The wonderful British character actor Reginald Owen hits all the right notes as the ultimate miser, Scrooge. Equally fine are Gene Lockhart and his real-life wife, Kathleen, as Bob and Mrs. Crachit. [21 Dec 2000, p.F36]

The film offers a valuable life lesson in the powers of determination and timing, but most of all it's darned entertaining.

Bugonia is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life.

Master Z: Ip Man Legacy, like any old-school popular entertainment, contains sentimental moments and broad comedy as well as all that action. If you don’t already have the Ip Man habit, it’s a fine place to start.

This film has qualities of feeling and insight that set it apart from most movies about cantankerous coots. [18 Jun 1995, p.6]

Pieta, which won last year's Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is disturbing, for sure, but its larger points save it from being a quick and dirty wallow.

A good, rock 'em, shock 'em political thriller, done in the best imitation Costa-Gavras style by director Roger Spottiswoode. [08 Oct 1989, p.5]

You may well question the worth of a documentary that so fully embraces the perspective of a narrator this unreliable, just as you may crave the reassuring conventions of a more balanced filmmaking approach. But even for those who don’t regard the notion of perfect objectivity with the wariness it deserves, there are compensatory insights in this movie’s unapologetic fascination with its subject.

Cronenberg has a lot of high-minded ideas, but he grounds them in human behavior and has found the right humans to tell his story.

With American independent filmmaking all too often a ready punching bag in today's cinéaste culture, this frequently dazzling, eccentric portrait of mutually assured destruction is that most delirious of combos: charmingly funny and emotionally terrifying.

The film couldn't be more timely and germane for the American audience. If it weren't a documentary, it would seem like a post-apocalyptic allegory of our own vaccination debate.

Don't mistake the brief running time of India's Daughter for a lack of importance or ability to involve. Though it lasts only 63 minutes, this documentary's impact is devastating.

And although the film might stint on full renditions of their songs, one of the few played in its entirety is a gorgeous, relaxed acoustic version of “Honky Tonk Women” delivered by Mick and Keith in a vacant dressing room.

Lucid interviews with human-rights activists, attorneys, anthropologists, authors and others help frame this multi-faceted portrait.

Miike retains his twisted sense of humor, with mangling and disemboweling deployed for comic effect. And after 99 movies, he certainly knows how to make action memorable. When 300 brightly clad actors with sharp props come storming in for the story's climax, all a martial arts fan can do is sit back and salivate.

Wright's film is a beautiful and deeply empathetic depiction of this community, a portrait of Vanier and his philosophy of compassion as the source of true human connection, found and forged with those who have otherwise been cast out by society.

Intellectually intoxicating and stylistically sumptuous, this romantic oddity about the passage of time (for an individual and for a country) evokes the grand elegance of a Wong Kar-wai epic infused with mature droplets akin to anime like “Belladonna of Sadness” or “Millennium Actress.”

Fiendishly researched and smartly constructed, A German Youth is a formidable piece of documentary detective work focusing on a small but significant historical moment that continues to matter.

Less a film about the iconic 17th century Dutch painter of the film’s title than it is an acute, often fascinating and occasionally puzzling rumination on aspects of the other titular word — “my.”

Ghastly humor coated in serrated-edged commentary on corrosive power creeps in through Jordan’s yearnings for a world before online accountability.

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn never lets up, continually introducing new characters and adding new thrills and chills right up to the last frame… A terrific trip, although admittedly not one that everybody would enjoy taking. [13 Mar 1987, Calendar, p.6-14]

As a comedy about a young man with cancer, it needs to be serious enough to be real as well as light enough to be funny. Though it falls off the wagon at times, it maintains its balance remarkably well.

A sly and gleeful comedy showcase that pokes clever fun at the American musical, amateur theatricals and anything else that's not nailed down.

Basquiat's energetic brilliance is mourned as much as revered in "Boom for Real," which ends with his cannon shot into the money-mad, drug-fueled '80s. What lingers, though, is a heartfelt reminiscence for what's memorable about emergent talent, the spark that precipitates the well-fanned blaze.

This melding of two cinematic sensibilities, though effective at moments, is finally not as exciting or involving as it we'd like it to be.

Has the sweep of a classic John Ford movie, the sentiment of Frank Capra and a spirited steed named Joey who will steal your heart. The film itself is more difficult to love.

Not only one of Kazan's richest films and Dean's first significant role, it is also arguably the actor's best performance. [10 June 2005, p.E12]

Escalante draws remarkable performances out of his cast of mostly newcomers in this film about the consequences of pleasure and the many meanings of flesh; where animal intelligence fills the void left by emotional disconnect.

There's something about professional comedians breaking down what's funny for civilians that gets annoying after a while.

Neither as smart nor as funny as it wants to be. With the verbal-cleverness dial set at 11, the teen comedy wears its glib cultural references - pop and 19th-century literary - in boldface embroidery.

As unlikely as it is enchanting, The Eagle Huntress tells its documentary story with such sureness that falling under its sway is all but inevitable.

El Camino isn’t horrible, but it’s not commendable either, and given the legacy of “Breaking Bad,” mildly entertaining isn’t good enough.

Director Chen Kuo-fu adds a refreshingly wry humor to this view and then deftly throws in some wrenching moments and an ultimately astounding final twist.

Every element of The Mother, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, fits together with perfection. The film's staging -- the way its settings create a world that allows for striking images that echo the psychological interplay of its people, the way in which every performance could not be any better -- is awe-inspiring.

Censored Voices is a soul debriefing of sorts. The soldiers' tales of killing the captured and uprooting entire villages lead them to question whether the war was more about expansion than survival.

Jandal emerges as someone who was truly in Bin Laden's inner circle, Hamdan seems the menial driver he claimed to be. What remains unanswered is where their allegiances now lie. Frightening or not, terrorists or not, both seem human, which at the end of the day is what Poitras set out to do.

A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, or so the saying goes, but the unadulterated joy Irène takes in throwing open the closet door to show Jean how this gold digging is done is positively infectious.

Mortimer gives a terrifically keyed-up performance that is nicely complemented by the wholesomely chipper Harrelson, who seems to be drawing inspiration from Fred MacMurray's gallery of Disney dads.

Would that all love stories were as sophisticated and amusing as the satisfying Charlotte Sometimes.

For all its genuinely funny moments and its mix of outrageousness and insights, Down and Out remains curiously unsatisfying in the way it resolves the Nolte character.

Unfortunately, director Michael Lehmann's point of view is swivel-mounted: He doesn't have the courage of his cynicism. [31 Mar 1989]

As one observer here aptly - and non-hyperbolically - sums it up, White is "a founding father of the current state of pop art."

[A] stunningly assured, darkly gripping first feature.

DaCosta, who made her directorial debut with the remarkable abortion drama “Little Woods,” firmly announces herself as an artist at work with Candyman, a genuinely terrifying and artful horror film that speaks with a bell-clear voice to the current moment, the product of centuries of racist power structures.

Lee has sacrificed some clarity for inclusiveness; this is the document as monument, artful and rough by turns, and determined to be as big as its subject.

This exquisitely textured ensemble portrait is a gentler, more forgiving piece of work, not least because the filmmaker's jabs — and his sympathies, such as they are — feel more evenly distributed.

These performers are so young, so serious, so full of dreams and so hard on themselves that it is difficult not to be moved by their striving.

The film’s affable nature and the sheer charisma oozing off Pine and Grant is intoxicating, but overall, there’s a sense that it doesn’t quite gel, the engine revving but never hitting the speed of which it seems capable.

The film practically vibrates with youthful aggression, sly humor and gathering tension, hurling itself forward like a junkie toward the next fix.

Writer-director Xu Haofeng’s movie doesn’t feel like many other movies of its ilk. That’s mostly a good thing, even if the movie can’t quite fit all its eccentric pieces into a satisfying whole.

The Stooges were postwar kids who took to the stage with fearless, demented exuberance, Iggy writhing half-naked. With Gimme Danger, Jarmusch doesn’t ask him to strip down further. He simply thanks him.

As a gorgeously conceptual art-horror object, El Conde frequently mesmerizes; as a proper evisceration of its subject, it can’t help but feel curiously defanged.

At its best, when theme and visuals are in sync, Arco has the easy charm of something half-remembered from one’s cartoon-packed youth: beguilingly earnest and awkward in equal measure.

From our current vantage point, the film's appeal has less to do with surrealism than nostalgia. It's a movie that potently evokes bygone attitudes and aesthetics -- a relic of the age of pre-digital effects, a product of both Cold War paranoia and midcentury techno-utopianism. [03 Jun 2007, p.E19]

The new film is so leisurely paced and overly long that what means to be at once charming yet darkly satirical lapses into tedium and barely comes alive.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

A warm and feisty documentary that is as much inquiry as it is tribute.

One of the year's riskiest yet most effective films.

The pleasure of a film like this is not in wondering where it's going to go, but in knowing its exact trajectory. Getting us to pull for a foregone conclusion as if the outcome was in serious doubt is no small sleight of hand.

This is an intelligent epic told without special pleading, a film able to cut deep enough to reveal a keen specificity of experience.

A wholly enveloping experience. Gentle, ravishingly beautiful and awash in everyday sensuality, it so intoxicates you with the elegance and refinement of its filmmaking that even noticing, let alone caring, whether it has a plot starts to seem beside the point.

There is more to admire in A Beautiful Mind than you might suspect, but less than its creators believe. When the film does succeed, it almost seems to do so despite itself.

Between the gorgeous locations (New Zealand subs for Colorado), a credible emotional core, some effectively droll dialogue and a well-staged finale, Slow West is worth a look.

In some ways, Barry the film takes its personality from Barry himself. Always pleasant and companionable but a little pro forma in its early going, it gains in texture and interest as Obama's life and his reaction to it get more complex.

A brilliant mixture of laughter and pathos with delightful performances from Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell (in his last role) and Jack Lemmon, who received an Oscar as the enterprising Ensign Pulver. [24 Dec 1998, p.F12]

This absorbing, thoughtful film doesn’t take sides; that’s not James’ way.

The music is so strong, and such a demonstration of how potent the group was in action, that it alone makes the film worth seeing.

The spell that it casts is bright, dreamy and absorbing, but it is also in no particular hurry to come into focus, which makes its aftereffects all the harder to shake.

Though not among Melville's classics, Un Flic is a pleasure to experience.

He Never Died isn't as fleshed out as it could be, but what the film lacks in vivid supporting characters and rich plotting it gets back from Rollins, whose innate charisma carries the film.

Lee has phenomenal presence, and his movements are so balletically powerful that his rampages seem like waking nightmares. Lee keeps you watching The Crow when you'd rather look away.

It's an icy parody of suburban bliss, featuring the kind of proud pop who gets his kicks from loving his family to death. [23 Jan 1987, p.15]

It isn’t exactly terrifying, but is well-acted and sinister enough to rise (levitate ominously?) above the pack.

The film's core, anchored by a fine ensemble cast and a controlled, focused performance by Bacon, is completely solid.

Bayona mixes a sense of survivalist adventure with an otherworldly spirituality — the idea that they were somehow touched by something bigger, but also that the answers to what they needed were there with them all along.

Artfully calculated and authentically felt, the unexpectedly effective Summertime combines the conventional structure of classic movie romance with a sensual same-sex frankness that couldn't be more up-to-date.

Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.

The actors sell it, especially when Dern is unafraid to mix revitalized pleasure with pushing for answers. But the stand-up storyline, so promising, is dropped and it feels like a missed opportunity. Still, the highs and lows of marriage aren’t merely a punch line in “Is This Thing On?” — and that’s good.

It is Mulligan and most especially Fassbender that give the film its power. The desperation, hostility and despair he conveys through the act of sex make Shame a film that is difficult to watch but even harder to turn away from.

Williams has been making taut, gritty genre films and TV programs in the U.K. for two decades now, which is evident in the confidence of Bull.

A genuinely sweet and determinedly inspirational family film that features a charming young actress in the title role. It's a successful feel-good movie, but it would make you feel even better if it didn't push quite so hard for its desired effects.

Although ill-served by the lack of expert voices or elaboration on viable choices, Plagues and Pleasures is an often-fascinating document of change -- incremental as evaporation, or catastrophic as flooding.

If Frederick Wiseman's involving new documentary Crazy Horse is any indication, that old rule about how you get to Carnegie Hall - "practice, practice, practice" - applies equally well to that Parisian temple of self-described "nude chic" known to its intimates simply as "Le Crazy."

Johnson has taken a well-worn, much-revised genre, adapted to what's become a clichéd setting and transcended both in the process.

One of the pleasures of Doctor Strange is the way it both wholly embraces and gently mocks the unapologetic geekiness of the enterprise.

This beautifully crafted jewel of a throwback thriller signifies Okuno as a talent to watch, but furthermore, it pushes the viewer to question what, and who, we choose to believe and why.

Psychotic, battle-weary and devoid of compassion as they may be, these merry professional killers aren’t entirely dead inside. By the same token, Gunn’s insouciant swagger isn’t entirely devoid of warmth or sentimentality, and the bonds of kinship that emerge between comrades — warm little cracks in the movie’s nihilistic facade — can’t help but sneak their way into your own affections.

Audiences who feel battered by Hollywood's usual hard-sell approach to farce may be disarmed by Koepp's soft touch and inclined to credit blandness as understatement.

As Madeleine Sackler's absorbing, often tender documentary The Lottery shows, when it comes to the world of charter education, no seemingly good deed may go unpunished -- or at least undercut.

Stephenson's a true original, worthy of her own reality TV show. As Pressure Cooker proves: Anything is possible.

That Shear knows how to bring the storyline’s seasonal time frame to a cyclical close with humor, warmth and hope is the grace note that makes Fantasy Life feel like the start of a promising writing-directing career.

The machination is comic, and the repercussions carry the awkward tinge of threadbare farce, but the vibe is pure melancholy, echoed in the clinically beautiful monochromatic cinematography and the tinny, weeping musical phrase Hong often leans on to close his extended takes of dialogue.

Escapes is as unconventional as its subject, demonstrating the charming things that can happen when a life in no way ordinary gets documented by a filmmaker most unusual.

What the film does well is capture the confusion of the identity abyss of twentysomethings of a certain social class.

Dances on the edge of flat-lining just like the DOAs that are Frank's stock-in-trade.

It's one of the charms of Air Guitar Nation that much of it plays like a mockumentary in which you're not quite sure who's pulling your leg. But it's real, even if the guitars are not.

Veber, also responsible for "The Dinner Game," apparently has a finger on the pulse of French audiences and Gallic-minded Americans, but there's just not a lot of freshness in this Closet.

Sensitive, gritty and courageous, this film gathers a power and focus not foreshadowed in its deliberately rambling earlier sequences.