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.