In Moving Midway, Cheshire chronicles not only the history of the move but also of the family members, past and present, who occupied the place, and, most pointedly, the slaves who worked its fields, some of whom turn out to be related.

As an anatomy not only of Polanski's psyche but also of the legal system he confronted, it's as baroquely compelling as "The Dark Knight."

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.

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.

The sometimes agonizingly powerful documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat is built around some staggering statistics: Only two journalists were killed in World War I. Sixty-three lost their lives in World War II. And in the past two decades, almost one journalist per week has been killed.

This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

Tim Robbins gives a strong performance in this first-class horror yarn, which has a surprisingly strong political edge.

In Gyllenhaal's all-out performance, it reminded me most of Judy Davis in "High Tide," another movie directed by a woman (Gillian Armstrong) about a misfit mother and her daughter. It has the same fierce honesty.

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.

Marjorie Prime, which has a soulful score by Mica Levi, is essentially a chamber drama, and yet it rarely feels stifled or stagey.

Considerably less slick than "An Inconvenient Truth," and no less urgent.

I don't wish to give offense here, but it certainly doesn't hurt that Mary Lou is voiced by that famously small bundle of energy Isla Fisher. (She's 5-foot-2.)

In Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, Thomas Hardy's Victorian romantic tragedy "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" proves surprisingly adaptable to contemporary India.

A feast for Neil Young lovers and initiates alike.

This may sound like a dry subject, but, as presented here, it's anything but – especially if you have more than a passing interest in the art and science of what gets projected onto our movie screens these days.

Lena Dunham, the writer-director-star of the microbudget Tiny Furniture, has a distinctive comedic take on the world – a kind of haggard spiritedness.

Pianomania is the thoroughly apt title for a thoroughly enjoyable documentary.

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.”

Nathalie Baye is remarkable in Le Petit Lieutenant where she plays Caroline Vaudieu, a Parisian police inspector who returns to her post after a bout with alcoholism following her child's death.

A comprehensive and compelling film that does justice to the anguished history of Cambodia.

The most enjoyable thing about the "Ocean's" movies is that nobody involved seems to take them seriously. The star wattage is immense but the stars themselves are refreshingly self-deprecating, almost satirically so.

Nunez unfolds her story at a leisurely yet steadily absorbing pace, allowing Ashley Judd to develop one of the year's most luminous performances in the title role. Made on a low budget by artists with high hopes and towering talents, this is another undersung gem that deserves much wider fame. [13 Jan 1994, p.12]

It doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer the way its predecessor did, but it’s consistently inventive, funny, witty, and heartfelt. In other words, it’s a lot better than it has any right to be. It’s more than good enough to justify its existence.

What comes through so powerfully in this movie is a portrait of an entire generation making its way from death throes to new beginnings.

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

The interaction between soldiers and captives becomes a microcosm for an entire culture. It's a wisp of a movie but it has stayed with me longer than much supposedly weightier fare.

The Istanbul interviewees believe it is their responsibility to look after the cats but not confine them as indoor pets. This responsibility is a matter of almost spiritual deference.

It transcends its genre even as it fulfills it.

Whatever it is, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an original.

Rams confirms what I have long maintained: Often the best films come from the unlikeliest places.

In top form, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up feel-bad experiences that, like fine blues medleys, make you feel good (although with an acidulous aftertaste). Inside Llewyn Davis is one of their best. So many movies are emblazoned with happy faces; this one wears its sadness, and its snarl, proudly.

If this were a fictional Hollywood movie, it would be criticized for being too upbeat. But sometimes truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's also a whole lot better.

True, traces of his bad habits show through at certain moments, especially near the end, when a long and lachrymose scene plunges into Spielgerian sentimentality of the gooiest kind. But before that unfortunate point, Schinder's List serves up three full hours of brilliant storytelling. That's as humane and compassionate as it is gripping and provocative. [15 Dec 1993]

Starts slowly and ominously and gradually accelerates into a frenzy.

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

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

At its best, Juno is about the messy things in life that are not so easily summarized.

At this late date there is little that is factually revelatory about his film, but as a human document of what people are capable of in wartime, it's indispensable.

Pacino still gets a blast out of acting. His performance in this film about a blocked performer is gloriously unblocked – a valentine to vanity.

A fine example of a director bringing just enough of his style to revitalize possibly dated material.

As one of Booker's supporters notes, it's a sad day when academic success is used to denigrate an African-American.

Easily the best in the series since the first one.

What makes Get Out more than just a slam-bang scarefest is that, in its own darkly satiric way, it is also a movie about racial paranoia that captures the zeitgeist in ways that many more “prestigious” movies don’t.

Heartbreaking, exhilarating, baffling. In other words, it expresses the performer's persona in its purest form.

Ladybird Ladybird tackles this troubling tale with documentary-style realism, showing profound sympathy with the protagonists while dispassionately revealing the enormous divide that exists between ideals of harmonious family life, on one hand, and a network of inadequate social policies, on the other. [29 Nov 1994, p.14]

Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima is his companion piece to "Flags of Our Fathers" and in almost every way is superior.

This is the second documentary he has made about tragic jazz artists who died young – the first was “My Name Is Albert Ayler” – and he clearly has an abiding fascination with them. But what draws him most of all is the music, and that’s as it should be.

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.

The film is laced with lovely moments, from the leads and from Shelly as a waitress friend.

In many ways, though, Gremlins is ingenious. Gizmo yanks at your heartstrings with both furry fists, then sits out a few scenes while suspense builds, then plunges back with more vim than ever. The small-town setting, right out of a gushy Frank Capra movie, manages to be timeless, nostalgic, and slightly ridiculous all at once.

Most of the photographs on view in The Salt of the Earth bear witness to great suffering, and what they exalt is not the photographer’s eye but the fearful humanity that binds us all.

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.

Morgan Neville’s movie is more than just a chronicle of Rogers’s career. In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness. It’s a love letter, but the sentiment and affection that pour through the film is honestly arrived at, even when, near the end, the film threatens to turn into the cinematic equivalent of a group hug.

Many times more African than "Tarzan" and "The Lion King" combined, Kirikou and the Sorceress is one of the best movies so far in this very young year.

Blossoms of Fire fulfills the first criterion of any good ethnographic study: It's about an inherently interesting subject.

Sprawling yet cramped, There Will Be Blood may not be the best movie of the year, but it's certainly the strangest. It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.

It's a marvelous performance in a marvelous movie, one that sneaks up on you while you're watching it.

Despite everything, many of us still think of animation as a kid's genre. $9.99, based on stories by Etgar Keret who also co-wrote the script with the director, is an attempt to use the animation medium to express an entirely adult sensibility.

If the literacy of The History Boys is deemed uncinematic, then give me uncinema anytime.

Sissako, a Muslim, frames his story as a cry against religious intolerance. One of the characters, speaking of jihadism, says, “Where is piety? Where is God in all this?” It is the central question of this movie – and of much more now than this movie.

After seeing this film, try reading Norman Mailer's "Of A Fire on the Moon," its perfect companion piece.

The result is doubly satisfying: We get not only a trenchant political drama but a bang-up concert film as well.

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

The movie is an idyllic view of life as it ought to be, rather than the way it is.

Interviewed in the film, Juárez journalist Sandra Rodriguez offers up this grim summation: “That these people represent the ideal of success, impunity, and limitless power is symptomatic of how defeated we are as a society.”

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.

In the end, the power poetry workshops, as the teachers are first to admit, are not about creating Shakespeares. They are about survival.

A lean, efficient modern Western that is so satisfyingly constructed I’m tempted to say it’s just about perfect. There’s a special pleasure in watching a movie that knows exactly what it’s after and then, in scene after scene, gets it.

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]

Preteen girls – and not just those who are already American Girl fanatics – should be entranced. And why not? Not many movies for that audience are as respectful as is this one.

High among the film’s many standout virtues is how fully Kapadia has captured the faces of this trio.

This extraordinary film, which, despite its tragic trappings, is often surprisingly playful, can be appreciated without knowing anything about Panahi or his long-term battles with the authoritarian regime.

Past Lives, the graceful debut feature from the Korean Canadian playwright Celine Song, stands a world apart from most of today’s slick movie fare.

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

Apollo 10½ is a portrait of innocence untainted by any agenda other than the need to convey as honestly as possible what it felt like to be that particular boy at that particular moment in history. It’s a movie about how we conjure and commemorate our pasts.

Perhaps most heartening about Writing With Fire is how the film doesn’t discount the personal toll on these women. Crusaders though they may be, they voice throughout the film their deep doubts and fears.

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

R.M.N. is one of the most searing cinematic examinations of xenophobia I’ve ever seen.

It would be too convenient, I think, to write this movie off as a study of untreated mental illness. The performance of Jean-Baptiste (who was so memorable in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies”) transcends the clinical. She shows us what lies beneath Pansy’s suffering. This woman who can’t abide other people is terrified of being alone.

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.

King is above all a pleasure-giver. He wants to heighten the knockabout joys of unfettered high spirits.

A thriller so tricky that figuring it out is half the fun.

It would be natural to place this film in the context of America’s ongoing immigration crisis. Certainly it is “topical.” But I think Liu and Majok have transcended its immediate relevance. It’s a human drama, not a sociological artifact. Because of its quality of feeling, and the remarkable performances of its two leads, it will likely outlast its historical moment.

The film periodically risks turning into a swoony fantasy. But it is a fantasy we can favor because it’s one we all can share.

It’s a wonderful movie, and an Oscar nominee for best international feature. It is also proof, if any were needed, that the rhythms of everyday life, no matter how seemingly mundane, can resonate when beheld by an artist’s eye.

Emotional, powerful, an important film to see.

Rather than structure their movie as a chronological biography, the co-directors, Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, wisely focus on the genesis of Cohen’s most celebrated and performed song, “Hallelujah.” This approach allows them to interweave Cohen’s entire career while also avoiding the one-thing-after-another sprawl that often bogs down these kinds of films.

Most of the acting is as real and warm as the characters themselves. And the streets, shops, and living rooms of Brooklyn have never seemed more inviting. [29 Jan 1988]

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.

The film is an indictment of a cultural tragedy; a testament to the steadfastness, against all odds, of the Indigenous community; and a plea for healing.

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 film’s moral issues don’t come across as tacked on. They arise organically and register as both intensely personal to the filmmaker and much larger in scope. The film even offers up, against all odds – and a truly chilling final moment – a measure of hope.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down someone as good or bad, the tables are turned and the complexities thicken. Just like in real life.

Although Neville obviously had the cooperation of many in Bourdain’s inner circle, the film never feels authorized or hagiographic. He allows for Bourdain’s inner darkness.

Directed with deadpan flair by Barry Levinson and based on a memoir by Hollywood producer Art Linson, it's a pitch-perfect sendup of the movie colony with a marvelous cast.

This is not intended as a movie about what a genius must endure on the path to success. Sharad’s story is much more relatable than that.

Blue Moon may essentially take place inside a single room, but it rarely feels stagy. It captures the connivance and conviviality of theater people – the way they come together, if only for a night, with a spiritedness that is both forced and entirely genuine.

The paradox of Train Dreams is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living.