Shadowman is at its unsettling, want-to-look-away best when tiptoeing around the question of what makes for success regarding artists like Hambleton: the hoopla that keeps the work in circulation, or the mysterious inner pilot light that keeps a self-destructive talent going?

It’s the sort of verbally dexterous farce you’d have to be a total Crabapple Annie not to enjoy.

Despite the awkwardness of much of the staging, and the unevenness of the script, the movie does give you a sense of real people living real lives. [14 Feb 1992, p.B9]

It feels like a blessing to have this production at all and we are fortunate it turned out as well as it did.

In Scum, one of only three features he directed for the big screen, Clarke finds a bleak beauty in an institution devoted to controlling, yet also propagating, all manner of human ugliness.

A work of striking beauty and affecting emotional heft enhanced by an Afghan-themed score by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, The Breadwinner reminds us yet again that the best of animation takes us anywhere at any time and makes us believe.

So much of Ruthless People goes so far that maybe it was inevitable that the film makers would pull up short and make this half-sappy compromise--cynicism with a smile--as compensation for their previous audacity. A pity. A lot of the rest gives you something better: full-bore, shameless, gut-clutching laughter.

Buoyed by an unreserved humanism and a cheerful sense of the absurd.

To describe Endless Poetry as self-indulgent would be entirely accurate and not even remotely insulting.

Harris Dickinson, the spellbinding British newcomer who plays Frankie, rewards the director’s scrutiny with piercing emotional depth and a startling lack of self-consciousness.

How can one dislike this movie? It has wit, romance, gentle rebellion, idyllic landscapes and fine actors savoring luscious lines. Only the undercurrent may bother a few: the hints of feminist revolt, beneath the sparkly surface. Enchanted April--based on a 1923 novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim--is a pure wish-fulfillment story, but there's an acid edge to it.

The Catherine Breillat-directed period piece is an extreme cinematic pleasure, a well-told yarn of merciless desire.

What Live-in Maid offers is a pitch-perfect observation of life on a continent where forms are adhered to, distances aren't really kept, and your best friend is the person who knows to pour the cheap domestic whiskey into the empty bottle of imported stuff before your bridge buddies show up to judge you.

It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.

The desert trek in Tracks is as brutal as it is beautiful; the performance by Mia Wasikowska as raw as the reality. And the camels? If they don't steal your heart it must be stone-hinged.

Epic and intimate, historical and contemporary, moving and thought-provoking, the impressive The Princess of Montpensier has something for all and sundry but especially for those who like to believe that films can be as boldly intelligent as they are entertaining.

Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma may be the most important documentary you see this year.

Schoenbrun, a native speaker of the language of the internet, has uploaded into the cinematic landscape one of the most thoughtful depictions of self-discovery in the digital age. Through Casey’s plight of suburban isolation, the artist reaches out to us from a corner of the web’s endless abyss with an unmissable invitation, quite literally demonstrating the transcendental prowess of storytelling.

Drunk and disorderly on the pure joy of making movies. A frantic, flawed, fascinating film that is both impressive and a bit out of control, often at the same time.

The magic trick of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is that you find yourself caring deeply for Linda, thanks to Byrne’s vivid, impassioned performance. You can’t shake her.

A glorious, mostly lighthearted adventure celebrating the mythical freedom and excitement of the outlaw life in the Old West. [09 Feb 1986, p.4]

This deservedly anticipated Frankenstein transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.

Not every joke here lands, and not every experiment proves successful, but it scarcely matters. The genius of the picture is that even its wildest, most boundary-pushing formulations are tied to a thoughtful, rigorous thesis about how disparities of race, class and money conspire to keep ruthless systems of human oppression in place.