An exceptional film that makes for the perfect home-video experience: It gets better upon repeated viewings. [03 June 1990, p.77]

The resulting film is a gripping story about a search for justice amid systemic corruption.

Atlantic City is a sophisticated fairy tale, beautifully acted and beautiful to behold; it is as funny as it is touching.

Crossroads needs a leap of faith to swallow it whole, to buy its Faust-like premise of a musician's pact with the devil played against the realism of a contemporary road movie, but director Walter Hill lays out reasons enough to make us want to make that leap.

Private and odd, archly dreamy and intimate, A Bigger Splash remains one of the more uniquely hypnotic movies about the connection between presented life and pulsating art.

The Fear of Being Watched is focused and thorough, but it takes the time to place its events in a larger context.

This coolly passionate film mostly deals with Stevenson’s thoughts rather than his life, providing an involving examination and analysis of the ideas (and ideals) that consume the man’s every waking moment.

In between rehearsals, they discuss their lives, from facing the draft board, to their small hometowns, with a fascinating frankness.

More popular melodrama than the usual exercise in high art, it whipsaws us with so many unexpected passions and surprising events that holding on to your seat is strongly recommended.

The Great Hack couldn’t be more timely, or unsettling. An intentionally disturbing examination of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it both explains and offers a warning shot about the misuse of personal data and how that influenced past elections and might well do so in the future.

Somehow existing both inside and outside the moment, This Is Not Berlin is clear-eyed enough to see that rebellion has its joys as well as its limits, and that coming of age — which is to say, coming into one’s own — means learning to recognize the difference.

In Wilkes’ heartfelt thank you note of a film, time, art and space collide, though in the end, all things must pass.

A sweet, funny and thoroughly winning romantic comedy that’s a kind of a bi-curious take on When Harry Met Sally for the Millennial crowd — or anyone else looking for some brainy, banter-rific fun.

Rojo is a sophisticatedly entertaining reminder of our propensity for malevolent apathy.

The filmmakers give Hinako weaknesses and doubts as well as strengths and talents. She’s a more complex, fully realized character than many heroines in recent American features.

After seeing every leaf on every bush in so many features, it’s fun to sit back and enjoy a film that pushes its look and palette beyond mere reality to create a fantasy world that could exist only in animation.

A stunning, stylish detective mystery in the classic Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald mold. [02 Sep 1990, p.72]

A remarkable truthfulness shepherds Benjamin Gilmour’s tightly written and conscientiously produced drama Jirga as it renders an image of Afghanistan not as a ravaged battleground but as an arrestingly rich land.

You feel the love in Love, Antosha, that’s for sure. But you also feel something else, a sadness that is close to overwhelming. How could it be otherwise?

“Cassandro,” which recalls the grabbed verve of a ‘60s-era verité snapshot, charts the reluctant dimming of this extravagant icon with affectionate energy and lasting poignance.

Raimi’s sheer passion for his material can sometimes overwhelm the coherence of his storytelling, and his unfashionable sincerity doesn’t always mesh with the breezy quip-a-minute tone that is the Marvel enterprise’s preferred comic idiom. I mean those both as compliments.

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.

A willingness to subvert expectations is one reason this ungainly, ingenious and altogether fascinating collaboration works as well as it does.

It’s a profound, affecting and beautifully told chronicle of faith, family, obsession and the language of music.

Larraín crafts a mesmerizing cinematic rhythm that alternates between montage and slow camera movements; the film’s push-pull tempo mimics that of Ema’s own intimate machinations.

Coalesces into a thoughtful, pointed, at times deceptively profound look at how the rich get richer and, well, you know what happens to the poor.

The film absorbingly shuttles back and forth in time, tracking key moments in the trio’s lives that not only illuminate their pasts but effectively prepare us for who Matt, Nicole and Dane become, for better and worse, when the going gets tough. It adds up to a skillful kind of mosaic that pays powerful emotional dividends.

The movie is both a lesson and a diversion, a movie that seeks to educate by means of trickery and misdirection. It is thus best approached as a kind of cinematic shell game, in which the focus of the story keeps shifting and the full scope of the corruption on display remains just out of view.

This engaging and enlightening documentary is stuffed with anecdotes, history and information. It makes excellent use of both new interviews and carefully selected archival footage to reveal the building blocks of all this accomplishment.

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]

Genèse concludes as a sober reminder that the young always feel intensely, but that the years between the crush that shines and the ardor that confounds are short ones, indeed.

“Raise Hell” does more than allow us to bask in Ivins’ trademark attitude and humor; it shows us how she got that way and explores the toll that being the public Molly Ivins took on her personal life.

The totality of Fantastic Fungi is so entertaining, informative and appealingly hopeful about the hard-working cure-all for our ailing world lying beneath our feet.

The role is nothing more than an elaborate comic turn, but he invests it with such sly knowingness and reserves of feeling that he gives this dinky joke-book movie a soul. Brando is doing here what a lot of famous actors probably wish they could do to the roles that made them famous (or, in Brando’s case, famous again). He’s using the gravity of his performance in “The Godfather” for comic effect, bringing out the absurdity that was always just under the surface of the role.

As a director, Mak must have a remarkable capacity for inspiring a trust in his actors that would permit them to appear in one uninhibited scene after another; to his credit, he never makes fools of them -- and he furthermore gets terrific performances from them in the most potentially embarrassing situations.

It’s telling that both the first “Black Panther” and this messier if seldom less engrossing follow-up are at their strongest when they resist or even flat-out ignore their franchise obligations.

The combination of Ruffalo’s quietly intense performance and Haynes’ direction illuminates both what drives him and what the cost can be.

Though it is a tale of real-life 15th-century rulers and lords, The King uses superior filmmaking and fully involving storytelling to make it seem very much a modern situation — in which wholly human individuals deal with up-to-date themes including power and its corruptions and the nature of friendship.

While it’s sometimes dizzying in its visuals or its joy, it’s often not cute. It can be fun, even exhilarating. It can also carry the emotional impact of loss.

The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.

Ritt's film does not follow predictable lines, nor does it tidy up the personalities it examines. In the end, that unflinching honesty lends the The Molly Maguires pertinence and power. [08 Apr 1993, p.21]

This fanciful piece, written and directed by Alexis Michalik, based on his popular play “Edmond,” owes more than a passing debt to “Shakespeare in Love,” among many other stage-centric films, while staking its own claim as a brisk, funny, sneakily poignant love letter to words, plays, playwrights and actors.

Anchored by Weixler’s and Pearson’s natural charm, Chained for Life stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.

A terrific campy wallow from 1964 starring Bette Davis as twins. And double the Davis means double the fun. [08 Aug 2004, p.E14]

Treating an incendiary issue in an austere, minimalist manner has turned The Assistant into an arresting independent drama.

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.”

Winocour shows us smart, sometimes insensitive and fundamentally decent people navigating an extraordinary situation and the sacrifices that are made in service of a grand collective undertaking.

The Cave reminds us of the horrors of a situation we have perhaps become numb to and shows us the unforgettable people who don’t have that luxury.

The documentary doesn’t hesitate to reveal the dangerous reality facing elephants and the other animals, offering a frank look at their existence in a film that’s as entertaining as it is moving.

Esrick’s Cracked Up affectingly peels back the years of protective layers trapping the trauma, revealing a man who has found a semblance of peace after a lifetime of battling demons.

A rich and diverting piece of film scholarship.

This dire and dreamy road movie is impressive work from director and co-writer Winkler (he co-wrote with Theodore Bressman and David Branson Smith).

The Kingmaker may end on a queasy note of alarm about the Philippines’ future, but it also reminds us that we neglect the past at our peril.

A finely observed documentary.

Atom Egoyan has made one of his most accessible films to date, a haunting and complex fable of loss and desire with wide implications.

Though the narrative could use more structural integrity, Zollo, and her daring lead actress, Duke, create a courageously personal, experimental piece, tapping into a raw emotional state not often rendered on screen with such depth and intelligence.

This contemplative film is beautifully shot, set in a stunning landscape surrounded by fog and greenery and ancient stone steps. But it’s Yao’s soulful and stirring performance as a complex woman struggling to understand herself — and life itself — that anchors Send Me to the Clouds, allowing it to truly soar.

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.

When this movie stumbles, it stumbles honestly and sympathetically, but, when it succeeds, it makes history sing. [11 Sep 1987]

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]

It’s not the promised spectacle that cements Venom: Let There Be Carnage as touching, wild entertainment. It’s the themes of home, love, and companionship that make Serkis’ sequel another reason to want more “Venom” movies, and quickly.

There’s a terrific ensemble — including Ella-Grace Gregoire as a girl Jack has a crush on — but it’s Nighy who will have you enthralled. He delivers a subtle, nuanced performance that allows the actor to shine while in full support of his costars.

The peek into this world, at this time, feels like a rare treat, an unearthed gem released from a vault.

The key reason Richard Jewell works as well as it does is the perceptive nature of Hauser’s lead performance. His sense of who this character is, how he thinks about himself at his core, leads to scenes with both Rockwell and Bates that are unexpectedly powerful.

Citizen K uses Khodorkovsky’s story as a way to guide us through the thickets of modern Russian history, a tangled, through-the-looking-glass world that the film surveys from the days of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 to today’s increasingly autocratic reign of Vladimir Putin

What emerges is a chilling portrait of what happens when people in power just ignore sociopolitical norms and behave as though the rules don’t apply to them.

Although it occasionally plays as a Statue of Liberty promotional tool (there are worse things), the film is a timely, engaging and well-assembled look at one of our national treasures and its eternal place as a beacon of light for anyone “yearning to breathe free.”

Lolita may be a flawed adaptation, but it's still a great movie. While the film fails to capture the compulsive, microscopically detailed obsession of Nabokov's antihero, Humbert Humbert, it does explore (sometimes shockingly, even now) a kind of sexual destruction in frank (and often hilarious) ways. [30 Jan 1992, p.11]

It is as harrowing as it is triumphant in its depiction of the way it all came to pass.

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

This isn’t simply a damning indictment of the nation; it is a hopeful celebration of one woman’s activism and kindness in the face of her own struggle with AIDS.

While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and 63 Up in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.

There are marvelous moments from Don Rickles as Sal’s nouveau riche attorney--"Don’t murder a cop on my front lawn!” he exclaims hilariously--and from Elaine Kagan as his terror-stricken, lacquered wife. There are also plenty of unbilled cameos, a Landis trademark, along with moments from beloved old films glimpsed on TV.

As it explores the intersection between the occult and mankind’s brutal cruelty in relation to women, The World Is Full of Secrets grips us with its minimalist, calibrated and cerebral scare tactics.

The tricky brilliance of Queen of Hearts is in how el-Toukhy uses a well-worn narrative — the unsuspecting, hidden passion with the appearance of erotic freedom — to unveil what in reality is a poisonous tale of abuse.

Not as slick as “Free Willy” or as sophisticated as “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” this is a throwback to the sweet and sentimental Disney family films that Walt himself loved, a live-action fairy tale about a boy, his dogs and a darn tough race.

The real strength of Feast of the Seven Fishes is the attention to detail Tinnell brings to the wintry West Virginia setting: from the blue chill of the outdoors to the welcoming bustle of the bars, kitchens and churches.

Beineix is still the sumptuous stylist; it's as much a part of him as his skin and the film has its share of gorgeous dawns, haunting sunsets, rollicking pink-and blue-painted beach houses. But he is also a great storyteller, and the whole middle section of Betty Blue is an irresistible tale of crazy love on one hand and crazy friendship on the other. [07 Nov 1986, p.1]

Richard Brooks adapted and directed this superbly acted though watered-down -- all references to homosexuality were deleted -- 1958 version of Williams' popular 1955 play. [30 Apr 2006, p.E14]

Emma partisans, fortunately, never say die, and a very satisfying new version of Austen’s sprightly novel has been directed in high style by Autumn de Wilde.

Bolt’s ethically engaging, easy-to-grasp and artfully conceived film covers a wide range of areas that stir us to think about benefits and costs.

That all these characters and then some have distinct personalities is all the more remarkable because no one uses actual words, instead making do quite nicely with assorted grunts, groans and indefinable grumbles.

Taguchi and Lefferman approach it all less like journalists or vérité documentarians than friendly guests who want to be respectful yet connect to something deeper about pain, mourning and forward movement.

The filmmakers materialize a fascinating cinematic language that interrogates itself about matters of spontaneity and manipulation, man-made products and earth-given treasures, simplicity and sophistication, and how these all intersect.

A compelling and instructive look at the political practice of gerrymandering. It’s also an infuriating watch on several levels, which is entirely the point of this call-to-action portrait.

A chilling portrait of how fanaticism can grow and be enabled, this is a matter-of-fact film that moves with an awful inexorability toward its foregone conclusion.

Some testimony here may rankle certain viewers, despite — or because of — Bloch’s attempt at evenhandedness. No matter, it’s a timely and essential portrait.

The result is a swift, self-reflective, often funny and always original reimagining of the material, which sees Wachowski reassessing the existing characters and lore of “The Matrix” while embroidering the text with new ideas and details. It’s less of a reboot than a remix, and this time, it’s a bop.

What’s attractive about revisiting The Europeans now is how it’s more indie-flavored, its pleasurable finery and delicate ironies — even the filmic stiltedness — befitting a novel whose lightness of tone James himself recognized when he subtitled it “A Sketch.”

The performances remain delectable, the multiple murders startlingly bloody -- even the ones that are presented purely hypothetically. [02 Nov 2018, p.E4]

An undervalued 1978 thriller with an ingenious script by Curtis Hanson. [23 Feb 2001, p.18]

The most gripping parts of Advocate are the film’s fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité sequences of Tsemel at work, meeting with clients’ families, navigating the legal system and conferring about cases with fellow attorneys and her staff.

No Man’s Land is such a modest, low-key thriller that you’re caught up in it long before you realize it. A contemporary Faustian tale, it’s one of those nifty little movies that arrive without much notice but prove to be far more enjoyable than many more highly publicized pictures.

Approaching the world in his own specific visual way, Geyrhalter also gravitates toward exploring big ideas, and here he takes on one of the biggest, an exploration of, as he puts it, “the wounds we are inflicting on the Earth.”

Narrative bumps and all, The Evening Hour gives Ettinger a full stage to parade his unassuming virtuosity.

“Giraffes” benefits not only from Dagg’s charismatic presence but also from excerpts of letters she wrote during her first trip to Africa (read by Tatiana Maslany) and 16-millimeter color film she shot back in the day.

It makes for one of the more alive portraits of artists in the moment you’re likely to see, a thumping gallery show forged from survival, and assembled out of passion and need.

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.