Tender, marvelously well played (by almost everyone) and thoroughly engaging. When it comes to the current sexual skirmishes between men and women, screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue (Second City alumni) know every inch of enemy territory and take no prisoners.

As directed by New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton, “Capital” is a sleek tour of economic history over the last 400 years or so.

There’s much to admire about this alternately tough and tender film, including a fine turn by Caton, some striking outback scenery, and many resonant thoughts about living — and dying.

Tony Richardson’s 1960 The Entertainer, based on the John Osborne play, is a cultural event of the first importance.

A vivid reminder of the hand-in-glove importance of right actor/right role — and the indispensability of those casting mavens who helped make movie history. Good stuff.

Starring an ideally cast Patton Oswalt in the title role, Big Fan is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans.

That silver-lining nature is also what keeps “Herself” from entirely distinguishing itself, too often leaving an admittedly powerful story about female fortitude to rely on schematics and clichés instead of the accumulated impact of its many well-played human details.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a movie of deliberately low stakes and, for that very reason, enormous charm.

As original as it is lovely.

The AIDS scare remains as much window dressing as do other period details such as rotary phones and cassette tapes. Test seems to be about dance above all, with choreographed montages filling the bulk of its running time.

With an unassuming directness, Moretti...toggles between work and life pressures in a way that finds the curious feelings and epiphanies that bind the two, and somehow give meaning to the whole dance.

Though affecting and humbly breathtaking, Sun Children doesn’t bargain in condescending pity.

With a traditional structure combined with daring flash forwards and a modern soundtrack, Ceddo is powerful and uncompromising.

The movie treats a girl's burgeoning sexuality as neither epic nor problematic, or mutually exclusive of feelings of love, but rather simply, refreshingly, as one part of maturing.

This seedy Barfly is beautifully written, acted and directed. It may be full of dank desire, wasted love and jesting misery--but it blooms. Whatever its flaws, it does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being.

A surprisingly tender and humorous shuffle down a weighty road.

It's a product of the highest quality, but at the end of the day that's what it is: a machine-made, assembly-line product whose strengths tend to feel like items checked off a master list rather than being the result of any kind of individual creative touch.

Hunter Gatherer is a warmly eccentric little indie that’s amusing, authentic and works against expectation. B

Such a smart and savvy piece of work it encourages us to feel we're eavesdropping on history.

Circuitry plugs into the underground world of raves. The scene, complete with drugs and its own culture, is blissfully examined in a documentary that speaks the language of its youthful generation.

Miller's strength in her stories and in the film is in her ability to push past ideology and get right down to the nitty-gritty of desire.

Millennium Actress fascinatingly goes where films have not often gone before.

Gitai has created a film that is as beautiful as it is all but unbearable to watch.

A delightful, effervescent morality tale for children conveyed with such wit and sophistication that adults are likely to be enchanted as well.

A strange story wrapped in a stranger one, an engrossing documentary about one of the least known and most unexpected aspects of the Nazi war against the Jews.

Lutz's dialogue is consistently sharp and snappy, and the large cast forms a sparkling ensemble under Junger's adept direction.

Turning ordinary life into movie magic is one of the most difficult, least-heralded challenges for any filmmaker. What makes Freaky Friday a charmer isn't how far-out things get for this mother and daughter, but how sweet and distinctly un-freaky a kid, her mom and their love for each other can be.

Isn't in league with the Nicholas Ray classic ("Rebel Without a Cause"), but in its ferocious energy and lead performances it's many cuts above most big-screen soap operas.

Again and again, Van Dormael delights in finding romantic solutions to existential problems, in forging the kinds of topsy-turvy emotional connections between his characters that enable them to overcome their natural impulses toward suspicion, hostility and even violence.

The uncomplicated humanism of Joyeux Noël, with its Christmas message of peace, feels at once irrefutable and refreshing.

Through sensitive, in-depth profiles of four workers, Weisberg drives home the point that hard-working men and women with full-time jobs find themselves and their families trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty.

Input from a broader range of chefs and food experts, as well as sociologists and scientists, could have better fleshed out this brief study.

The plot line may fray at times, especially with Fisher's dizzyingly quick segue from magazine reporter to Geraldo Rivera-like television muckraker. But Schatzberg anchors his story with enough pungently observed details of New York--its lofts, chic editorial offices, in restaurants and sad and tawdry street scenes--and with enough marvelous actors, in big roles and small, to give his story real bite.

If Medak had been able to delineate the twinship of crime and show biz, he might have moved the film's frights into a higher realm. Instead, he's come up with a classy freak show.

The nuances in Derki’s portraits are what deepen the elements that could easily have been a distancing turnoff.

The film’s icy style pays surprising emotional dividends by the end, with the heroine’s silent meditations on who she is and whether she owes anything to her family culminating in moments of real tenderness.

The end result is sprawling and often unfocused, with a reach that exceeds its grasp.

By the grace of a talented cast, especially the reliable Helms and the revelatory Harrison, Together Together is a sweet, albeit incomplete search for companionship in the unlikeliest of places.

There are risky plot choices all along the way, but the risks are what keeps the pot boiling as the complexities of the relationship triangle heat up and cool down.

The Cronenberg trademarks are here in full force, including an outrageous sexual suggestiveness in his bizarre special effects.

This is a powerful movie about human nature and how no matter where we end up — and who we end up with — we wake up each day and adjust.

A striking new documentary that shows the war in a way it's not been seen before: from the ground up.

Though Almodóvar has retained the creep factor of his source material, he hasn't fully embraced its darkness.

A period spectacle, steeped in awesome splendor and lethal palace intrigue, it climaxes in a stupendous battle scene and epic tragedy.

It is classical in form yet fresh and spontaneous.

Nebbou and Peyr’s script crackles most with its observations about aging, sex and second chances, and Who You Think I Am spins a tale of love, attention, manipulation and obsession that is recognizably uncomfortable and summarily captivating.

Stressful to watch, but its entertaining stage performances and document of people under pressure should interest even non-rap fans.

Ava Gardner in the role of her career (Humphrey Bogart isn't bad either) and writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz at the top of his form. [03 Dec 2006, p.18]

Post Tenebras Lux is that real rarity in cinema, a visually striking archaeology of the psyche that benefits both the moviegoer primed to engage Reygadas' ideas, and the ones open to being swallowed in an art film wave.

While this buoyant account of his brief but eventful life might feel like a rock climber's "Man on a Wire," the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary about tightrope walker Philippe Petit, director Marah Strauch gives the film an exhilarating uplift of its own.

You can be absorbed by Black Widow, fascinated and intrigued by it--and you can capitulate entirely while watching the seductive interplay of these two actresses--but Black Widow never really gets you by the throat. It’s sleek where it should be dangerous.

It's rare for young actors to exude as much charisma and charm as Gainsbourg and García Bernal.

A witty and sophisticated sensibility brings individuality to the classic odd-couple comedy.

Working with cinematographer Harris Savides and serving as the film's editor, he (Van Sant) has fashioned a visual style and a narrative shape that has the quality of a waking dream, then a nightmare. Rarely do form and content add up with such harmonious grace and power.

An attractive and talented young cast brings this graceful film alive in all its tenderness and emotion.

With its chilling evidence of fetus-centric policies in practice, Birthright shows Big Brother in action, and at his most misogynistic.

The story is fantastical, predictable and utterly delightful, allowing the audience to engage in familiar generic pleasures that have been cut and trimmed to fit every curve neatly.

Written, directed and acted with real compassion and sympathy for the humanity of its characters, no matter who they are or on what side of these multiple issues they turn out to be.

The 12th Man is a polished crowd-pleaser, with a timeless message: Nazis suck.

The supremely watchable pairing of these magnetic actors is what helps lift this lyrically crafted frontier love story above the usual efforts to restore the genre’s appeal.

Meet The Patels is more than just a hoot. Its candor and empathy allow it to make keen points about love, marriage, family and the unexpected complications that American freedoms can bring to immigrant lives.

It's a demanding film but one filled with important truths about humanity in all its denominations.

As sad as it is to realize that youth activism in this country is dead, it's sadder still to find yourself agreeing that they have a point. Just look at what happened to Kurtz.

With simple storytelling, the film allows its star, Velasquez, to shine, and with her endless reserves of positive energy, eloquent speaking and willingness to be vulnerable, it's no wonder millions of people have already found her inspirational.

Shanley seems to have lost a certain amount of faith in what he'd written. As a director he's ended up pushing the drama harder than he needs to. He hasn't done anything fatal, but he has tampered with and hampered it.

Incorporating fluid flashbacks and snippets of narration that refreshingly serve to enhance rather than distract, director-writer Hannes Holm maintains a gentle, lyrical flow while coaxing fine performances from a diverse cast.

For Liar Liar is marking time through the duller moments of exposition, wishing the film was as sharp overall as Carrey is himself.

The film is as heartbreaking as it is heart-stopping.

A spare, smart, seductive piece of real movie making with (almost) every loophole covered, a superlative cast and enough tension to keep us all hyperventilating for hours.

What emerges is a vague, often chilling impression of an unpredictable opportunist and provocateur who may not even be sure himself.

[An] entertaining, if straightforward documentary.

While the filmmaker keeps his eyes peeled for every possible shred of good news in the wake of disaster, he has little interest in peddling easy inspiration; the stakes are too colossal, the devastation too raw.

The result is a take-no-prisoners movie from one of Hong Kong's most idiosyncratic, shoot-from-the-hip filmmakers that's the very antithesis of sentimental gay love stories. [31 Oct 1997]

Genial mirth and the nightmarish gloom of the Middle East do not sound like natural companions, but the droll and delightful Tel Aviv on Fire has made the impossible possible.

There is surely more to be mined from this extraordinary, complicated trailblazer’s life than one suitably enjoyable love letter to his brilliance and bravery.

The comic pizazz and bawdy dazzle of this film's vision of gaudy drag performers trekking across the Australian outback certainly has a boisterous, addictive way about it. [10 Aug 1994]

Humor, sentiment and melodrama strike a balance as he brings to life nine major characters and a host of others as well.

It may have been a long road to glory, but seeing Perkins (then 97) and Smith (75) enthusiastically accept a 2011 Grammy for their album “Joined at the Hip,” it’s readily apparent that it was worth the trip.

A splendid, unjustly neglected 1973 British film in which Sean Connery, at his very best under Sidney Lumet's direction, plays a veteran police sergeant haunted by years of contact with terrible crimes and on the brink of a total breakdown. [27 May 1990, p.10]

It’s a film noir in much the same way that “Crimson Peak” was a horror movie: Feverishly and often magnificently overwrought, it treats its genre less as a template to be followed than a lavish funhouse in which to run amok. Its characters, tropes and archetypes, convincing enough on their own, take on even richer dimensions when placed alongside their antecedents.

The result is an unexpectedly satisfying fantasia of reality and imagination, a meditation on the nature of lies and deception, on how we come to embrace not the truth but what it suits us to believe.

Belladonna of Sadness is an interesting curiosity from the early days of modern anime, but material that may have seemed daring and adult in the era of Disney's “Robin Hood” and “Snoopy, Come Home” looks exploitative and misogynistic 43 years later.

Fascinating documentary.

As ever, Silva’s filmmaking — formally rough on the surface, carefully worked out underneath — depends on the steady upending of expectations. Social media is phony but potentially revealing. Bodies are hot and sexy until they’re gross and inconvenient. Jordan is insufferable, the worst kind of self-entitled Ugly American, but also endearing, perceptive and admirable in his tenacity.

An example of sophisticated, impassioned filmmaking involving mainly people who lived through the harrowing experiences so unsparingly depicted, Journey From the Fall powerfully illustrates the refugee/immigrant experience.

A centerpiece of the film is a tribute to the late, legendary Amália Rodrigues, a woman of commanding, majestic beauty and presence, who is seen with her pianist in rehearsal, searching out every nuance of a song she is to perform. Unfortunately, Fado's other performers are not identified.

This beguiling Belgian fable, very much its own droll and delicate little film, has some touching things to say about what is important in life and why.

Altogether, this is successful as a film, while at the same time being a most touching reconsideration of the familiar masterpiece.

A diabolically adroit piece of filmmaking that goes even further than the films of Italy's excruciatingly macabre Dario Argento.

This is the biggest surprise of all -- it's hard to watch Going Upriver without wondering, frankly, what became of the young John Kerry, who comes off so exceptionally well in this film.

Director CB Harding captures the relaxed rhythms of the comedians while keeping the film well paced.

When the trouble does hit in this film, it hits hard, at which point all the investment in character pays off.

The first full flowering of the De Palma style, the film cleverly uses split-screens and cross-cutting to string the audience along while heightening the emotions of any given scene nearly to the point of parody. The movie is playful and provocative -- at once one of the scariest and funniest horror movies of the '70s. [21 Oct 2018, p.E7]

Lethal Weapon 2 has the brain-rattling pace of a terminal speed freak going the wrong way down an expressway. [7 Jul 1989, p.1]

On the evidence of the documentary I Am Divine, to know the drag star Divine was to love him.

Ultimately, Studio 54 proves a nostalgic, sometimes wistful, other times unsettling look back at a singular period of time.

It's just that there isn't enough story - the book shouldn't be required reading for the film to make sense.

Mines the comic possibilities of the classic setup of introducing the fiancé to the family, with results that are playful, charming and surprisingly thoughtful.