Dreamy and creepy, tender and terrifying, Somersault is a frank and visceral film that at the same time exudes an unexpected innocence.

The dialogue is fresh-prince clever, the themes are ageless, the rhythms are riotous and the return to a primal animation style is beautifully executed.

The details are mesmerizing as is the rule-breaking psychology behind it.

A demanding, harrowing drama of agonized love laced with sardonic humor. [19 Apr 1992, p.9]

There’s a salve-like quality to Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a balm for any battered romantic’s soul. It may be utter fantasy, but it’s the kind of escape you’ll want to revisit again and again, like a favorite Austen novel.

Crossing the Bridge does more than offer a wide variety of entertaining and intoxicating Turkish music. It also uses music to paint a portrait of a vibrant, cosmopolitan city and provide a window into a rich and varied national culture.

One of the best sports documentaries in recent memory.

Like "Street Fight," Marshall Curry's account of the 2002 Newark, N.J., mayoral race, "Mr. Smith" captures ground-level political machinations in an utterly fascinating way. The question raised by the title makes for an interesting, if possibly disheartening, debate.

The 1959 film's style is dated, but it is visually glorious and tells a fascinating story.

Sometimes when the moment comes to reconcile our feelings, we freeze or fumble the opportunity; other times, when we finally process the emotions and can articulate the thoughts, it is too late to communicate them. Coming Home Again, sweetly, sometimes painfully, evokes this experience.

Though admirably sensitive to the inner lives of opened souls, The World to Come is more a journal with faded photographs than a past made vividly present.

While other films struggle for their effects, Brothers simply lives and breathes, thoroughly likable from beginning to end.

Such a powerful experience that it is equally effective whether you have figured out from the start where it is headed or whether its denouement comes as a complete surprise.

The creators of the magnificent Balseros stayed involved with its subject, a group of Cuban boat people who made it to the United States, for a full seven years. If you put in that kind of time, you witness life happening in front of you in all its compelling, confounding drama. What could be better than that?

Demme finds haunting overtones in the somewhat old-hat situations of E. Max Frye's first screenplay. Something Wild also has three first-class performances: by Daniels, who seems to have resources that his earlier roles never touched; by electrifying newcomer Ray Liotta, and by Griffith as the maddening, mysterious Lulu. [6 Nov 1986]

School Life is as charming, intimate and warm-hearted an observational documentary as you'd ever want to see.

Fake Case assumes a certain familiarity with Ai and his work — explored more thoroughly in Alison Klayman's "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." But as a follow-up and a companion piece to that 2012 documentary, Johnsen's new work is remarkably intimate and astute.

As it marches its characters ever so slowly toward a suitably despairing climax, the movie feels increasingly like a self-satisfied but unsustained provocation, a rich display of craft in service of secondhand shocks and ideas.

The focus here is always on character and storytelling and the acting that brings it all alive. With thrillers this good becoming a lost art, Wind River is definitely one to savor.

Lynch's film is a work of steady chronological progression. Without straining for big-picture significance, it provides a composed look into the revolutionary spirit.

In some ways, the movie is also carrying on a subliminal, more subtly nostalgic conversation with the ’90s, the decade that transformed Affleck and Damon into household names and saw some of their key supporting players here first rise to prominence.

Kusturica works marvels with his endlessly amusing cast, and his film has an appealingly free and easy tone.

As intriguing as the facts are, much of the documentary's charm is the way in which it embeds the work.

The remarkable script by Pierre Marton manages to be great fun while laying bare the evils of the institution of slavery. [11 Aug 1991, p.6]

Actually witnessing the audience’s emotional connection to her lyrics makes “Hit Me Hard and Soft” feel like an epic coming-of-age movie as much as a concert film. Still, by the 50th mascara-smeared face, I needed fresh air.

Spider-Man may look like an action comic come to life, but its best feature is its romance comic heart. It's that rare cartoon movie in which the villain is less involving than the love story.

Wings of the Dove is richly appointed and beautifully mounted, with lush location shooting in Venice given the place of honor.

Parabellum excels when it tees up the sublimely inventive and wince-inducing close quarters fights with the lethally graceful Reeves baring John Wick’s psyche and soul between reloads and headshots.

It's exhausting, exhilarating, riveting stuff that fans of high-octane filmmaking should not miss.

In his sleek, punchy and altogether captivating Sonatine, Japan's fabled writer-director-tough guy star Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes it seem as if we've never seen such a tale on the screen. In doing so, Kitano creates one of the most effectively anti-violence violent movies since The Wild Bunch. [10 Apr 1998, p.F10]

Davaa has made a sweetly meditative film.

What's bracing about Sorry Angel is that it refuses to allow the specificity of its characters — specifically drawn and superbly played — to be obscured or flattened by the drama of terminal illness. Neither man is made nicer or more palatable than he has to be.

Shot in evocative black and white, Karl Marx City is a sleek, absorbing detective story, a fascinating primer on mass surveillance in the pre-Snowden era, and a roving memoir of East German life.

The Great Mouse Detective reflects the energy and enthusiasm of a talented group of young artists stretching their wings for the first time. That group has gone on to produce some truly extraordinary work, win awards and earn sums no one believed could be made from an animated film. And, as has often been the case at Disney, it all began with a mouse.

As compelling as the music and concert footage is, it is the vitality of the performers as characters that enables the movie to transcend the music documentary genre.

Sunset Song, Davies’ adaptation of a 1932 novel about a Scottish farming family, falls short of the intended cumulative effect, its emotional power undercut by its studied, episodic unfolding.

In its clear-eyed empathy for the totality of life, Free Chol Soo Lee is only deepened by not ignoring what happens when the spotlight fades on a righted wrong, and what’s left are demons, trauma, guilt and that thing both sought after and scary: being free.

This is one terrific thriller with several wicked tricks up its sleeve, each more satisfying than the last.

One of the ironies of Casino is that even though Scorsese is interested in the story's wider implications, he focuses so much energy on that unsavory romantic triangle that he and the film lose sight of the larger issues.

Unlike the highly charged “Sicario” and other recent drug trade-themed movies, the film, shot in New Mexico, eschews explosive confrontations and political judgments in favor of complex, thoughtfully portrayed characters and tense, compelling situations.

It's simply the best, funniest Grand Guignol horror picture to come along in ages.

In sharing these often harrowing stories, “Unsettled” paints a sobering but ultimately hopeful portrait of possibility for those who are allowed to enter.

Both actors know how to hit Macqueen’s more emphatic dialogue with a soft, glancing touch; they also know how to settle into the script’s familiar narrative grooves, its intimations of mortality and grief, in ways that will yield fresh, distinctive notes of humor, emotion and even surprise.

This buoyant, giddy comedy of catastrophe is the funniest film of the year so far, possibly the most amusing mainstream live-action comedy since "There's Something About Mary."

Mbatha-Raw looks, sounds and moves like an A-lister. If "Belle" put the actress on Hollywood's radar, Beyond the Lights heralds her superstardom.

A wildly cinematic futuristic thriller that is determined to overpower the imagination, The Matrix combines traditional science-fiction premises with spanking new visual technology in a way that almost defies description.

[An] absorbing, entertaining and lovingly crafted documentary.

Ultimately, and perhaps most beautifully, the film makes a case, à la the musical “Rent,” about how, in the end, we must measure our life in love. On that score, Eli Timoner left the world a very wealthy man.

Thoughtful as well as sensual, particular yet universal, it is the kind of expertly made examination of the human condition we can never have too many of.

Bayona achieves a rare sense of balance between the big and the powerful as well as the small and the intimate in the family's survival against impossible odds, no doubt the inspiration for the title.

Touzani, an unfussy, patient director with a fondness for the simplicity of human interaction, implicitly trusts her star to carry the film’s effervescence and complexity, although you may wish the filmmaking was a little less straightforward.

Central to the last film's success are Manise and Blanc, who invest the story with intensity unmatched since Belvaux stormed through the first feature.

The stars and Doyle's expressive cinematography add up to a disarmingly seductive yet always precarious film experience.

With a graceful confidence Salvatores has made a movie in which good and evil flow into each other as easily as day and night.

Packs a lot of good information, witty visual aids and expert testimonials into its fast 96 minutes, and all the bad eating certainly makes for compelling if at times repugnant viewing. But the film ends up too short and, as a consequence, frustratingly glib.

Entertaining portrait.

Lonely, bitter, insecure and clearly unstable, the women are meant to level the emotional playing field and add depth to what is, at heart, a story about the exploitation of poor nations by rich and powerful ones. But they wind up being too bitter and unstable to elicit much sympathy.

Le Week-End is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.

To packs the moments of contemplation with as much suspense as the action sequences and is a master of ratcheting up tension through small details.

High Art is, unfortunately, full of itself and its artistic pretensions.

The ending is both shocking and inevitable. Drummond and Matthews honor the western traditions, classic, spaghetti and revisionist, while creating something stylishly original steeped in the seldom-seen rural and tribal cultures of South Africa.

In divisive times, Pig and his friends, who consist of maybe a dozen drawn lines apiece, provide much-needed laughter in the tradition of the great Warner Bros. cartoons.

Gilbert emerges as a tenderly observed, remarkably insightful keeper.

Love & Bananas works on two levels, spreading awareness about the plight of Asian elephants and the damage that tourist activities like elephant treks wreak, as well as documenting Noi Na's 500-mile journey and dramatic rescue.

A shockingly alarming investigation produced with the sensibilities of a social realist drama, Sarbil and Jones’ nonfiction warning should petrify U.S. viewers immeasurably.

A haunting, elegaic reverie of a movie; its opening battle scenes recalling John Ford’s cavalry westerns.

Smartly nuanced and darkly comedic. [21 Mar 1997, p.F2]

Formidable from a technical standpoint, The Platform thrives on effectively grotesque production design and ghastly special effects that shock and disgust with purpose.

The relationship between Gilbert and Arnie has "Of Mice and Men" vibes, but it strikes a responsive chord in a way that the rest of the film doesn't. Most of the credit for that goes to DiCaprio's performance.

There are many heavy hitters still to come, but Hoppers feels like the first great animated movie of the year. At a time when our right to protest is under siege, this sci-fi yarn exalts the way an individual’s conviction can plant seeds of change, leading to a stronger sense of community.

While the events that transpire are minimal, the poignancy of “Montana Story” resides in watching these two strangers, once inseparable, reconnect now as different people but with the same scars.

There are not one, but two wars raging inside this adaptation: one between the North and the South, and another, more calamitous war between art and middlebrow entertainment.

Foley's family members, colleagues and prison cell mates vividly recount his 2011 imprisonment in Libya, his difficulty reacclimating to home life in sleepy New England after his release, before leaving again for Syria and enduring imprisonment by ISIS.

Whenever The Commitments threatens to get bogged down in its own problems, Parker is savvy enough to pull it back with more of that invigorating music on the soundtrack. When that band starts to sing, the screen fills with genuine life, and that is too rare a commodity for anyone to second-guess for long. [14 Aug 1991, p.F1]

The biggest disappointment of Williams’ film then is not the ordinariness of its style and narrative mechanisms or even its safe and easy politics in search of a similarly broad audience, but its unwillingness to disrupt, with full and heavy weight, the exact things that it critiques.

The key to the fun is that Yeon eschews lookie-loo gore for thrilling set pieces: his fleet, imaginative action scenes recall Brad Bird’s crisp transition to real people in peril when he made his “Mission Impossible” movie.

McKay, a British stage actor who was doing an off-Broadway production about the movie legend when casting started, and Danes, whose acting always seems so effortlessly good, are the best things about the film.

American Sniper is at its best when it deals with the assembly-line-of-death relentlessness of combat for Kyle, how it simultaneously consumes him and wears him down, and how, to his wife's distress, it turns the civilian life he returns to between tours of duty into the aberration, not the norm.

Working Girl is the sparkling success that it is because of the sheer irresistibility of Melanie Griffith. [21 Dec 1988, Calendar, p.6-1]

Favored with copious amounts of footage shot during the voyage, as well as Genovés’ collected data and writings, Lindeen forged a riveting and illuminating study of the unscrupulous endeavor.

A clever piece of business that is a complete pleasure to experience.

Still, as compelling as The Price of Sugar is, it also represents a squandered opportunity. A stronger connection could have been made between the film's subject and our own responsibility as consumers.

Deeply fascinating, unexpectedly potent documentary.

Never Gonna Snow Again, Poland’s submission for the 2021 international film Oscar, is an intriguing, hypnotic, often beautiful but ultimately inconclusive dramedy.

Despite its singular star and bursts of audio-visual vibrancy, the film may prove more ponderous and patience-testing than enlightening or involving for all but the most intrepid viewers.

Whether snarling behind shades in uniform or off hours in elegant dresswear, Chen is a rule-breaking hoot, never more so than when she’s gearing up to heap abuse on a near-tears little girl in order to break her.

As brainy, vital and captivating as its eponymous star, the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy should warm the hearts and minds of science lovers, weather enthusiasts, environmental watchdogs and astronomy buffs, all while inspiring viewers to ask questions and seek answers.

Funny Pages itself sometimes feels like an exercise in misplaced artistry, a student’s overly precocious stab at brutish cynicism. Its biggest laughs, which tend to go hand-in-hand with its meanest jolts, seem to arise less from any recognizable emotional or situational reality than from a filmmaker’s desire to shock and humiliate his characters, to put them repeatedly through the wringer.

As vital, incisive and entertaining as its subject.

Fortunately, Pajot and Swirsky don't overdo the minutiae (this is a movie even non-gamers can enjoy), offering just enough insight into the creative process to feel enlightening.

Like any craftily layered confection, what at first presents itself as colorfully whipped reveals itself to be a more tangy, lasting bite.

Supplementing the interviews with well-chosen archival material, Hanks assembles a capsule history of the music biz and youth culture.

Francella and Lanzani are excellent, not only in their charged moments together, but throughout this nervy and provocative picture.

L.I.E. has embraced tragedy, folly, perversity and outrageous dark humor. Like "Happiness" and "American Beauty," it takes an unflinching look at the darker aspects of life in American suburbia.

As the film, with its haunting score and inspired use of popular music, builds flawlessly to its resounding conclusion, it is accompanied by a pitch-dark humor that grows out of the sheer absurdity of the city's daily body count.

Connects the antics of professional wrestlers with their lives out of the ring with such compassion, humor and perception that the result is utterly captivating.

The Corporation takes great and successful pains to be as visually diverse and clever as it is intellectually provocative.

Has a warmth and sweetness that is especially hard to resist.