Back to the Future doesn't exactly leap out of the starting gate, and some scenes are strung out by gimmicky editing. But the story picks up steam as it goes along, and the last third is especially full of speedy surprises. [3 July 1985, p.23]

The story is surprising, the screenplay is witty, and the animation is wonderfully creative. A super sequel.

It’s easily the best of the Marvel superhero movies but it’s also a film that foregrounds a cornucopia of powerful black faces, garbs, traditions, and conflicts. It’s a stealth movie: Like “Get Out,” it’s a genre film jam-packed with social relevancy.

It’s possible to be heartwarming and tough-minded, as this wonderful film demonstrates. And it’s possible to be both “old-fashioned” and vibrant, too. It’s the best new/old movie in town.

What makes this film different from numerous other such movies is that, in many instances, it utilizes footage never before seen publicly.

Abrasive at times, delving into bewildering behaviors and moral complexities that the characters sadly fail to understand. What's undeniable is the propulsive honesty and unstoppable energy of their black-and-white images and the foreshadowing they provide of later Cassavetes movies. [14 Mar 1996]

Most moviegoers will leave buzzing about the climactic Battle of Helm's Deep. But in my eyes, this is Gollum's show more than anyone else's, even the special-effects wizards behind the scenes.

Sonia may seem happy-go-lucky at the start, but grief steels her. It makes her grow up very fast. She becomes a kind of heroine in the course of the film, which ultimately owes its stature to her presence.

This is a movie about people trying to make sense out of the senselessness of what happened.

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

A movie with ambitions as high-flying as its superhero but a success rate decidedly lower to the ground.

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]

Given the slam-bang slapstick featured in so many of her movies, I have to admit the subtlety and fullness of [McCarthy's] performance in this film did hit me as a shock to the system.

Well worth seeing on the wide screen before its video release next year. It's guaranteed to take your breath away.

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

The story gains most of its dramatic impact from superbly understated acting and Christopher Doyle's atmospheric camera work.

It will frustrate viewers who like stories to make instant sense, but fans of provocative puzzles will have mind-teasing fun.

There’s something borderline dishonest about the way Rosi intercuts the oblivious, life-goes-on Lampedusans with the harrowing, too-brief footage of Africans inside the immigration center and aboard the rescue ships. His stylistics keep these two groups cruelly apart, but who knows if this is the way things actually play out?

As summer franchise movies go, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is near the top of the heap.

Brilliant, poetic, and utterly unique.

A film director doesn’t have to shoot the works to hold an audience. If the drama is galvanizing enough, that’s all you need. And what we have here is more than enough: Viola Davis in one of her greatest performances, and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final and most powerful appearance.

[Berger] honors the animation medium by investing it with a full range of feeling – just as if he were making a movie with real people. This is another way of saying that “Robot Dreams” is a film for adults perhaps even more than for children. I

McKay is very good where it counts the most: He understands these immigrants from the inside out, and, against all odds, he allows us to rejoice in their hopes.

Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane brings Goodall’s ineffable and incredible story to vivid life, starting with the aforementioned anecdotes as, now in her 80s and still seraphically beautiful, she recalls with an almost ethereal calm the extraordinariness of her days.

One of the funniest and happiest movies I’ve ever seen about early adolescent girls and their wayward, fitful joyousness.

The role of Fern gives McDormand license to indulge an opaqueness that is often more gnomic than expressive. Perhaps she and Zhao felt that being more demonstrative would shatter the film’s wayward poetic mood.

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

The dense interweave of relationships, a Farhadi specialty, is continually compelling.

It’s not that this material is, or should be, off limits in a movie. But The Diary of a Teenage Girl isn’t exactly “Lolita.” Heller must think that taking a moral stance is tantamount to selling out. Commercially, she may be right. In every other respect, she’s wrong.

Whenever Jones is on screen, the film's energy level kicks up several notches, an indication, I think, that Spielberg otherwise overdoses on directorial decorum.

If one buys into the whole grace under pressure thing, All Is Lost – the title is its own spoiler alert – is first-rate.

The result is an unprecedented voyage into the tortuous life of our greatest actor, with the actor himself serving as narrator and navigator, as dissembler and penitent.

It's as powerful as it is bruising, with more surprises than "Jurassic Park" and more sheer energy than any action movie this season.

A heartbreakingly powerful masterpiece.

Timely, pointed messages about oppression and opportunity come poignantly through in strongly dramatic terms.

This romantic farce has a talented cast and energy to spare, but somehow the ingredients don't burn as brightly as one would expect from such promising ingredients.

This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.

The filmmaking is meticulous and the ideas are endlessly thought-provoking.

Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy because these men have found something that many people, of whatever sexual persuasion, never find - true love. And they can't do anything about it.

It's minor, but powerfully so.

Particle Fever doesn’t prompt us to say: “Gee, these superbrains are just like us, except for the brains.” The film allows for our awe. It also demonstrates that science is the most human of activities, with all that that implies.

Harrowing, extremely disturbing at times, but brought to the screen in dazzling pop-art images that make the movie's grim content very much worth watching.

Nothing short of amazing. [25 Oct 1996, p.13]

It’s no secret that the best animated movies can enthrall us in ways every bit as immersive as any live-action film. Flow is a triumphant case in point.

This is a lively, life-affirming documentary no viewer is likely to forget.

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

The best parts of The Shape of Water, a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.

This is the most Hitchcockian of Haneke's films. A seemingly well-adjusted man in a well ordered universe is brought to the brink.

Some will find the movie's sexual antics too explicit and unconventional for comfort.

Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.

Anderson fulfills the promise of his inventive "Bottle Rocket" with this quirky, often hilarious comedy, and Murray gives his most uproarious performance since the groundbreaking "Groundhog Day."

Overall this overlong movie is too knowingly coy for its own good.

A full-fledged masterpiece.

Force Majeure is ultimately about something not often explored in film: the consequences of male weakness in a world in which men are expected to be strong at all times.

It’s a rarity, and a real pleasure, to find a movie that presents without condescension rural working-class people, especially women.

Iran's greatest filmmaker is fond of stripping personalities bare through conversations they have while riding in cars. Here he pushes his favorite dramatic device to its limit.

The first half is full of verbal and visual surprises, but the later scenes are talky and dull, as if filmmaker Steven Soderbergh had lost interest in his subject and his characters. Which would be understandable, since the story often seems more calculated than heartfelt. [4 Aug 1989, Arts, p.10]

The film is very good at laying out the forensics of the case, but Triet is after something larger. I’m not sure she altogether succeeds: She wants to show how Sandra is being judged not just for the murder but, in effect, for everything – for her failures as a mother, a lover, an artist.

It’s a filmmaker’s conceit. These filmmakers may come from Nebraska, but, from the looks of things, they don’t want to be spending much time there.

It never exploits its characters or demands their way of living. For all the hidden misery it uncovers, it remains compassionate and humane from first scene to last.

Unexpectedly subtle cinematic style.

The latest installment is packed with surprises and emotion for people who've seen earlier stages of the project, but even newcomers will be fascinated by the vivid glimpses it provides of everything from love and family to political action and the pervasiveness of class distinctions in British life.

It's an ideal match, and Eastwood deserves accolades as both director and star of this powerfully made picture.

The rise and fall of Dawson City, intimately tied to the vagaries of climate and man’s greed, is heartbreakingly rendered.

Is this misogyny, as some insist, or a critique of misogyny, as others say? Many moviegoers, grossed out by the film's gothic approach to medical matters, won't watch long enough to find out which is the answer. [30 Sept 1988]

Director Ira Sachs, who co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, has a plangent feeling for the small-scale travails of “ordinary” people – who, of course, are only ordinary on the surface.

Heavily influenced by Quentin Tarantino's brand of quirky sensationalism, this high-energy saga by Paul Thomas Anderson goes a long way toward exposing the greed and stupidity of the pornography trade, then loses its moral compass and steers toward a sadly superficial ending.

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

As slow-moving as the voyage it portrays,...a surprisingly complex view of contemporary life beneath its good-natured surface.

These paintings speak to us; they both compress and elongate time. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog is reaching for ways to comprehend what he imagines to be the emblems of the birth of the modern soul.

The Red Turtle benefits from being open to all sorts of possibilities and interpretations because we sense that Dudok de Wit respects our imaginings. He allows them to take shape right alongside his own.

Directed by newcomer Todd Field, who has a sensitive eye and a knack for storytelling.

It's a transcendently uplifting tragedy.

A conventional dark comedy with moments of unexpectedly biting wit.

Nobody's Fool centers on a hard-luck guy named Sullivan, played by Newman with a wisdom and panache that recall the best work of his career.

One of the great American films of the past decade, and the crowning masterpiece of Lumet's long career.

The sheer sensuousness of all these bric-a-brac memories is sustaining.

Most powerfully, Berg also films a number of O'Grady's victims as they recount their trauma and, in some cases, loss of faith.

The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy.

As a man flummoxed by circumstance and the rifts in his own marriage, Romano is deeply touching in the role. As for Hunter, this is her best work since “Broadcast News.”

In some ways the movie might have been better if it had been about those two Hollywood guys with only occasional blips from the hostage crisis in Iran.

It's a picture marked by competence, not the boiling-over intensity that Frears and Thompson fans have anticipated. [30 Nov 1990]

The picture's thoughtfulness and ambition make it unusually suspenseful, gripping, and disturbing.

One of Almodóvar's most challenging pictures, jumping around in time and sending a large gallery of characters through a wide variety of situations -- will find him again at the peak of his powers.

Assayas conveys with great understatement an entire constellation of emotions in Summer Hours. I wouldn't have minded a little bit of overstatement.

The performances by Phoenix and Hoffman are studies in contrast. Phoenix carries himself with a jagged, lurching, simianlike grace while Hoffman gives Dodd a calm deliberateness. Both actors have rarely been better in the movies. The real Master class here is about acting – and that includes just about everybody else in the film, especially Adams, whose twinkly girl-next-door quality is used here to fine subversive effect.

Swank gives one of the year's most complex and hard-hitting performances in the demanding central role.

It's the best animated fun of the year, and you don't need a lamp or a genie to enjoy it.

Smart, funny, stimulating.

Loach has made more memorable films, such as "Raining Stones" and "Ladybird Ladybird," but his dramatic sense remains strong and his social conscience is absolutely unstoppable.

The film should captivate anyone with a taste for bold cinematics, unpredictable storytelling, and pitch-black humor aimed at the worthiest of targets: a self-involved and self-congratulatory, industry that often gives lip service to art while worshipping the bottom line. [10 Apr 1992]

It combines a fresh and exciting style with stunning performances and that rarity in current film, a deeply humanistic story.

A marvel.

Alternately inspirational and disheartening, galvanizing and wearying.

The enchanting French-Belgian animated feature Ernest & Celestine is so liltingly sweet and graceful that, a day or two after I saw it, it seemed almost as if I had dreamed it.

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson, especially his “Diary of a Country Priest.” But Bresson’s spare stylistics achieved a sublimity while Schrader’s, though intermittently powerful, too often feel schematic.

Up until its final scene, I thought A Little Prayer was an entirely decent and poignant piece of work. But its closing scene between Bill and Tammy, those two self-described kindred spirits, moved me more than anything I’ve seen all year. It’s an infinitely touching expression of the love that one human being can have for another.

The endangered swampland dwellers are supposed to be an indigenous pastoral community threatened by eco-unfriendly oil refineries. I kept rooting for Hushpuppy and Co. to leave behind their squalor and relocate. This is not the politically correct response.