Like its subject, American Movie works entirely on its own quirky terms.

Woody Allen's comedy Husbands and Wives is set in his familiar New York world of verbal, neurotic achievers, but there's something new in it, a rawness we haven't seen before. It makes you laugh, deeply, and it makes you squirm.

Shot in stunning color by a gifted cinematographer named Caleb Deschanel, beautifully scored by Carmine Coppola in moods ranging from Arabian Nights impressionism to Wagnerian exaltation, the first hour of The Black Stallion is a state-of-the-art demonstration of film as a purely visual medium, a formal exercise that is nonetheless suffused with feeling. [29 Oct 1979, p.105]

Wise Blood, a virulently comic, grotesquely unforgettable adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's celebrated novel of customized redneck religion and redemption, is as strange and original a movie as Huston has ever made. [17 Mar 1980, p.101]

In the end, the film lacks the skill of its actors and ends up feeling disjointed and confused about its own message.

A powerhouse of a film, an epic of sixteenth-century Japan swarming with savage action and even more savage irony. [13 Oct 1980, p.131]

Moore’s stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film’s brave, double-edged beauty.

Alan J. Pakula has succeeded brilliantly in converting that outworn myth into a brand-new myth that conforms to our time. Pakula drives moral and ideological meanings straight to your nervous system by the rhythms of his imagery and editing. But Pakula is subtler, less melodramatic. Redford and Hoffman really are ordinary guys doing an ordinary job. But film shows how their tenacity, their doggedness, become under pressure much more than mere professional virtues. [05 Apr 1976, p.85]

The zinger of a climax is, appropriately, the blackest joke of this blackest of comedies. [17 June 1985, p.89]

This handsomely shot movie, with its throbbing Philip Glass score, has a kind of perverse integrity; its mixture of the art house and the hothouse is pure Schrader. I'm not sure whom this movie is made for, but you've got to admire the chutzpah of the man who got it made. [23 Sep 1985, p.68]

A spectacular sequel. [21 July 1986, p.64]

The great Spanish director's fourth triumph in a row--following "All About My Mother," "Talk to Her" and "Bad Education"--Volver (which means "coming back") flows effortlessly between peril and poignancy, the real and the surreal, even life and death.

Scene by well-crafted scene. Mamet holds you in a tight grip. But this movie is troubling. His intricate murder mystery plot may be overdetermined -- it doesn't leave enough room to satisfactorily explore the richly suggestive themes of identity, loyalty and betrayal. Gold's transformation seems willed by artistic fiat. The bleakness of his ending is a kind of intellectual cop-out: it reduces all that we've seen to hollow ironies. Homicide plays like a house afire: what it adds up to may be less than it seems. [14 Oct 1991, p.70]

As writer and actress, Thompson has all the right Austen rhythms and filmmaker Ang Lee ("Eat Drink Man Woman") orchestrates with sensitivity and style.

The Terminator is a splendid meta-monster, Frankensteined for the computer age. And Cameron devises not one, not two but, well, let's call it X climaxes that will melt the hinges of your jaws. [19 Nov 1984, p.132]

Hilarious and captivating.

Take this classical-farce premise, put it in the very accomplished hands of the neoclassical director Blake Edwards, and you have yourself a real comedy -not a mere grab bag of gags but a deliciously accelerating divertissement on the theme of role-playing, sexual and otherwise. [22 March 1982, p.84]

Far from being a period piece, this love story/murder mystery/political thriller couldn’t seem more timely.

A haunted thriller of disturbing power.

Has an almost perfect-pitch grasp of those messy, idealistic, vibrant times, when everyone was trying to reinvent himself from the ground up.

Crazy Heart gets to you like a good country song--not because it tells you something new, but because it tells it well. It's the singer, not the song.

The gift of this charming, low-key excursion is more intangible, yet you may find that its surprisingly complex moods linger with a bittersweet afterglow. [28 Feb 1983, p.79]

An inspired flight of fancy, an oddly poignant examination of the creative process, a rumination on adaptation (orchids to their environment, books to the screen and misfits like Charlie to life) and, in its ultimate irony, a story in which our hero learns a life-altering lesson.

As warm and lived-in as an old pair of boots, The Snapper is an honorable feel-good movie.

A unique and provocative film, ironic, funny, crazy and moving. [26 Oct 1981, p.78]

Artfully ambivalent, Danny Boyle's film, twists with a junkie's logic. It does not preach; it wallows in the pain and, more daringly, in the pleasure.

The beauty of Welcome to the Dollhouse is its pokerfaced objectivity, which neither condescends to its pubescent victim nor romantically inflates her plight.

He’s (González Iñárritu) conjured up a dark, brutal vision of urban life that sticks to your skin like soot.