A richly appointed period piece, it features kingly tantrums, mistresses, bodices, roaring fireplaces, incest, and mutton. It also features sharply enunciated, period-perfect dialogue in which nary a contraction can be heard.

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.

Spain's most important living filmmaker isn't at his very best in this complicated tale, but it raises still-timely questions well worth pondering.

Generous doses of bright-sounding music add to the movie's appeal.

Baye gives a stunning performance in the central role, backed by a first-rate supporting cast.

While more performance views would have been welcome, this is a treat no balletomane can afford to miss.

The film is frustrating because so many of its best possibilities are missed. But Bening keeps you watching, and, to a lesser extent, so does Jamie Bell as Peter Turner.

The director, Bob Clark, has earned a reputation for childish leanings in some of his earlier work, and A Christmas Story does have a few stupid and vulgar touches. But these pass quickly, while the movie's overall sense of goodwill lingers.

For the most part, plays like a pretty good TV police procedural.

I was expecting something raunchier. Instead, what we have here is a wistful, somewhat overextended but occasionally sweet comedy about a couple that can't – in more ways than one – quite get it together.

Norton gives the comedy unexpected sparkle in his directorial debut.

The actors, all of whom seem too posed and pretty, are not particularly accomplished, and director Luis Mandoki lacks the visual imagination to bring the story to a boil.

The best thing about the movie is David Oyelowo’s performance as King. He doesn’t simply portray King; he inhabits him.

August Evening is rambling, diffuse, and at times so "sensitive" it makes your teeth hurt. And yet it's also intermittently quite affecting.

Like its precursor, U.S. Marshals has lots of action and the Jones groupies are likeable. Though the overall picture isn't as fine-tuned or character driven, it still delivers what moviegoers want to see - a fast-paced and entertaining chase.

Gently filmed, quietly thoughtful, sometimes almost heartbreaking.

The most pressing question I took away from the film is, Are they really still teaching "A Tale of Two Cities" in honors English classes?

With its skillful blend of documentary, confessional, and comic moods, this is one of the infrequent avant-garde movies that's as amusing and entertaining as it is artful and sophisticated.

It would be even better if Eastwood followed his character's lead and emphasized "real issues" over "human interest" in a story that touches on important social problems without doing much to illuminate them.

As director of the movie, Eastwood takes a conservative approach, with few of the imaginative touches that have made some of his films – "Bird," "The Eiger Sanction" – so memorable.

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

It’s a skimpy, overextended riff, but some of the seemingly tossed-off moments are lovely.

The evocative visual style -- is the main reason to watch this whimsical comedy-drama.

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

This gritty drama doesn't rank with the greatest Iranian films, but its urban characters offer an interesting change from the nation's best-known productions, which generally center on rural subjects.

Freilich includes interviews with three generations of kibbutzniks and some fascinating historical footage going back to the 1920s.

The only thing missing from Salt is Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb with her steel blade-tipped shoes from "From Russia With Love." Come to think of it, the Russian defector here does indeed kill with steel-blade shoes. Nice touch.

It takes awhile to get going but, still, it’s rather sweet.

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

On the surface, The Game is an unusually imaginative thriller that bends its offbeat plot into so many twists that you actually have to pay attention - something few Hollywood movies demand nowadays - to understand its evolution and enjoy the multiple payoffs at the end.

Less original than the first "Star Wars" and less resonant than "The Empire Strikes Back," but packed with fast-paced action and downright cuddly Ewoks.

Stirring on religious and humanitarian levels, and very timely notwithstanding its 1979 setting.

Horror fans will find plenty to shriek about. Everyone else should keep their distance.

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

Worth viewing by anyone concerned about world events.

Offers much food for thought.

Hallström conveys a bit of the circuslike atmosphere of the times. But he overreaches in trying to turn the film into a commentary on the politically corrupt 1970s.

The story that Hidden Figures tells is so irresistible that you can almost forgive the fact that the movie itself is resistibly unoriginal. It’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser with a heavy history lesson undertow.

Light, lively, informative, fun.

The filmmakers are more interested in spinning an entertaining yarn than probing the spiritual dimensions of their important subject.

Detailed, compassionate, humane.

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]

Humane, unsentimental, eye-opening.

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.

Efficiently and imaginatively directed.

A ruthless dissection of suburban malaise.

It’s a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

The music and camera work are dazzling, and the story has solid sociological insights into a fascinating pop-culture period.

Sayles takes great storytelling risks to explore this theme; his unusual approach will please some viewers and irritate others. [04 Jun 1999, p.14]

It’s questionable whether this film needs narration at all, or at least whether it needs the faux biblical lyricisms served up here. The panoramas are so glorious that I didn’t ache to hear any highfalutin hoo-ha on the soundtrack.

The dialogue is often silly but Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn deliver it with enough crackerjack energy to keep audiences laughing.

This engaging 1966 comedy isn't de Broca's best movie, but it was so popular with American audiences in the late '60s that it's still one of the era's most fondly remembered cult classics.

Harrowing, realistic, humanistic.

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.

At its best it's refreshingly offhanded. It's a hit-and-miss movie that's worth seeing for the hits.

For western fans, watching this movie is like encountering an old friend after a long absence.

This is closer to an Allen comeback than anything else he's made recently. Maybe he'll achieve it with his next movie, "Match Point," due this year.

Its grimness is explicit, so approach it with caution.

Timely, chilling, and grimly instructive.

The best reason to see this documentary is for the stunning shots of polar bears and walruses in the Arctic Circle. If the filmmakers had just left it at that, they would have accomplished a lot.

No envelopes are pushed in Brave, which was directed by Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews, and no genres are subverted. It's a safe experience; but safe, in this case, is better than sorry.

As deliciously eccentric as the real-life characters it chronicles.

It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.

The story's rambling, meandering style is just right for the melancholy subject being explored, and all the acting is excellent.

I’m not sure that anybody coming to this film to witness her for the first time would necessarily pledge eternal allegiance. Still, she’s sui generis, and in the theatre world, as in life (yes, there is an overlap), that counts for a lot.

Gwyneth Paltrow is enchanting as a self-confident young woman who decides to wile away her time by playing matchmaker for a friend whose romantic life would fare much better without interference.

The acting is excellent, and the movie has a good-natured spirit to match its ultimate faith in the hero's deep-down goodness.

The movie doesn’t delve especially deeply into the psychology of double-agentry, and the shifting viewpoints between Israelis and Palestinians flattens the drama instead of broadening it.

Effective action, solid suspense, excellent Ribisi, plus enough clichés to equal the grains of Gobi sand that fill the screen.

Baye and Lopez are excellent, as always.

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

The picture makes up in energy and high spirits what it lacks in structure and style.

What Trust conveys, at its best, is that ultimately parental protections are not fullproof, and that is the greatest horror of all.

Without Bening, whose performance is a watchful and laid-back marvel, 20th Century Women, written and directed by Mike Mills, would still be borderline worth seeing because of its supporting cast.

For all the film’s righteous anger and obeisance to Baldwin, it remains a baffling, amorphous construct.

There are fine, wry moments tucked inside the curdled whimsy.

It's a bewildering mix of very smart and very dumb, but the cast, which also features a hilarious Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd as the Cheney-esque ex-vice president, and Hilary Duff as a Turaqistan airhead pop star, is tiptop.

It has moments when the spiritual and the secular burst forth in stunning disarray.

Nothing in this film approaches the boy's-eye view of war that, say, John Boorman achieved in "Hope and Glory," but it's an affecting, if somewhat flavorless, journey.

Thoughtfully directed by the versatile Iain Softely from Hossein Amini's screenplay, which reduces James's intricately structured narrative to feature-film scale without losing the book's rueful psychological tone.

Tykwer doesn't aim for the heights of excitement and invention he reached in "Run Lola Run," but he blends an impressively varied palette of moods into an intriguingly unpredictable story that's never short of ideas.

The movie is often preachy and self-conscious, especially in long dialogue scenes, where Robbins's inexpert scriptwriting makes people talk at instead of with each other. Yet the picture's solid assets enable it to soar above such problems, both intellectually and emotionally. [29 December 1995, Film, p.13]

Redford gives one of his best performances ever in this taut, emotionally engrossing thriller.

Splendid acting, a screenplay as likable as it is unpredictable, and an undercurrent of deep human generosity make this a particularly engaging comic-dramatic experience.

Cash was a true anomaly: a poseur who was also the genuine article. A better movie would have made that contradiction its core.

It’s a miniature art history lesson that is also a rapt communion between two people who, at least in this moment, are joined in the ecstasy of creation.

De Villa's debut film is persuasively written and acted, if a tad rougher around the edges than one might wish.

Who would have guessed a documentary about Derrida, the great French philosopher of deconstruction and "différence," would be so entertaining?

This unusual Macedonian release is engrossing if not always nimbly directed.

The characters are hardly original...but Stone puts them into play with his usual fever-pitch gusto, producing what's probably the most heart-pounding gridiron movie ever made.

Manages to seem fresh, funny, and original from start to finish.

This remarkably clever, often hilarious animation derives much of its humor from its satirical view of the 1950s.

A jagged, uneven, often unfulfilling experience, but there are a few first-rate scenes between Joseph and Hannah that convincingly put forward the capacity for redemption in even the most ravaged of souls.

It's nice to watch a political movie that, for a change, isn't trying to save our souls. It's possible to have a good time with this movie while, at the same time, regretting all that it isn't.

Lavishly produced animation makes imaginative use of familiar formulas, filling the screen with handsome images accompanied by sprightly songs and lively voice-performances.

James Ponsoldt, who directed from a script by Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, is a bit too glib to do justice to this material, but the young actors, especially Woodley, are quite fine.

Stone does a masterly job of balancing two Nixons, the ruthless power-monger and the sadly vulnerable man, allowing each to flourish as a fully rounded screen figure. Yet here, as in many of his other movies, Stone pushes the envelope a little too far, allowing his own similarities to Nixon. [20 Dec 1995, p.14]

What saves it all from being sordid is the open desire of the director, Gregory Jacobs, and his writer, Reid Carolin, to make sure the women in the film, not the male dancers, are ultimately the ones who are celebrated.