It is startling, and sometimes disturbing, but hits a place that is intensely human — bittersweet and bloody and beautiful at once, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

The characters’ dilemma may, ultimately, be meaningless set against the ebbs and flows of history, but Gomes, who won the directing prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, invests it with such elegance that it becomes nearly mythic: a touching fable of cowardice and devotion with tragic undertones. The scenes may be dreamlike, but they’re our shared dream of being swept away by the movies.

Short Term 12 is a small wonder, a film of exceptional naturalness and empathy that takes material about troubled teenagers and young adults that could have been generic and turns it into something moving and intimate.

Ron Howard reaches real maturity here, as he pulls together the script's tendency to skitter between sociology and sitcom, making it into one perceptive, delicious whole. [2 Aug 1989, p.1]

Two of Us is one of those artfully crafted movies that never plays as such, because its proud, beating heart is so front and center, and its faith in the power of love and desire so energizing.

Though as leisurely as a summer’s day, this kaleidoscopic memory film has an intensity of purpose that wants to knock you on your heels — or maybe harder — in its take on gentrification.

The most entrancingly feel-good movie of the year.

A ticking time bomb of a movie, a gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work that marries pulp watchability with larger concerns without skipping a beat.

It is expansive but more tightly time-framed in terms of plot. I wish it were a handful of minutes shorter, but this is my single caveat about another richly imaginative, engrossing and spectacular motion picture from the redoubtable George Lucas. [18 May 1980]

The film’s most disorienting and wondrous realization, however, is that Shakespearean acting can exist even within “Grand Theft Auto’s” limits.

A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.

As good as it is because of the care and skill writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck bring to it, gifts that were visible in their first film, "Half Nelson," which earned a lead actor Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling.

Watching Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg's probing documentary on Hogancamp's undertaking, is an exhilarating, utterly unique experience.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.

This is a rom-com with heart, wit and style. But it also shows a clear-eyed understanding that one dreamy day — no matter how epic — is really just a good start.

The Serengeti Rules celebrates not only the diversity and beauty of the natural world but also recognizes the transformative power of curiosity and knowledge.

It’s a wondrously silly premise, and one that Lanthimos, not unlike those great cine-surrealists Luis Buñuel and Charlie Kaufman before him, executes with rigorous illogic and immaculate formal control.

It's most successful when it is being off-center, a state of grace it doesn't quite have the nerve to maintain. [6 July 1994, Calendar, p. F-1]

Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year.

Wildly entertaining, deeply humanitarian and fundamentally educational film.

The bitter truths in Black Ice paint a sobering picture of a sport with a lot to reckon with, especially in a country that prides itself on embracing its diversity of culture.

Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.

Acutely observed, faultlessly acted, graced with piercing emotion and unsparing honesty, it will make you laugh because you can't bear to cry.

At its best, Winged Migration is a marvel, and if that seems like a gee-whiz word, that's because this film has a lot to be gee-whiz about.

As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated.

Takes a clever premise and Black's unflagging manic energy and comes up with a pleasing mainstream comedy that uses new people and attitudes to entertain in old-fashioned ways.

It’s a vital, singularly crafted film that simply tells it — or more specifically shows it — like it is through the eyes of a struggling African American single mother and the adolescent son she desperately wants to keep out of trouble against the mounting odds.

The film is a harrowing and eerie horror fairy tale from another time, even as it feels startlingly fresh and always unpredictable.