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.

Director and co-writer Emmanuelle Bercot doesn’t go in for a lot of plot, and the film’s one-thing-after-another trajectory, at least for a while, is engagingly shaggy.

It would have been wonderful if Lee had consented to an interview for this documentary, but at least we have, among many others, her 99-year-old sister Alice, until recently a practicing lawyer in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala.

A powerful, and powerfully sad, experience.

Pound for pound, Ami is a heavyweight.

One thing is clear from A Place at the Table: You cannot answer the question “Why are people hungry?,” without also asking “Why are people poor?”

A considerable achievement even if, on balance, it's more of a Tim Burton phantasmagoria than a Sondheim fantasia.

Audiences knowing nothing about hockey will still be able to appreciate this movie as a somewhat jaunty take on the cold war and its aftermath – and resurgence. A curious kind of cold-war nostalgia can be felt in the West these days; President Vladimir Putin is the kind of comprehensible villain Americans feel comfortable with.

The aura of shock-and-awe surrounding this game is laid on a bit thick, and sometimes you feel like you're just watching an ESPN special. Still, it's fun. The interviewees include Harvard's stone-cold-serious Tommy Lee Jones and Brian Dowling, Yale's wonder-boy quarterback who became the model for B.D. in classmate Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury."

Given what this film is about and the dangers hindering its fullest accounting, a dramatic rendition, rather than a documentary, might have been more emotionally satisfying. Still, there’s nothing like seeing some of this stuff up close and for real.

The Lost City of Z cannot compare in intensity with Herzog’s film, with its magisterial delirium. But, in his own way, Gray is as unremittingly obsessed as Herzog.

Whether you deem this project an extravagant boondoggle or a masterpiece, you have to admire Christo’s tenacity in finally making it happen, as chronicled in the documentary Walking on Water.

Although it’s refreshing to see a movie that stands up for charter schools and takes on teachers unions for their hammerlock on educational oversight, Bowdon overcorrects. His home state of New Jersey may not be an isolated case but neither, with its high level of corruption, should it be seen as altogether representative of all countrywide educational ills.

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.

It’s lovely, child’s-eye fantasia.

My Brilliant Career is a calm and sunny movie, carrying a family-film G rating despite its essentially grown-up theme. As a bonus it contains a delicious performance by Australian actress Judy Davis -- a clear-eyed beauty whose character long-sufferingly endures countless insults about her "looks" because of a turn-of-the-century Australian prejudice against freckles! [4 June 1980, p.18]

Burton is extraordinary in one of his rare good movie roles and O'Toole is regally madcap and larger than life. No doubt his Oscar-nominated appearance in "Venus" has prompted this rerelease of Becket. They make a fascinating then-and-now combination.

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.

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.

It’s impossible not to be charmed by these students, by their aspirations and idealism, not to mention the fact that one of them, or someone like them, may well end up winning a Nobel Prize. It’s also impossible not to recognize, although the movie does not make a political point of it, that a goodly percentage of these participants are first- or second-generation immigrants to the United States.

Shine A Light is essentially just an expertly made concert film. But what a concert! (And what a camera team.)

A better movie would not have hinged its thesis so closely on Anna’s innocence. The film doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the issue of Anna’s veracity, or lack of it, is essentially a sideshow.

Erotic comedies are often attempted but rarely realized. Tamara Drewe is proof that sexy and funny need not be mutually exclusive.

As strong as Blood Diamond is in its best moments, I wish it had been even harder-edged. DiCaprio is remarkable - his work is almost on par with his performance this year in "The Departed."

The director has a good eye for semidocumentary detail, and the performances, which also include Bruce Dern as a veteran trainer, Gideon Adlon as Roman’s estranged daughter, and especially Jason Mitchell as a fellow inmate and trick rider, all have the sharp tang of authenticity.

Himmler in one of his letters says that “in life, one must be always decent, courageous and kind-hearted,” and “decent” is apparently how he saw himself right up to the time he swallowed a cyanide capsule after he was captured by the British.

Gibson has done a capable job of directing The Man Without a Face, showing little in the way of a personal style, but taking advantage of the skills brought to the project by his collaborators. [27 Aug 1993]

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.

It does leave you with something, though – a deeply wistful mood, if not a full experience. It bears out the sadness in a line from Tao earlier in the film: “Nobody can be with you all through life.”

The Ghost Writer is minor Polanski but it’s one of the rare thrillers these days that plays up to you instead of down.

Borden artfully combines social and political commentary with story elements, character development, and enough ideological savvy to poke intelligent fun at dogmas of every stripe.

Cameron, tall and lanky, fitted himself into the podlike chamber and dropped seven miles to the ocean floor. Although he didn’t encounter anything other than barrenness, he did bring back to the surface 100 new species of microorganisms. I hope National Geographic appreciates the effort.

The film drags a bit and Irglova's inexperience as an actor sometimes leaves her costars in the lurch. But it's a sweet little film just the same.

There are some great, rapturous moments in Where the Wild Things Are. Jonze is humbled before the wonders of a child's imagination, and so are we.

For a movie so sensuously mounted, it's remarkably grounded.

What we have here is a perhaps unanswerable enigma of the sort all too common in the annals of spying.

By Dardenne standards this plot is pretty pulpy and unconvincing, but I rather enjoyed watching them attempt to twist it into an existentialist pretzel.

What Batra is reaching for here is the fairy tale beguilements of Bollywood romance but without all the hoopla. He wants to tenderize the Bollywood clichés and bring the essence of their ardor into the real, teeming world of Mumbai.

It's a movie that could easily have been made 50 years ago, and I don't mean that as a knock. There is much to be said for a film that values unflashy craft and simple, unhurried storytelling.

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

It's reminiscent of David Lynch, who is a master at mixing the ghastly and the risible. Brick would be better with a bit more Lynch in its soul, but Johnson is his own man, and I look forward to what he comes up with next.

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.

The overlong but charming documentary California Typewriter is an ode to the iconic writing instrument. I have to say I feel kind of guilty celebrating it on my word processor.

While this may seem like an apologia for randy older men, it doesn't come off that way, and Cruz gives her best performance to date.

What is strikingly brought home in “Rumble” is how the vast stew of influences in American music, rather than diluting everything, makes the music all the more powerful.

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

Color Me Kubrick is a far more modest movie, but in some ways is more successful than "The Hoax" in conveying how deeply people want to believe something is true against all evidence.

There are some good laughs and ironic twists in the story, along with a nagging vulgarity. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas make a terrific team, and director Jeff Kanew gives them free rein to amuse us. [3 Oct 1986, p.23]

"Money Never Sleeps" doesn't get inside the sociopathology of the money culture. In a sense, it is a product, an expression, of that culture. Maybe that's why it's so disagreeably agreeable.

Each man has his own distinctive style, and yet when they jam together it sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

It's the kind of movie that creeps up on you, and this is due almost entirely to its lead actress, María Onetto, who looks as though she actually could solve one of those 8,000-piece puzzles.

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]

Kazi is a bundle of energy, and the film touches on an important and often-overlooked issue: The commercial pressure that is often brought to bear on rappers to be scurrilous and offensive. This project, which was produced by Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah, shows that there is another way.

I, Daniel Blake is one of his better efforts because the story is powerfully focused and the acting is strong, which is not always the case with Loach's films.

If the head of the bureau is God, then why is he played by Terence Stamp and not Morgan Freeman?

The screenplay is by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote "The Mother" for Michell and also scripted the classic "My Beautiful Laundrette." He has a feeling for outsiders.

It lacks the delirious inventiveness and irreverence of the best Pixar movies (which for me would be the “Toy Story” trilogy, “The Incredibles,” and the first 10 minutes of “Up”), but there’s always something spacious to look at, and the songs, mostly by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, aren’t bad either.

The cinematography by Bradford Young is rich-toned and lustrous, and the film, until it bogs down in melodramatics, has a sensual ease. We are not looking at these people from the outside. Dosunmu pulls us deep inside.

Kittelsen is a funny, expansive actress, and director Anne Sewitsky manages the sad-comic tonal shifts with emotional accuracy.

It’s unseemly, I know, to praise a movie like this for the stand-up-comic affability of its host. But Reich’s engagingness also gives credence to the seriousness of his message. He’s all about fairness, and, in his demeanor, as well as in his presentation, he embodies that ideal.

What makes the picture special is its muted atmosphere, its way of concentrating on the human dimensions of the plot without slipping into pathos, sensationalism, or even melodrama. [18 Nov 1982, p.19]

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

How intently should we take Joel and Ethan Coen as artists? Despite their extreme unevenness and the flip misanthropy that runs through their work, I think they deserve to be taken seriously as such. In this new film, their extraordinary jeweler’s-eye attention to detail, their gift for concocting dialogue in plummy 19th-century vernacular, their lyrical embrace of wide-open landscapes, and their woeful nihilism that conceives of a world where paradise is always on the precipice of ruination are hallmarks of something much more than mere jokesterism.

The Immigrant is reaching for the same thing that Fellini achieved in “La Strada” – the state of grace that arises between people who at first would seem to have nothing in common but desolation.

In its own superannuated preppy way, Stillman's comic universe is as singular as Woody Allen's.

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.

No great claims should be made for In Her Shoes. If the aim here was to show how chick lit can become just plain lit, the effort failed. But there is something to be said for froth when it's expertly whipped.

Barring a middle-class revolt, it's extremely unlikely that, whatever its virtues, universal healthcare could ever take hold in America. Still, I'm glad Moore made his film.

The greater the illusion the greater the manipulator, and few are as good as Kevin Clash, the subject of Constance Marks's sprightly six-years-in-the-making documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey.

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.

Given the impossibility of crafting William Shakespeare into a believable human being, the film is an honorable try.

When Kandel revisits his childhood neighborhoods in Vienna and Brooklyn and ruminates in his sprightly way on the past, the full measure of his humanity comes through.

The most powerful sequences in the movie are the linked vignettes involving Margaret and the various grown-up children whom she attempts to help in their search for – what, exactly? Closure? Catharsis?

The passage of time has rarely been more forcefully conveyed in a movie, as we see clips of the interviewees not only from today but also at seven-year intervals from the past.

Despite the film's coy artiness and a lassitude that sometimes passes for soulfulness, Certified Copy is strangely haunting.

It's a fascinating story, fascinatingly told.

The best part is that, amid all the hubbub, Jeunet, improbably and inevitably, draws out a love story between Bazil and Elastic Girl. Without it, Micmacs would have imploded. The romance, which is funny and sexy at the same time, anchors the shenanigans.

I couldn’t follow many of the ins and outs of the time-travel scenario, and I’m not altogether sure that the filmmakers could, either. It doesn’t really matter. It’s enough that the movie is fun. We shouldn’t also expect it to make sense.

Among other things, Unforgivable is a free-floating meditation on the distresses and exhilarations of being a parent.

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.

What Alfred Hitchcock once said about thrillers also applies to Westerns: The stronger the bad guy, the better the film. By that measure, 3:10 to Yuma is excellent.

Captures the fear factor in the lives of these men without turning them into the usual home front head cases.

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

The best episodes have the emotional resonance of full-length features, and yet I didn't want them to be a moment longer than they are.

It’s a big movie, but in an emotional, not a historical, sense. Oftentimes it has the hushness of a chamber drama even when the world is its stage.

The surprise is that, at least for its first half, this newest A Star Is Born is so powerfully fresh.

What struck home the most forcefully for me in Cold War is its depiction, insidious and unrelenting, of how artists under communism suffered for their art. At its best, the film is like a bulletin from a benighted world.

At times the film resembles a promo for Shortz and the Times, and the celebrity puzzlers, who include filmmaker Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, and the Indigo Girls, have an unfortunate tendency to bloviate. Not so Jon Stewart, who seems to regard each Times puzzle as an opportunity to go mano a mano with Shortz.

The filmmaking style is annoyingly slick, but the testimonies of these children are excruciatingly moving.

The Lunchbox, the debut feature from Indian director Ritesh Batra, has such a sweet premise that I sincerely hope it doesn’t get remade with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

What The Witness makes clear, especially for people who know very little about the Kitty Genovese case, is that the scenario of 38 apathetic witnesses was a gross misrepresentation of what actually occurred.

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.

You could argue, I suppose, that this film, a Sundance hit, is essentially a funny sketch padded out to feature length. And what of it, my man?

A great way to go on a safari without ever leaving the multiplex.

A celebration of the gloriously mundane.

Soderbergh does overemphasize the "little-people" dreariness of it all. But there is much low-key humor here, too, albeit on the dark side.

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

There’s real verve in the animation and wit in the byplay.