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.