With pathos competing equally against the often pungent laughs for the audience's attention, it's a movie that is both unsettling and amusing, most comparable to "Chuck & Buck" in tone.

A carefully thought out and consummately well-made piece of work, a serious comic-book adaptation that is driven by story, psychology and reality, not special effects.

Sophisticated in its ease and spontaneity, it was directed with clarity and rigor by Auraeus Solito from Michiiko Yamamoto's acutely perceptive script.

There is a sense of sadness around Earth Days, a sense that opportunities were not capitalized on, that not enough was done.

Succeeds by never tipping its hand or losing its equilibrium while its characters often seem to be doing nothing but.

A constant, idiosyncratic pleasure that leaves us eager to see what the Goodmans and Logue will do next.

Almereyda imagines Hamlet taking place in present-day Manhattan with such vigor, insight and originality that the power and immediacy of his film makes Shakespeare accessible in an exciting and provocative manner beyond all expectations.

Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.

With its gift for infusing uneasiness into every frame, Kurosawa's moody, unnerving film continues to spook us even after the lights have gone on.

Features an aggressive, in-your-face romanticism that's noticeably lacking in genuine warmth. While its story of lonely misfits searching for love has appealing moments, more often it turns into an overbearing fable overburdened with fake joie de vivre.

Na captures at once the fragility of the human body and the deep-rooted darkness of the human soul. The Yellow Sea is easily one of the films of the year for underserved action-heads.

A well-researched and iconoclastic documentary that is both thoughtful and troubling, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is indeed a cautionary tale, but what it cautions against is the lure of easy judgments derived from prejudices and ignorance of the facts.

Block's work, so often ahead of the curve (Woodward and Bernstein marvel at how he understood Watergate before them), always comes shining through, revealing an artist who made it his mission to champion the "little guy" and speak truth to power.

Ferran's eccentricity is an acquired taste, but the light, emotional artfulness of Bird People — a cry for the senses in a world that so often dulls — is welcome.

Despite confusing information about the role of diet and lifestyle, The Widowmaker is a lucid and important work of advocacy journalism. It illuminates yet another way that mainstream medicine thrives on crisis rather than health.

A strikingly poetic documentary that illustrates the push and pull of life's opposing forces.

Whatever your feelings on capital punishment, A Murder in the Park has a gripping story to tell about, oddly enough, the corrosive effects of storytelling on the justice system when it gets the best of reasoned minds.

While Our Last Tango is a little schematic overall, from moment to moment, it's beautifully choreographed.

Filmmaker and Columbia professor Joseph, and playwright Beaty, in his feature writing and acting debut, infuse the movie with an intense New York City realism and an evocative street poetry that conjure up early John Cassavetes and Spike Lee.

Hepburn’s eye for detail and nuance is exceptional, especially as she evocatively captures the extremes of the film’s imposing landscapes. This is an austere, demanding, deliberately paced picture that will reward the patient.

An arresting if somewhat wayward documentary.

Castro’s Spies becomes genuinely challenging once Aslin and Lennon get to the trials of these men, who argued they were acting within the bounds of U.S. law to push back against the actions of a country that had interfered in Cuban affairs for more than a century.

With its mix of collected video, on-the-ground scenes in more than a dozen cities, interviews with Ukrainians (including some dissenting Russian voices), and media coverage, “Freedom on Fire” is a pulsating jumble of hearts and minds making do amid war and wreckage.

This is a beguiling film about two people so charming and disarming that no one suspected them of anything shady when they were alive — although now that they’re gone, the Alters’ many mysteries have the allure of great art.

Directed by Henry Hathaway and co-written by Charles Brackett, the picture, about a femme fatale who wants to kill her husband, could be seen as a "House of Gucci" predecessor -- starring Marilyn Monroe as she was coming into herself as a performer and star, and featuring Joseph Cotten with his blend of the suave and the sleazy. [25 Nov 2021, p.E1]

This madcap mockumentary works beautifully because Gordon, Lieberman, Platt and Galvin take care to imbue this setting with a real sense of culture and place, populated with wonderfully eccentric characters.

Focus is really the heart of Morris' unsettling film, which strikes a remarkable balance between art and disturbance, between beauty and pain.

Blessed with clever plot devices and a villainous horde that makes the once-dread Klingons seem like a race of Barneys, First Contact does everything you'd want a "Star Trek" film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style.

Could have taken a more relevant, insightful and even funnier cut at a very rich topic. But the filmmakers didn't; they went with dog poo instead.

It offers a blunt, ruthless evisceration — which is to say, a clear-eyed assessment — of the brilliant legal mind who helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and made his reputation as Joseph McCarthy’s attack dog.

A rich and diverting piece of film scholarship.

A gently humorous fable about the power of faith and the possibility of change, Ushpizin not only takes place in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, it was filmed with that media-shy group's cooperation and followed religious law at all times.

It would be swell if all of The Walk came together as beautifully as the computer effects do, but it would also be churlish not to appreciate what we do have. This film may not talk the talk, but it definitely walks the walk, and for that we are grateful.

Bristling but finally surprisingly moving film.

Since Dior and I was made with the house's cooperation, the film is not exactly a slashing piece of investigative journalism, but it does give us glimpses of the reality of this kind of business.

In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.

Hayakawa keeps her story at an intimate and, for the most part, effective human scale. Baisho’s beautifully calibrated performance holds us close, turning Michi’s every step — a brief stint as a traffic guard, a trip to a cafe she once frequented with her husband — into a quiet act of resistance against her perceived uselessness.

As a dark techno-farce with a violent wit and some daring empathy (coming as it does in a time of suspicious excitement about our modeled, molded future), Companion is a sleekly designed, well-powered date-night package.

Where the filmmakers’ approach sets itself apart in these days of image-massaged biographies is in juxtaposing the bookending health catastrophes of Fauci’s career as an especially illuminating lens through which to examine his drive, decisions and personality.

Superfans aren’t necessarily going to love this. It’s a movie made with affection, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be jerks.

The Paper never stops for breath long enough to be dull. But all this tumult also leads to a feeling of shellshock, of having every contrivance not nailed down thrown at the audience. Part of the problem is that many of these subplots, like Henry’s marital difficulties, are no more than Hollywood serious, dealing with adult situations in a bogus way that would be better avoided.

Long Way North is a complete pleasure, a gorgeous piece of wide-screen animation that is as delightful as it is unexpected.

Real enough around the edges to hold our attention even if it sacrifices accuracy for storytelling ease.

Director Jason Wise’s enthusiasm proves undeniably infectious.

Manon of the Spring reminds us how gratifying good old-fashioned revenge can be. Yet the film makers also remind us that carrying vengeance too far is ultimately futile and self-destructive. [24 Dec 1987]

Because Manville and Neeson are such potent performers, they are expert at playing out all the implications of what this experience is like.

Director Kenji Nagasaki pulls out all the stops in the climactic battle, serving up a dazzling array of explosions, lightning, punches, kicks, storm clouds and more explosions. The brilliant palette infuses the sequence with a striking visual beauty, even if the result is a foregone conclusion.

The film is an evocation of character, place and time, the tempo alternating between moody and lively, like our central odd couple, laconic Benny and chatterbox Kathy.

Charming, slyly comic and far from conventionally religious.

Ozon misses some chances with Sarah, but Rampling doesn't skip a beat. Freed from the burden of likability, the actress pushes the character from near-farce to near-tragedy, without once appealing to sentimentalism.

It's a loving and comic tribute to a musical era Allen knows well.

To transcend cliché, movies like Narc need the passion of a heretic who can take stock characters with their stock predicaments and turn them inside out, the way Curtis Hanson and Quentin Tarantino do. Blood, guts and flash aren't enough.

Fast, light and funny, Galaxy Quest has a wide, generation-spanning appeal--and you don't have to be a die-hard Trekkie to enjoy it.

Finds the impassioned Makhmalbaf in a more contemplative, even whimsical, mood than usual.

"Breakdown" gets the music right and has the benefit of strong acting, but its unapologetically melodramatic plot has a tendency to throw everything at you but the kitchen sink.

Even in the full-length Italian version, 1900 is too emotionally extravagant ever to be considered a masterpiece. Rather, it’s a monumental achievement like such original and impassioned but scarcely flawless screen epics as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Abel Gance’s Napoleon.

A beautifully structured and photographed film, John Turturro's rapturous Passione offers a vibrant exploration and celebration of Neapolitan music in all its grit and glory, presenting 23 musical numbers that encompass a millennium's worth of influences.

Though Art Bastard is a zesty, engaging documentary about a veteran outsider, when it comes to his complexities, it’s not terribly cohesive.

King Corn is entertaining enough, but it's also a moral, crucially skeptical road trip down the food chain.

Tapping into that transitional juncture where limitless possibility crosses paths with nagging uncertainty, filmmaker Michal Marczak adroitly captures the youthful, restless spirit cradled within the pulsating beat of its immersive, ambient soundtrack.

East of Havana is a rare glimpse of everyday life in Cuba, where big questions and obstacles confront the rappers at seemingly every turn. Some of their lyrical criticism of the government is downright brave. The artists don't live in utter squalor, but are certainly impoverished by American standards.

Though the movie wears its agenda on its sleeve, the music and the cast, many of them members of the real Les Muses, as Marion-Rivard was for a time, are simply so charming that it makes Gabrielle hard to resist.

As written by Gregory Poirier and produced by Jon Peters, whose credits are mostly of the blockbuster variety, the film is broader and more simplistic than it needs to be, settling more than it should for obvious emotions and situations.

Bardem's performance is so good it tends to mask how lacking much of what surrounds it is.

Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann's latest work may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.

It may have benefited from a quickened pace, or touches of humor, or heightened stakes because — at least in this film — watching Nazis get theirs is a vein of amusement that runs dry.

There’s more at work here than just Hall’s unsurprising mastery of exposed-nerves emoting; both she and Semans, striking unnervingly dissonant chords at every turn, seem to be operating in near-perfect harmony.

Whatever its weaknesses, Tsotsi is redeemed by its excellent performances.

It's a film of unexpected, almost indescribable off-center charm that deepens as it goes on.

Inspired in part by the success of "An Inconvenient Truth," the makers of Countdown to Zero are determined to mobilize public opinion to zero out the world's nuclear arsenal. We all should be rooting for their success, because failure would leave no one left to mourn our mistakes.

Final Portrait is quietly involving, amusing in a shaggy-dog-story way and impeccably made.

Trumbo's dialogue has its corny moments, purple patches and inevitable preachy passages, and the cast is jarringly uneven...but on the whole Exodus is a formidable accomplishment embracing suspense, danger, passion, romance, politics, religion, intrigue, sacrifice and bravery in an entertaining fashion for 3 1/2 hours. [10 Sep 1998, p.F12]

Though indulgently overlong, “Raiders!” manages to unearth the inner geek in all of us.

Though the plot here may be a confusing, multi-threaded mess (which may in fact be the script’s truest homage to Chandler), it’s occasionally offset by the exuberance with which Black blends splatter and slapstick, and the leeway he grants his two very game leads.

Audacious, bracing, uncommonly timely, Bob Roberts would seem almost impossible to pull off. So it is very much to Robbins' credit as a filmmaker that he manages to do so while rarely getting preachy and never neglecting the importance of movement and excitement in keeping an audience involved. [04 Sep 1992, p.F1]

Although Mark Osborne’s new CG/stop-motion feature succeeds in bringing the essence of Saint-Exupéry to life in the lovely stop-motion sequences, there are only a few of these delightful moments in an otherwise muddled movie that feels like three films ineptly grafted together.

Informally sketched but deeply felt, Bradley Beesley's documentary Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo mingles with the spirited cowgirl inmates who compete in Oklahoma's annual state penitentiary rodeo.

Amid the verisimilitude of location shooting and a cast of mostly nonprofessionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Carpignano inserts poetic touches.

A work of superior craftsmanship, Wilde moves quite briskly, and the idea of approaching an unconventional life with a traditional narrative style pays off. [01 May 1998, p.F10]

The 1942 musical-comedy Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and featuring the music of Irving Berlin, has been overshadowed by Crosby-Berlin's 1954 hit "White Christmas." Holiday Inn is the superior film, thanks to Mark Sandrich's light-hearted direction, Astaire's dance numbers and Crosby crooning "White Christmas" and "Be Careful, It's My Heart." [20 Nov 1992, p.11]

As enervating as it is long -- and at 2 hours and 47 minutes it is quite long -- this version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald fantasy short story is a baffling project, an endurance test of a movie that feels like it was made on a dare.

Kwietniowski might have tried for some edginess that would express a measure of the excitement Mahowny is experiencing. Despite the driven intensity of the banker, the film threatens to slip into the lifelessness of the drab world it depicts.

A powerful and empathetic melodrama with feminist underpinnings.

This stunning, unjustly neglected 1981 release unfolds much like a Ross MacDonald Lew Archer mystery as it becomes a singularly devastating indictment of the plight of the neglected Vietnam veteran. [13 March 1988, p.2]

Producer-director Markus Imhoof tackles a hugely vital subject, but the film's loose structure and lack of a specific through-line don't make for the clearest intake of its, well, swarm of information.

With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Despite its need for serious narrative compression, this remains an emotionally authentic, often poignant look at growing up and growing aware.

Israeli journalist Amos Elon once wrote that the demands for justice presented by the Israeli-Palestinian impasse exceed the human capacity to administer it. The dramatic, involving The Oslo Diaries details the closest these adversaries have come to proving Elon wrong, a story that is heartening and heartbreaking by turn.

Though Unstrung Heroes' thematic elements are uniformly strong, it is the film's treatment of Danny and Arthur that is especially impressive. [15 Sep 1995]

Rodeo takes its blind corners and open roads with plenty of ferocity, but also a necessary compassion for the searching force of nature at its center.

The Friend strips the pet-movie genre from the easy appeal of mawkishness, bringing it closer to what an ongoing dialogue between lonely species stumbling into connection actually feels like.

Neither Hathaway nor the script makes any overt bids for the audience’s sympathy in Colossal, which may explain why they earn it so handily.

The doc flags toward the end, but it remains an absorbing snapshot of a daring time.

The film delineates the rise and fall of conventional urban planning, but also lets us know that the battle is not completely over.

Roger & Me is a terrific movie, but if it were a great one, those images would reverberate with the shareholders' meetings and the AutoWorlds and the Gatsby parties.

It's a film enthralled by its own lower depths… Although Bad Lieutenant is structured as a redemptive thriller, it functions primarily as a freak show with religioso overtones. [30 Dec 1992, Calendar, p.F-7]

Director Scott Thurman presents a largely even-handed recounting, wisely letting folks - and events - speak for themselves. It's riveting stuff.

An insightful film that takes us on a nuanced emotional journey with a group of friends trying to make sense of the romantic choices they've made, it has the sympathy and psychological acuity we've come to recognize as the hallmark of French cinema at its best. [20 Aug 1999, p.F14]