Low-budget triumph.

Like warriors themselves, you will be left to sort through a jumble of emotions: pride and sorrow, bitterness and gratitude. [09 Feb 2007, p.43]

Overlong, poorly paced and woodenly acted film.

OK, it’s no Frozen — a Let It Go only comes around once every couple of ice ages — but it’s nonetheless a heartfelt and joyful take on a good old dysfunctional family.

Frank’s work is phenomenal, but his longtime editor and collaborator Laura Israel seems determined during the course of her documentary never to give you a moment long enough to contemplate it.

Hits one out of the park.

It's actually the surprisingly compelling plot and the often hilarious dialogue that keep you watching this tale of passion and murder in a Samurai militia unit - not the beautiful scenery or the elegant color palette.

There's style and panache to spare. Mournful jazz adds to the mood.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

Hilarious sweet and sour David Mamet comedy.

Mistress America never falters in its case study of a complicated female friendship.

It's truly inspiring to watch Fred Knittle, 81 and tethered to an oxygen tank, perform a riveting solo of Coldplay's "Fix You" after his singing partner dies shortly before the show.

By the end I was getting a bit antsy from the rambling script and direction.

A thoughtfully conceived and tastefully executed tribute to a venerated author.

If Michael Fassbender wears a giant papier-mâché head for most of a film, is he still mesmerizing? Happily, yes.

Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."

Maggie Gyllenhaal goes from caring to creepy in this Netflix release.

Ends in magnificent fashion, with skyscrapers bowing to Beethoven's Ninth. It's a stirring ending to a sweet movie.

Someway, somehow, it’s the funniest movie to hit theaters in a long time.

Hilarious from first frame to last.

A thinking man's buddy movie.

If the documentary has a star, it's pony-tailed AES exec Piers Lewis, who had the impossible job of getting Georgians to actually pay for their electricity.

Moves in a predictable path that includes some remarkable coincidences.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

Despite copious full-frontal female nudity, House of Pleasures isn't mere sexploitation. Rather, it's a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail. On the downside, the movie is overlong.

The film’s reckoning, when it comes, is fully as heartbreaking as it should be.

It’s photographically yummy, heaving with sun-dappled vistas and four-star dining. The boys float around a bit in the sea and enjoy homemade pasta while trundling out their impressions of, say, Marlon Brando.

The film is almost worth seeing just for the extraordinary scene in which a stark naked Mortimer has her movie star lover (Dermot Mulroney) deliver an exhaustive critique of her body's flaws.