since we all know that Paris wasn’t blown to smithereens, the tension here is not in the outcome but in how it was achieved. The meeting between these two men is largely fictional, but the stakes could not have been more real.

In the House does at least engage us. It even enlists us implicitly as co-conspirators in Claude’s devious storytelling.

Phil Hartman wrote and directed the picture, which proves for the zillionth time that a low budget doesn't have to mean low quality.

Says Lauro: "This is about as close as you can get to the way it sounded during slavery days." Lauro and McGlynn understand, too, that these clips must be experienced whole. They let the music unfold in real time, not snippets.

It’s a universal story that is also, by virtue of its very particular time and place, a singular experience.

While this slightly edgy comedy has moments of offbeat charm, it would carry more conviction if the acting were richer and the characters focused on more sophisticated attitudes and ambitions.

It's dark, funny, ferocious, and vintage Wilder all the way.

Färberböck has directed the story with a canny blend of liveliness and taste.

I found much of it as emotionally rigged as a crooked horse race.

Quiet, mysterious, sometimes violent, ultimately close to sublime.

For most of the way this is an eye-popping, not blood-curdling, experience.

The accounting of his life story, as it unfolds in the film, is grounded in the brutal realities of corporate skulduggery. I’m a big fan of Balzac’s maxim that “behind every great fortune is a great crime,” and if nothing in Jobs’s history qualifies as a great crime, there is certainly a long trail of extreme misdeeds.

It's all a lot closer to melodrama than drama, but Thalbach is a dynamo.

The new Superman has its visionary charms, but there's only so far you can go without great characters.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith give uproarious comic performances as government agents ordered to keep New York's monsters in Manhattan, where they'll blend right in with the rest of the confusion.

Smoothly directed by Kevin Costner, who also gives a sensitive performance in the leading role. The screenplay is often trite, however, and there's no reason for the picture's three-hour length. [9 Nov 1990, Arts, p.12]

This intellectual allegory would carry more punch if it didn't slip into melodrama so often, but it marks Aronofsky as an exceptionally promising new filmmaker.

In reducing Presumed Innocent to a 126-minute film, director Pakula has necessarily stripped it of many complexities and ambiguities that lend the novel much of its interest. The performances are capable, if rarely inspired.

In keeping with this background, the movie boldly incorporates actual newsreel footage - with authentic images of human suffering, some of them seen in TV reports on the war - into its conventionally scripted and acted story.

Dark Money should set off warning bells for even those who believe that the Citizens United decision, equating corporations with people and money with speech, was a First Amendment victory for free speech.