Family home movies and photos and archival clips round out the film, which holds its hero-worshiping to fairly tolerable levels.

The best of it has the comradely, free-swinging bawdiness of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

Tom Hooper, who directed "The King's Speech," is not great with action and big set pieces, but he gets the job done. What makes Les Misérables work are the up-close moments when he can focus on performance and song.

Most middle movies in a trilogy simply mark time. Not this one.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

It's minor, but powerfully so.

More than awe, the film provokes gratitude for what this man did.

As was also true of Pixar's last movie, "Cars," Ratatouille is better at pleasing the eye than the other senses.

Has its pleasures, foremost being its look – a sophisticated puppet primitivism backdropped by near-psychedelic colorations.

It's an expertly engineered popcorn movie - hold the butter substitute - but it also tries (and fails) to be a love story for the ages.

Alternately inspirational and disheartening, galvanizing and wearying.

With all this working against it, Les Cowboys strikes a fresh chord. The rise of jihadism has infused this revenge scenario with (all too literally) new blood.

The marvelous Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda shows a strong affinity for the humors and longings of childhood. It's an adult movie about children that feels made from the inside out.

This enjoyable Dreamworks animated comedy is well timed.

I rue the day when this becomes a Broadway musical.

Tries mightily to make the case that Spitzer was brought down by his political enemies.

Shoot the Moon doesn't reach the eccentric emotional heights of John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, perhaps the best family drama ever made. But flaws and all, it towers over most of the kiddie movies that have dominated the cinema scene for too long. It will be taken very seriously for a very long time. [28 Jan 1982, p.18]

Throughout the film there are small, rapturous moments.

The movie captures so well the push-pull of family dysfunction that, after a while, even the Fangs’ extreme eccentricities seem routine. And that’s the point: The filmmakers are trying to demonstrate that, no matter what we think our family dynamic may be, we’re all on the same strange spectrum.

The role of Deb is not written with any great depth, but Miller gets into the character’s psychological complications in a way that almost compensates for the lack.

I wish the entirety of Polisse were as good as its parts, but perhaps its free-form, mood-swing approach was unavoidable, given the subject. The audience is put through the same wringer as the cops.

The odyssey goes on a bit too long, and I suppose a taste for extra dry British comedy is a requirement, but this "Trip" is well worth one.

This may seem like a stunt, but the experience, with many of the sitters tearing up, or smiling beatifically, is overwhelming to watch.

There are wonderful sequences strewn throughout, like the moment when Lazhar, at a school dance, begins to slowly sway to the music as if in a trance.

The film is a dual portrait in courage.

The gifted Zhang Yi-mou directed this gripping and colorful drama, which mingles beauty and perversity in equal proportions. [15 Mar 1991, p.12]

Very difficult to characterize and that's why I like it. The best I can do is to call it a sunny tragedy.

At his best, Costner both exalts and complicates the strong and silent types who crowd, often to diminishing effect, so much of our American movie mythology.