The jokes are quick, with clever jibes alternating with double-crosses and the occasional murder, and the streamlined plot unrolls like a colorful ball of twine.

A former sketch comic, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters’ confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you’re listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world.

What makes The Fly such a stunning piece of obsessive film making is the way Cronenberg deftly allows us to identify with his monstrous creation. [14 Aug 1986]

Crammed with ideas, jokes, laments, non sequiturs and some terrific actors you’ve seen before (if not nearly enough), the movie comes at you like a warm hug wrapped in a kung fu chop: It’s both a sweet, sentimental story about a Chinese American family and a wild, maximalist sensory assault.

That meandering dialogue can be difficult to control, and at times the film feels as if the director has stepped away from the vehicle, leaving it to veer off the path. Still, it's an experiment that works more than it fails by giving Gosling and Williams both the motive and the means to create something extraordinary, a valentine that actually says something true about being in love.

As good as his actors are — especially the wonderful Dequenne, whose Sophie quietly seeks to repair the boys’ broken bond — they cannot conceal the calculation inherent in this story’s design. Nor can they quite overcome the disconnect between the glossy, self-admiring visual beauty of Close and the stormier, uglier emotional depths it purports to uncover.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s clinical and fascinating 135-minute assembly of this priceless archive is a categorically weird, thrillingly immersive distillation of four days of official, cultish pomp and mourning for one of the 20th century’s biggest monsters.

It sounds paradoxical but, if done right, films about a life ending can be the most life-affirming films you'll see. Truman, a great success in its native Spain, is definitely done right.

Chocolat is a film of some subtlety. It has good, even memorable moments to it, and it’s beautiful looking. It is very, very, very French, which may or may not be your cup of chocolat. It is also a suffocatingly precious film, enough to try the patience of an oyster, and one that primly refuses to detonate the mounting numbers of erotic situations it sets up.

Few actors can be as convincing as leaders of men, and to see Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is to see a consummate performer doing what he does best.

Teaches important lessons in the most casual, joyful way. How it manages to do that is probably the biggest secret of all.

Top Five is fully loaded. The laughs are earned, the intelligence never disappears, all the performers shine. But Rock is the diamond — raw, rough and rare.

The role of Jacob is greatly expanded from the book, and the unsatisfying way that Smith and Raimi resolve the brothers' relationship in the movie is the only major change--major compromise--made in transporting the novel to the screen.

Dunn juggles the story’s vital, at times fantastical narrative, eclectic imagery, and wellspring of human fears, flaws and desires with vision and confidence. But Jessup’s powerfully empathetic performance really seals the deal.

The problem with this priest — one of them, anyway — may not be an excess of spiritual fervor but rather a dearth of it, a lack of reverence for the beauty that Pálmason’s camera exalts in every magisterial frame. Lucas may be a blind wretch, but the creation through which he stumbles is a source of never-ending awe.

Zhang and his sterling actors have made something fairly unforgettable about the tragedy of forgetting.

Thanks to the residual love and attraction between the pair, this cocktail-fueled reunion never descends into a "Virginia Woolf"-like grudge match but, rather, remains an equitable, tender, sometimes surprising game of hard truth-telling.

Though Living in Oblivion may sound like a one-joke movie, the pleasure of the endeavor is that it has no trouble holding your interest without feeling repetitive. Mark it down to the excellence of the acting, including the smallest roles, and the amusing and accurate way the ambience of bargain-basement filmmaking is captured.

Try as you might to lose yourself in Coco, or pause to ponder its metaphysics, too often you find yourself hindered by the movie's breathless velocity.

A long-overdue creation corrective that gives an outwardly revolutionary cultural icon his trailblazing due at the same time it grapples with the conflicted soul that rarely knew a lasting inner peace.

Bridge of Spies is a consummate professional's tribute to a gifted amateur, a smooth entertainment with a strong but subtle political subtext that's both potent and unexpected.

When something heartfelt occurs in this movie, you accept it without too much squirming. The disciplined yet intuitive way in which these actors connect is a model of ensemble performance.

Playful, absurd and endearingly inventive, this unstoppably amusing feature reminds us why Britain's Aardman Animations is a mainstay of the current cartooning golden age.

I have a weakness for inside Hollywood films, and this smart and fearless item starring Jean Harlow as an amalgam of herself and Clara Bow is not as well-known as it should be. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

A triumph of stylish, witty Grand Guignol, it allows Price to range richly between humor and pathos as a crazed Shakespearean actor. It's not too much to say that if horror pictures were taken seriously Price would have been a 1973 Oscar contender. [24 Mar 2005, p.E15]

It’s a drama of resilient women, thoughtless men and crushingly unrealized dreams, told with supple grace, deep feeling and an empathy that extends in every direction.

The difficulty of turning mass spectacle into moral edification, of getting the public to think and care about history in ways that go beyond simple-minded patriotism, is a problem that this brilliantly multifaceted picture both critiques and embodies.

Simultaneously poetic, dramatic and realistic, White Material is an altogether stunning work.