This is Depp's coming-of-age role, and he's terrific. Pacino, who's shown more flash than substance recently, reminds us how great he can be when he loses himself inside a character. The bond between these two makes the film sing.

The film seems to want us to pin a medal to its own chest.

No better children's film has appeared all year, but my bet is it'll be the grown-ups, not the kids, who come away with a lump in the throat.

Pollock can be clunky and TV-movie-ish. Still, Harris gives a fiery, convincing performance.

A deep, powerful and rivetingly complex study of Tienanmen - and, ironically, it's far more evenhanded in its account of the massacre that killed more than a thousand protesters than the Chinese government might suspect.

It’s too early to place Eminem alongside those Hollywood giants (Jimmy Cagney/John Garfield), but the promise is there. He understands the power of being still in front of a camera. Compact, volatile and burningly intense, he’s got charisma to spare.

Domestic violence has never been more savagely portrayed on screen.

The filmmakers are clearly in awe of the Chicks' fighting spirit. If you think Maines's original Bush remark was disrespectful, wait till you hear what she calls him here. Maines is not ready to make nice, and neither is this riveting documentary.

A Single Man's sleek surface may go against Isherwood's crisp, understated prose, yet the story's beating, wounded heart and its spiky intelligence still come through, personified in Firth's moving, eloquently internalized performance.

Armstrong's first feature is a terrific job, a universally appealing story told with an integrity, humanity, warmth and humor you can taste. It is beautifully shot and performed with a style and sensitivity worthy of England's best actors. Russet-haired, bold-eyed, defiantly freckled Davis is like a summer storm, and Sam Neill has the rueful charm of a young James Mason. [22 Oct 1979, p.101]

This is a one-of-a-kind action flick: a tale of triumph tinged at every moment with tragedy.

For the eternal adolescents of the '80s, "Warrior" is even more primal fun than its predecessor. Miller has perfected the popup Spielberg style and laced it with speed. [31 May 1982, p.67]

Ulee's Gold possesses an attribute that's increasingly rare in American filmmaking, independent or Hollywood: call it soul.

What sets Jerry Maguire above any other romantic comedy this year is Crowe's writing. He captures the venal, high-stakes world of pro sports with deadly wit and an ex-journalist's sense of detail.

In keeping with a morality tale on the excesses of wealth and power, it is extravagantly confusing, grandiosely paranoid, flamboyantly absurd and more than a little fun. Though it utterly lacks the internal consistency that "good" movies require, as a wild-goose chase it maintains a certain lunatic fascination. [04 Jun 1979, p.76]

At first, Blue Collar looks like an interracial buddy movie. Then it shows signs of becoming a caper comedy. Finally - and powerfully - it turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genuinely political film. And a damned good one at that. [13 Feb 1978, p.98]

Scherfig and her wonderful cast slyly transmute the quotidian into the magical. It’s like watching flowers bloom in a concrete garden.

Nair’s stereotype-shattering movie -- like the polymorphous culture it illuminates -- borrows from Bollywood, Hollywood and cinema verite, and comes up with something exuberantly its own.

It's like a spectacular roadside accident: you can't turn away.

The astonishing thing about Alex Cox's mesmerizing movie is that it makes no attempt to conceal how boringly self-destructive its punk lovers were, yet it still holds us fascinated to its preordinated conclusion. [27 Oct 1986, p.103]

The movie crackles with the serio-comic tension of thin-skinned New Yorkers thrown together in a crisis.

The movie's slight, anecdotal structure is deceptive; you wouldn't guess how big an emotional wallop it packs.

Beautifully served by Eastwood's self-containment, which is less granitelike than usual (he has a soft spot for that mouse), Siegel sets these various escapes ticking like a time bomb. [22 July 1979, p.67]

A premise this preposterous must be carried off with unflappable comic conviction, and Cusack is just the right man for the job.

Singleton's powerhouse movie has the impact of a stun gun. [15 July 1991]

Structured like a farce but filmed like a Qaalude dream, this marvelously performed fairy tale packs a lot of style into its minuscule budget. [19 Nov 1984, p.135]

What this version offers is the chance to watch Russell Crowe and Christian Bale—two of the more charismatic, macho leading men around--duke it out psychologically, while another fine but less well-known intensity artist, Ben Foster, steals

Takes the prize. It's a bloody hoot.

This is a movie that sticks its political neck out, that throbs with dread, paranoia and outrage, that doesn't coddle the audience by neatly tying things up.

Most of the time these rowdy kids are refreshingly real...Stand By Me, like Wilson's film, owes some of its appeal to sheer nostalgia, an easy enough emotion to evoke. But there is more here as well: sweetness of spirit, and comedy that comes from a well-remembered vision of the way we were.[25 Aug 1986, p.63]

This is an epic you have to listen to--it's about people who trade in words, who make revolutions in their heads, and Beatty and Trevor Griffiths's script is full of some of the best talk in any movie this year. [7 Dec 1981, p.83]

The movie belongs to Hudson as the proud, self-destructive Effie. When she's center stage, Dreamgirls transports you to movie musical heaven.

Escape From New York gets more conventional as it goes along, settling for chases and narrow escapes when it could have had wild social satire as well. Carpenter has a deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility--which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. [27 July 1981, p. 75]

This affable, well-built comedy is Reitman's best since Ghostbusters.

This movie is about giving us a privileged glimpse of the Stones in action. It's a record of an astonishing musical chemistry that has been evolving, with no signs of calcification, for nearly five decades. As a bonus, there are delicious guest appearances by Buddy Guy and Jack White.

A stunning crime drama that shares its protagonists' rabid attention to detail and love of adrenalin.

For a movie full of hairraising depictions of wife beating, What's Love Got To Do With It is a rousingly entertaining musical biopic. And that's what a movie about the unstoppable Tina Turner should be: sassy, playful, soulful and triumphant, like Tina herself. [21 Jun 1993, p.66]

Gripping from start to finish.

Slides gracefully between comedy and pathos (it aims for tragedy, but doesn't quite get there).

Has a flavor all its own-sweet, whimsical, homegrown. A quirky romantic for the 21st century, July finds humor and magic in places where no one has looked before.

What blasts off the screen like a heat wave, burning in the heart, is the sheer toe-tapping, booty-shaking joy of making music.

The Secret of NIMH is an ambitious and entertaining debut that will delight and terrify kids everywhere. If there are flaws in NIMH they are a product of its ambition: visually, moments when the animation is almost too busy to take in; dramatically, an eclectic and overstuffed plot that threatens the balance of the movie. But better a surfeit than a soporific. [12 July 1982, p.75]

This one's done right. Here's an intelligent movie with no special effects. You have to pay close attention, to listen hard to its cross-fires of dialogue.

Rabbit Hole deftly sidesteps sentimentality and still wrenches your heart.

[Stillman] has a keen sense of group dynamics and a fine comic ear.

When this historical adventure kicks in, it's thrilling in the way old-fashioned epics used to be, but its romanticism has a fierce, violent physicality that gives it a distinctively modern stamp.

There's a great story here, but it feels like American Gangster hasn't been mined for all its riches.

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

As a "Revenge of the Nerds" redux, Superbad isn't perfect. But it's super close.

Damon's Ripley is considerably different from the charming sociopath in Patricia Highsmith's novel or the smooth lothario played by Alain Delon in the 1960 French thriller "Purple Noon."

A hugely entertaining thriller shot through with dark shards of agony and paranoia. It takes nothing away from the original while delivering pleasures all its own.

An extraordinary movie. [5 Nov 1984, p.74]

Narnia, brightly lit and kid-friendly, has an appealingly old-fashioned feel to it. Adamson, codirector of "Shrek," wisely doesn't try to hip-ify the tale, leaving its curious blend of medieval pageantry, Christian fable and children's bedtime story intact.

There's not much depth to the charaterizations, but they're uncommonly vivid for a horror movie. You believe that these wildly disparate people are friends, and the growing sexual affection between Sutherland and Adams is conveyed with a nice, understated warmth. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

A Cry in the Dark is no mere courtroom drama. Schepisi turns this tabloid story into a kind of splintered epic, a scathing portrait of Australian provincialism and prejudice at its most virulent. [16 Nov 1988, p.86C]

Watching Croupier is rather like watching a roulette wheel--utterly mesmerizing.

Miller's strength, and his weakness, has always been his tendency to see things in black and white, which is what makes "The Crucible" moving, and also suspect. I recommend Hytner's movie highly, but a part of me resists a work that makes the audience feel as noble in our moral certainty as the characters it invites us to deplore. Some part of its power seems borrowed from the thing it hates.

An excruciatingly entertaining portrait of the filmmaking process that no Hollywood studio would ever allow to be shown. But Gilliam, bless his impish, obsessive heart, is anything but a Hollywood type.

Expect to be confused for 10 minutes. Then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Kapur can't decide if he's making an art movie or a melodrama, an opera or a soap opera.

A mix-and-match crowd-pleaser that shouldn't add up, but delightfully does.

Harron sets the stage expertly, but her lack of a point of view ultimately enervates the movie. [6 May 1996, p. 78]

Casualties of War is De Palma's best work in years -- it's powerful, meticulous filmmaking -- yet it may be a movie easier to admire than love. Ultimately the drama seems too cut and dried; Eriksson wrestle with his conscience, but the audience never has to. "Casualties" has the visceral impact of a good movie; it lacks the resonance of a great one.

A dizzying mixture of the sophisticated and the naive, the deft and the clumsy, Bulworth is overstuffed, excessive, erratic -- and essential.

It may be the most original American movie of the year. It's funny, fast literate and audacious. [01 Sep 1980, p.45]

The true allure of Titanic is its invitation to swoon at a scale of epic moviemaking that is all but obsolete.

It's a picturesque tale that, hobbled by its episodic structure, never achieves full steam.

The Madame Bovary-in-suburbia motif may sound familiar, yet the unusual mix of satire and melodrama feels fresh. Not everything works (beware the football scenes), but this adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel is hard to shake off.

Cameron's achievement isn't only technical. He's using all the not-so-cheap thrills of a violent genre to make a movie with an antiviolence message, and the wonder of T2 is that he pulls it off without looking silly.

What holds the movie together is the fiercely self-contained commitment of Day-Lewis's performance and the palpable chemistry between him and Watson.

A witty movie -- with a fine ear for the undertone of aimless chatter -- that never raises its voice to make hollow Gen-X proclamations.

A languorous, funny and lovingly detailed memory film.

The portraits are spare but right on target. And the film keeps you laughing even as you feel the pain of the characters.

Hamer, a meticulous observer himself, is a minimalist with heart.

Never less than engaging; all that’s missing is a proper crescendo. The picture moves along briskly, even at two and a half hours, but it seems to be running on cruise control.

In Peggy Sue Got Married, Francis Coppola takes a familiar, sitcomish premise -- the one about a grown woman who time-travels back to her high-school days -- and invests it with rich and surprising colors. Imagine a paint-by-numbers comic book put in the hands of a Rembrandt; the bold comic outlines remain, but the subject is transformed by the dark palette and subtle brushwork into a tale reverberating with complex, adult emotions. [6 Oct 1986, p.73]

The gags as usual vary in quality from gold to zinc, but what makes Silent Movie more than a string of gags is the comic sensibility of Brooks. [12 Jul 1976, p.69]

Movie purists will tell you that a heavy reliance on voice-over is a sin (“show, don’t tell”), but when the words are this funny, to hell with purity.

Mann, the executive producer of "Miami Vice," can be too stylish for his own good, but the movie holds the viewer all the way to the predictably explosive end. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]

Wise, humble and effortlessly funny.

The simplicity of Sicko's argument is also its power.

As brilliantly shot as it is brutally single-minded, this is a war movie shorn of all its usual accouterments: the battle is the plot.

Like a box of sampler candies, Radio Days offers a wide assortment of bite-size goodies. They can't all be to your taste, but the sweetness lingers from the best. [02 Feb 1987, p.72]

It's a testament to his (Amenabar's) cinematic flair that he has taken as daunting a subject as euthanasia and turned it into a crowd-pleasing movie. It's also an indication of what feels wrong here. I can't deny that I was moved, but it all goes down a bit TOO easy.

Though it lacks "Wallace and Gromit"'s charm, its mile-a-minute inventiveness is impressive.

Stillman remains a deftly funny portrait painter of the young, willfully self-involved Anglo-Saxon male.

Forest Whitaker, uncorking the power that he usually holds in check, gives a chilling, bravura performance as Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, whose bloody regime slaughtered more than 300,000 people. This intelligent, sometimes gruesome thriller is based on a novel by Giles Foden.

It’s sad to see such stunning work self-destruct. You walk out haunted by the movie that might have been.

A great horror movie is like a good shrink--and a lot cheaper, too. It purges us through petrification. That horror movie, thankfully, has arrived. It's called The Orphanage," and it is seriously scary.

This time out the versatile Soderbergh has cast himself as a sleight-of-hand artist. He's made deeper films, but this carefree caper movie is nothing to sneeze at.

[Douglas] is a superb (and underused) comic actor, one who knows that the secret of being funny is never begging for a laugh.

Explores both prepubescent and teen sexuality with an honesty that may make some people uncomfortable, which is a sign of its potency, and a badge of honor.

But Smooth Talk, alas, is two movies, and the parts don't mesh. What begins as subdued, plotless realism -- everything up to Arnold's late entrance -- then lurches into Gothic melodrama. Arnold is a literary conceit, Connie is real: thus their portentous mating ritual seems more contrived than inevitable. Smooth Talk feels like an anecdote that's been stretched out of shape. [24 March 1986, p.77]

Think of it as an epic poem, in which Scorsese's swirling, headlong baroque camera searches paradoxically for the stillness at the meditative heart of Buddhism. [22 December 1997, p. 86]

A superbly taut and well-made thriller that jumps from Geneva to Rome, from Paris to Beirut, from Athens to Brooklyn, each lethal assignment staged with a mastery Hitchcock might envy.

Gorgeous, mesmerizing, and stunningly well acted.

Director Kaplan has a generous, open-eyed affection for these quirky, hungry characters that he obviously wants to share. Smart host that he is, he doesn't over sing their praises. You warm to this movie at your own sweet speed. [31 Oct 1983, p.83]

Condon's obvious attempts to draw parallels between Whale's life and his work tend to be heavy-handed, and detract from an otherwise intriguing film.