The picture has fine ensemble acting and superb Italian scenery. It would have more power if it were shorter and tighter.

Controversy and all, JFK is one of the year's most powerful and provocative films.

Rhys-Meyers and Johansson work well together - they both know how to project glossiness and guile.

A winning movie about losing. I didn’t always warm to its coy quirkiness, but it’s the rare American movie about contemporary teenagers that rings more true than false.

It’s a charming, wistful movie, and I trust Tan will not have to wait another 20 years to direct her next film.

Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.

What also comes through is a quietly scathing portrait of a society in which every move, overtly or covertly, is monitored.

As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.

The dragons in this movie are expertly brought to life.

Although stylistically and conceptually it never lifts itself entirely out of the realm of a made-for-television drama – don't expect "My Left Foot" – The Sessions is bracing. It's also one of the few movies to recognize that people with severe physical disabilities have sexual lives, too.

Without Cooper's performance, Breach would have been a good, workmanlike thriller. His presence lifts it to a whole new level.

Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.

The ad campaign for the sci-fi thriller District 9, with mysterious billboards touting aliens among us, is highly creative and amusing. So, in patches, is the movie, which is a thinking man's, or man-boy's, "Transformers."

It may be subtitled, and the faces may be unfamiliar, but District B13 is the best buddy action movie around.

Timeliness is certainly on the side of Mira Nair’s uneven but fascinating The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Plowright's performance as a genteel widow in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a small-scale gem, deeply felt without being in the least bit showy.

The film stands quite well on its own. The directors have made the right, essential decision to make the movie almost entirely from Maisie’s point of view.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an ersatz experience, a commingling of forced uplift and exotica, but it's moving anyway.

The film has a transcendent spookiness.

The most powerful scene in the movie, and the one that most fully encompasses its meaning, belongs to Mrs. Morobe (the marvelous Thandi Makhubele).

It sounds like what it is: a modest, workable story for a modest, workable picture. And that's one of the things that make Broadway Danny Rose so likable. The film's very lack of presumption lifts it above the common run of noisy farces and pretentious romances so plentiful these days. [09 Feb 1984, p.29]

It’s to Hall’s credit that, in the end, we see Chubbuck as a victim of no one so much as herself.

Wilson is pretty much the whole show. With nobody else around to steal from, he ends up stealing scenes from himself.

The film pays off in the end when, almost imperceptibly, the rush of emotions it stirs in us rises to a soft crescendo.

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

If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.

The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.

I wish the directors had emphasized more of the players' personal lives apart from the football field. But, in the end, this is a documentary about Courtney and the transformative powers of caring. He works wonders on his players and they reciprocate.