Desplechin's film sustains its running time by continually revealing new aspects to its characters that reverse our initial judgments.

Both epic and intimate, this impassioned samurai drama is for anyone who's ever watched a movie and muttered, "They just don't make 'em like they used to."

A romantic comedy that feels like real life.

A vanity project by a moderately talented artist that has moments of real brilliance in it.

Ultimately, it's a compassionate view of marriage and its stressors. But the filmmaker and actors do their jobs only too well. Watching "Secret Lives" can be as uncomfortable as sitting in the dentist's chair.

That grim realism sometimes makes The Revenant about as appetizing as a three-course meal of turkey jerky — but also serious enough to remind you of classics like "Jeremiah Johnson" and "Little Big Man." It's a gruesome adventure story that rarely lets up.

In Wide Blue Road, his (Montand) character and the wages of desperation are much more complex. Here is the real lost Atlantis.

Classical dance great Jacques d’Amboise calls Tanaquil LeClercq’s style a “path to heaven.” And this lovely documentary by Nancy Buirski makes clear that he’s right.

Jodorowsky turns his own youth into an odd, hypnotic mishmash.

It’s a pleasure, all too rare, to watch two splendid actors pitted against each other with equal force such as Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in the exceptional murder mystery, In the Heat of the Night. Over the years I remember a few extraordinary cases of this kind - Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in “San Francisco.” Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins in “The Prisoner,” Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole in “Becket.”

What's cool and always kicky is seeing a country's irreverent movie trash being treated with such, well, reverence.

Laughter may be the best medicine, but in Obvious Child, it’s also a helluva cure for dealing with a serious topic.

A delicately upbeat, even humorous celebration of love and sacrifice.

Frustratingly, though, and not a little ironically, Justman chooses to focus on the new stars when they sing, rather than on the Funk Brothers playing in the background. Just as curiously, he paints a remarkably rosy picture of the old days, overlooking the racism and exploitation the Brothers surely experienced.

The result is cool and semi-comical, but also serious.

There is enough here — including the gifted Arena’s barely believable backstory — to keep your head spinning.

Writer-director Julia Loktev sustains the tension for long, Antonioni-esque passages that portend something momentous. The film delivers in unexpected ways, and then ponders what it means.

It is the devastating testimony from survivors themselves that leaves the most indelible impression.

Buscemi wittily captures the desperation of lives gone downhill in prettified surroundings although, like the Trees Lounge patron who suddenly stops breathing, the audience feels the life force slowly being sucked out. [11 Oct 1996, p.70]

Tractenberg, evidently a fan of lingering close-ups, lets the audience marinate in a claustrophobic vibe.

A Dangerous Method concerns itself primarily with sex, but what's most shocking is how conservative it turns out to be.

Kidman is able to draw you in even as the movie's solemn, morbid obviousness wears you out.

A small miracle of comic social portraiture, a sometimes affectionate, sometimes ironic study of a specific group at a specific moment. His work is deeply evocative and enjoyable.

The problem is that the movie spends as much time on the boring detective chasing Lucas as on the drug lord himself.

The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving.

Stripped of his former pretty-boy image, the Texas-born actor is snarly and gnarled, and understands what Nichols is aiming for. That’s crucial, as Mud needs something to stick to.

It’s a pleasure to see Russo back on screen (she’s married to Gilroy). But Nina’s eager complicity is far too easy and every social critique flashes as bright as the neon guiding Lou around back-alley L.A.

Rarely do adaptations of stage plays work on screen, and almost never do they work as well as this one does. Most remarkably, the dryly comic "Moon" is virtually a one-man show.