This is a gentle comedy, both funny and melancholy, about a timid soul who discovers the necessity of embracing life in all its absurdity and unlooked-for joy.

It's Patinkin who scores a special triumph. In his role there's a poignant strain of weariness beneath the leaping bravado, a pain under the braggadocio. [25 Sept 1987]

However pointed the drama's lessons, they're never simplistic and always involving, pulsing with compassion and urgency as Hamoud's vivid characters defy the rules.

The film’s beautifully painted mountains are particularly striking, and the climbing sequences are among its standouts. Live-action has nothing on the way these scenes convey both the majestic scale of the peaks and the technical skill necessary to attempt these summits (as well as the physical toll involved).

Not Yet Begun to Fight is barely an hour long, but it justifies a theatrical release with a lyrical meditation on nature and war.

One of the truly heartening international political stories of recent years.

Certainly, Wings soars beyond human experience. [17 Jan 1928, p.11]

What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and The Chronology of Water, arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish.

An art film to the core. If it's an epic, it's an intimate, dream-time epic, an elliptical, episodic film, dependent on images and reveries, that treats war as the ultimate nightmare, the one you just cannot awaken from no matter how hard you try.

Dance purists might dismiss Streb's work as circus gymnastics, but a bracing aesthetic is inseparable from the corporal shocks, as is an insistence on challenging accepted constraints. Through Gund's film, a wider audience stands to be not just amazed but provoked.

One of “Trouble’s” nicest gifts is a pair of lovers to sigh over, whose future you agonize about, lovers who can make each other roar with laughter while lovingly intertwined. How long since we cared anything about a couple on the screen?

In what’s been a banner year for archival docs that repurpose footage into absorbing, contemplative cinematic experiences (“Amazing Grace,” “Apollo 11,” “They Shall Not Grow Old”), Kapadia reasserts his mastery of the format, especially as a force of perspective from inside and outside a superstar’s orbit.

“Onoda” is an insightful portrait of fanaticism, illustrating how bad ideas can take root simply because people are naturally resistant to change.

Director James Foley and his co-screenwriter Robert Redlin have pulled Thompson's story out of film noir shadows and set it unflinchingly in the desert's orange-red glare.

Its wrenching honesty provides a potent counter to the simple-minded let’s-all-be-friends-and-sing-a-song inanities of “My Little Pony,” “The Emoji Movie” and other recent American animated features.

When I, Daniel Blake regrettably piles it on at the end, it’s Loach growing weary of humanizing details and desperate to shake you up with consequences, didacticism and speechifying. It’s the finger-pointer in him, but as this movie frequently shows in its best moments, he’s still a practiced veteran at open-arms affection for the dignity of the downtrodden.

The Counterfeiters demonstrates that no matter how many Holocaust stories the movies tell, there are always new and unexpected ones waiting to be revealed.

After the Wedding would never pretend to have any answers, but in hands this skilled the act of exploration itself couldn't be more illuminating, or more dramatic.

Potent, persuasive and hypnotic, The Dark Knight Rises has us at its mercy. A disturbing experience we live through as much as a film we watch, this dazzling conclusion to director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is more than an exceptional superhero movie, it is masterful filmmaking by any standard.

The movie may, in the end, frustrate your desire for straight-up thrills and clear answers, but its irresolution is masterful — sincere, generous and entirely appropriate to the deeply searching story it has to tell.

It's the film's glowing visual qualities, a striking performance by Denzel Washington and the elegant control Carl Franklin has over it all that create the most exotic crime entertainment of the season.

Girl Picture is designed to feel as closely observed as a diary, but it’s also like being pulled along by a friend eager for you to experience what they go through, see things the way they do, to just get it and have a great time too. That’s a special kind of invitation, and Girl Picture is more than enough movie to make its compassion for the lives of teenage girls a swirling, swooning high.

Somewhat miraculously, we’re carried out of this consequential collision of hearts and minds on the lightest of notes, with the sense that our capacity to rediscover harmony will always be beautifully mysterious.

The inside jokes and fan-service digressions are blatant and relentless, but also pretty effective. The conflicting narrative priorities that often bedevil an epic series finale — how to tell a story that builds with inexorable momentum while also staging the mother of all cast reunions? — are cleverly and resourcefully reconciled.

A film of simplicity and power, beautifully shot and effortlessly acted by nonprofessionals.

Makes for gripping, merciless drama.

Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.

I’d call “Wallis Island” a contender for the most quotable film of the year but there are so many good lines stacked on top of each other, and so much giggling on top of that, it’s impossible to keep up with Key’s wordplay.

There is a guileless quality to the enterprise as Young interviews stars such as Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson and Martin Short who worked in industrials, as well as the lesser known performers and songwriters who became his heroes.

Blue Ruin is an uneven film, and there are slip-ups along the way, but the tension that settles in slowly like a low-grade fever keeps you with it.

In interposing haunting footage of the destructive wake of the Fukushima tragedy with Sakamoto’s evident, childlike delight in coming up with the perfect tonal combinations, the film serves as a stirringly poetic meditation on the pursuit of creation in the face of mortality.

The War of the Worlds is one of those movies that many who grew up in the '50s remember fondly as a mix of science-fiction melodrama and crashingly good mayhem. Nostalgia goes a long way toward appreciating it today. [13 Aug 1992, p.15]

Equally brazen and ambitious, Drew’s film is committed to embracing the zany undertones that have always bubbled under the surface of a comic book tale in which secret identities, arch performances and fabulous outfits (all worn in the dead of night, no less) have always felt like lifelines for queer and trans kids worldwide.

What you see is pretty much what you get. Fortunately, what we see is often vivid and lovely.

Johnson is nothing if not a punchy ringmaster of deadpan humor and his grab-bag mindset generates enough goodwill to appreciate the DIY brashness of it all. I’m one of those who had no clue of this act’s history and I’m fairly certain I’d look forward to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Sequel.

Against considerable odds, Wang managed to smuggle the various media out of China and back to her New York base where she adroitly edited it into a quietly powerful first feature about the untapped potential for bearing witness in our social media-driven society.

Shrewdly imagined and persuasively made, Ex Machina is a spooky piece of speculative fiction that's completely plausible, capable of both thinking big thoughts and providing pulp thrills. But even saying that doesn't do this quietly unnerving film full justice.

It says something when you come out of a film as weird and fantastical as Oldboy and feel that you've experienced something truly authentic. I just don't know what. I can't think of anything to compare it to.

Herbulot and Diop have made a movie that is bold and exciting, combining bits of reality with outsized myth, in a tale of crime, revenge, and literal monsters, set in a wonderland where it seems anything can happen.

Slaboshpytskiy has made one of the most unusual and disturbing films about criminality of the new century.

Ramsay reaches out boldly with a film that is as unsettling as it is minimalist.

In the end, Audiard plays to his past strengths as a poet of wounded masculinity; in its most touching moments, The Sisters Brothers is like a hangout movie on horseback.

Martel's sharp observations of the foibles of human nature are expressed perfectly in the telling images of cinematographer Hugo Colace and tight editing of Santiago Ricci.

The film, which plays like "The Help" minus the safety net of nostalgia, provides a powerful reminder that as we all carry history with us, it is still possible for each of us to change it.

Saving Brinton is an endearing, affectionate documentary, an examination not so much of film exhibition pioneer Frank Brinton and how his life's work was saved but of the genial and humane eccentric who did the saving.

[Lee's] work is less strident here, more controlled, less in-your-face explosive than for instance “Do the Right Thing,” but for all of that, no less penetrating, no less troubling. Given his passion, there’s no way it could be otherwise.

Though its title suggests an exposé on Dodger Dogs, the movie is the moving, inspirational account of John Peterson's discovery of an almost divine calling in the land beneath his feet.

Of the many artists Hawke has honored on screen, he has never depicted one so touchingly diminished — someone so consumed with envy who nonetheless cannot lie to himself about the beauty of the art around him.

This one-of-a-kind film cycle has become as comfortable and reliable as an old shoe, providing a degree of dependability that's becoming increasingly rare.

Bursting with a rich blend of timely themes, superb voice work, wonderful visuals and laugh-out-loud wit, Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia is quite simply a great time at the movies.

Anderson, who makes as impressive a directing debut as has been seen in some time, creates a perfectly modulated mystery that doesn't even feel like one. It's a character play, and Hall, Reilly and Paltrow are so convincingly damaged they take on the properties of fine china.

Too short by half, Lost Boys of Sudan affords frustratingly little by way of real analysis and history. But it does introduce us to two extraordinary young men whose faith in this country is almost as unbearably sad as their stories.

Has both bark and bite. Its low-key but sharp and amusing sense of humor is a nice fit with the frenetic world of competitive dog shows.

Mantegna and Nussbaum are so good as the con artists that their reading of Mamet's dialogue--and often Crouse's reading as well--justifies the movie. These actors have worked many times on stage with Mamet, as have J. T. Walsh, and cardsharp Ricky Jay (as a Las Vegas gambler), and when they latch onto these lines, they're like seasoned pitchers palming and scuffing the ball. Oozing confidence, they, and Mamet, put on a coldly skillful, killingly well - calculated show.

The ending is ambiguous enough to be refreshingly un-clichéd. While “I’m Your Man” is very romantic in its own way, the movie is elevated by pondering not just love but life and our impending relationship to advanced artificial intelligence, a question that is surely already upon us.

Gorgeous, humbling, looking out-, up- and inward, the documentary The Velvet Queen is the rare nature film about not only beauty and beasts but also the very human urge to make sense of our place in it all.

Happily, the movie doesn’t exist only on paper. It lives in Marinelli’s and Borghi’s beautifully harmonized performances, in their expressive physicality and intense if sometimes hesitant emotions; in the soft-polished grit and enveloping romanticism of Daniel Norgren’s songs; and especially in the heart-stopping grandeur of Ruben Impens’ square-framed compositions.

A Love Song has the narrative economy and the sneaky emotional power of a well-crafted short story, plus a feel for isolation and rootlessness that harks back to some of the great drifter portraits of American independent cinema. It’s a testament to the lyricism that Walker-Silverman conjures here that I sometimes wished he would slow his narrative roll even further, immersing us even more deeply in the story’s quotidian rhythms.

De Bont and his team have turned in a visually sophisticated piece of mayhem that makes the implausible plausible and keeps the thrills coming. [10Jun1994 Pg. F1]

William Wyler directed this hard-hitting, beautifully acted 1951 adaptation of Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit. Kirk Douglas is remarkable as a tough-nosed, moralistic police detective who is accused of roughing up a shady doctor. [25 Oct 2005, p.E3]

[A] delightfully voluble new comedy.

“Jazz Fest” isn’t without flavor and rhythm, but what’s lacking is the thickness.

Lemmons' command of cinematic style, her appreciation of the chimerical aspects of life and her ability to inspire actors to give remarkably faceted portrayals mark Eve's Bayou a first film of exceptional promise.

Lee and his top-notch production staff employ camera wizardry and lighting techniques to evocative effect, yet manage to never take away from Smith’s performance.

The payoff to The Earth Is Blue as an Orange is incredibly powerful though, in ways that just about anyone can relate to, as these budding artists share their work with neighbors whose emotional reactions speak volumes about their shared nightmare.

The strangest and most delightful of the many collaborations of those joint exemplars of neo-realism, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini: a Chaplinesque fable about a purely innocent and good young orphan who leads the inhabitants of a Roman shantytown in angelic revolt against their cruel evictors. [10 Nov 1996, p.4]

Shadowman is at its unsettling, want-to-look-away best when tiptoeing around the question of what makes for success regarding artists like Hambleton: the hoopla that keeps the work in circulation, or the mysterious inner pilot light that keeps a self-destructive talent going?

It’s the sort of verbally dexterous farce you’d have to be a total Crabapple Annie not to enjoy.

Despite the awkwardness of much of the staging, and the unevenness of the script, the movie does give you a sense of real people living real lives. [14 Feb 1992, p.B9]

It feels like a blessing to have this production at all and we are fortunate it turned out as well as it did.

In Scum, one of only three features he directed for the big screen, Clarke finds a bleak beauty in an institution devoted to controlling, yet also propagating, all manner of human ugliness.

A work of striking beauty and affecting emotional heft enhanced by an Afghan-themed score by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, The Breadwinner reminds us yet again that the best of animation takes us anywhere at any time and makes us believe.

So much of Ruthless People goes so far that maybe it was inevitable that the film makers would pull up short and make this half-sappy compromise--cynicism with a smile--as compensation for their previous audacity. A pity. A lot of the rest gives you something better: full-bore, shameless, gut-clutching laughter.

Buoyed by an unreserved humanism and a cheerful sense of the absurd.

To describe Endless Poetry as self-indulgent would be entirely accurate and not even remotely insulting.

Harris Dickinson, the spellbinding British newcomer who plays Frankie, rewards the director’s scrutiny with piercing emotional depth and a startling lack of self-consciousness.

How can one dislike this movie? It has wit, romance, gentle rebellion, idyllic landscapes and fine actors savoring luscious lines. Only the undercurrent may bother a few: the hints of feminist revolt, beneath the sparkly surface. Enchanted April--based on a 1923 novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim--is a pure wish-fulfillment story, but there's an acid edge to it.

The Catherine Breillat-directed period piece is an extreme cinematic pleasure, a well-told yarn of merciless desire.

What Live-in Maid offers is a pitch-perfect observation of life on a continent where forms are adhered to, distances aren't really kept, and your best friend is the person who knows to pour the cheap domestic whiskey into the empty bottle of imported stuff before your bridge buddies show up to judge you.

It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.

The desert trek in Tracks is as brutal as it is beautiful; the performance by Mia Wasikowska as raw as the reality. And the camels? If they don't steal your heart it must be stone-hinged.

Epic and intimate, historical and contemporary, moving and thought-provoking, the impressive The Princess of Montpensier has something for all and sundry but especially for those who like to believe that films can be as boldly intelligent as they are entertaining.

Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma may be the most important documentary you see this year.

Schoenbrun, a native speaker of the language of the internet, has uploaded into the cinematic landscape one of the most thoughtful depictions of self-discovery in the digital age. Through Casey’s plight of suburban isolation, the artist reaches out to us from a corner of the web’s endless abyss with an unmissable invitation, quite literally demonstrating the transcendental prowess of storytelling.

Drunk and disorderly on the pure joy of making movies. A frantic, flawed, fascinating film that is both impressive and a bit out of control, often at the same time.

The magic trick of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is that you find yourself caring deeply for Linda, thanks to Byrne’s vivid, impassioned performance. You can’t shake her.

A glorious, mostly lighthearted adventure celebrating the mythical freedom and excitement of the outlaw life in the Old West. [09 Feb 1986, p.4]

This deservedly anticipated Frankenstein transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.

Not every joke here lands, and not every experiment proves successful, but it scarcely matters. The genius of the picture is that even its wildest, most boundary-pushing formulations are tied to a thoughtful, rigorous thesis about how disparities of race, class and money conspire to keep ruthless systems of human oppression in place.

Emotional and analytical by turn, The Case Against 8 is a thoroughly engaging documentary.

There isn't a single performance in Midnight Run that doesn't have a pulse, that doesn't show the actors at their best or near-best, especially De Niro. [20 July 1988]

Zilbalodis’ storytelling is intriguing but oblique.

Barnabás Tóth’s richly acted film exudes a faith in human connection as relevant today as such relationships needed to be in the years after World War II for survivors of unimaginable trauma.

An engrossing peek inside the Mideast peace talks during the Clinton administration.

The term classic gets tossed around a lot, but few films ever actually fall within its definition. John Huston's 1956 production of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, coolly received by critics when it first came out, now falls within the parameters -- a model of its kind. [03 Sep 1993, p.F23]