There’s more than a whiff of both Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund to the proceedings, except the characters never emerge as fully as they do in the best of those filmmakers’ works.

The film is as faithful to its subject as perhaps any film biography has been. As Eastwood said, Parker was a paradoxical character, both self-destructive and full of life, and the movie, simultaneously dark and exhilarating, takes that as its theme. [22 Sep 1988, p. 1]

A film that is genuinely mind-expanding, an exhilarating intellectual gantlet that tells a remarkable human story.

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

Jude is hardly precious about his craft. But that’s because he’s confident you’ll leave bursting with thoughts and feelings about the price of progress, the weight of history and the ways we struggle to do right amid so much that’s wrong.

In the end, the great thing about “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” is that rather than creating a desire to meet this formidable individual, it makes you feel as if in some way you actually had.

One of the pleasures of Enough Said is watching Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini, two well-known performers only Holofcener would think of putting together, come alive both as individuals and the two halves of a relationship.

The Kafkaesque reversal-of-fortune humor that follows — centered on how outgoing, beloved Oswald’s mere presence pours salt on Guy/Edward’s identity crisis — is as shrewdly conceived a comic bad dream as we’ve gotten since the heyday of “Zelig”-era Woody Allen or Charlie Kaufman (whose film “Synecdoche, New York” this feels like a cousin to).

It is, in effect, a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures, a record of the social and architectural changes the city has endured over more than a century.

Sr. proves a tender portrait and fitting tribute to an offbeat hero and creative pioneer.

28 Weeks Later lacks the streamlined thrust of its predecessor but makes for compelling, adrenaline-fueled viewing just the same.

Nothing in this gratifyingly focused movie feels excessive or gratuitous, and a situation that repeatedly threatens to spiral out of control is dramatized with the utmost assurance.

Concise, yet affecting, Chile ‘76 assuredly occupies the post as one of the finest Latin American productions to open stateside this year.

Ly surveys all his characters without judgment, but a longer, richer version of this movie might have distributed its sympathies to even more powerful effect.

Insomnia shows an equally welcome ability: a gift of creating intelligent, engrossing popular entertainment.

Bit by bit, line by line, she [July] nudges you onto her characters’ wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions.

Control keeps you riveted in ways that "24 Hour Party People" doesn't, primarily because of the investment of craft and conviction by all concerned.

Above all else expresses the timeless impact of Lily Bart's plight.

The singular achievement of Jonathan Karsh's graceful and rigorous documentary is that he enables his audiences to see his heroine's family through her very clear but always loving eyes.

An impeccably acted character drama revolving around a mother and her teenage twin sons, Private Property shows how strong and how terrifying the bonds within families can be. Directed by Belgium's Joachim Lafosse, it etches the line between love and hate with a savagery that is almost unprecedented.

The Boys is so heartfelt that it elicits a sense that complex creative relationships may ultimately elude explication, leaving Jeffrey Sherman to speculate that the friction between his father and his uncle was what brought their songs alive.

Unlike documentaries that tie things up in a tidy bow, Supreme Price wants viewers to understand that the status of democracy in Nigeria remains very much in flux.

Thoughtful, deeply affectionate and concerned more with essence than chronology, it recounts the band’s 30 years in a way that should enlighten diehards as well as the uninitiated.

Its dizzying strength is as a visceral journey, a detour from the privileged freedom represented by a horizon to the tragic limbo of displacement, an ocean that’s both a confinement and an abyss.

The artfully kaleidoscopic nightmare of a collapsed state has rarely been so imaginatively portrayed. The unintentionally awkward moments come from a few of the more overwrought voice-over performances, in conjunction with the often-pinched rendering of human faces.

The film has a marvelous first half. All of Zinnemann's best qualities -- tact, taste, integrity, quiet intellect and idealism -- shine through in the convent scenes, as does the acting. However, good as Peter Finch is (as an agnostic doctor), the second half seems hurried, over-reticent. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

[A] tender, harrowing and beautifully modulated coming-of-age drama.

Thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon.