A meticulous, spellbinding, provocative depiction of the final days of the Third Reich.

Face/Off is a summer movie extraordinaire: violent, imaginative, crazily funny and, oddly moving. Hollywood has finally wised up and let Hong Kong auteur John Woo strut his stuff in all its undiluted, over-the-top glory.

Let the Right One In unfolds with quiet, masterly assurance.

Danny Rose may be his most Chaplinesque film, and therefore his most dangerous: the fine line that Allen (like Chaplin) walks between sweetness and sentimentality has never been finer. [30 Jan 1984, p.69]

By the end of this white-knuckle movie, you stand in awe at the depth of man's will to survive. Touching the Void leaves you emotionally and physically spent, and grateful it was only a movie, not a mountain, you had to endure.

Press and Blunt are major discoveries: in this sly and wonderfully atmospheric gem, they conjure up the role-playing raptures of youth with perfect poetic pitch.

Wonderful...Based on an autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson, My Life as a Dog captures the manic mood swings of a turbulent prepubescence with deft tonal swings of its own: under its sweet, puppy-dog surface, this movie has teeth. [25 May 1987, p.72]

Superman turns out to be a surprisingly infectious entertainment, nicely balanced between warmth and wit, intimacy and impressive special effects, comic-strip fantasy and several elements that make the movie eminently eligible for Deep Thinking about rescue fantasies, cherubic messiahs and other pieces of popcorn metaphysics. [1 Jan 1979, p.46]

It takes nearly three hours for Tess to reach its tragic climax at Stonehenge, but the deliberateness and occasional longueurs pay off: Tess is depthcharged, resonant. [22 Dec 1980, p.73]

Blackly funny, unafraid to shift emotional gears from farce to horror, peppered with spectacular action.

There's plenty of violence in The Long Good Friday, but it's good old macho man-against-man violence and the film has crisp direction from John Mackenzie and a tight, smart, sophisticated script by a first-rate English playwright, Barrie Keeffe. [15 Mar 1982, p.78]

Written with an acute ear by Barbara Turner (Leigh's mother) and directed by Ulu Grosbard, it's a resonant, grittily specific film.

Though well acted, and handsomely shot by veteran Adam Holender, Fresh sacrifices real emotion for thriller contrivances. It's a tourist's drive through inner-city hell. [05 Sep 1994, p.69]

Barry Sonnenfeld's bouncy, immensely likable adaptation.

Moving like a dream that explodes into reality, Chocolat is blessed with superb acting, especially by its star, the African-born Bankole. His quiet eloquence and suppressed passion express the human cost of an unjust political system. [27 Mar 1989, p.68]

There's something decidedly mechanical about this intermittently gripping movie's bleak view of human nature.

Will be remembered as a vintage Rohmer harvest.

It's no shameless Hollywood weepie, mind you, but an overestheticized, coolly abstracted weepie, which is not necessarily better. [19 Nov 1984, p.132]

Unnerving because it forces us into uncharted waters: Solondz doesn't tell us how to feel but makes us thrash out our responses for ourselves. In doing so, he has made one of the few indelible movies of the year.

The film is a class-act thriller, a fiendishly efficient example of emotional manipulation. But that's not all. With Jane Fonda heading the cast, it couldn't help but be a thriller with a very large social conscience, activated, of course, to warn against the dangers of nuclear power. As such, the movie is both ferociously effective and decidedly facile. Director James Bridge's suspense film is the most potent blend of tract and trash since the underrated "Three Days of the Condor." [19 March 1979, p.103]

Summer hasn't arrived, but the funniest riff on a summer movie genre has already landed.

Though a few scenes are amateurish and the lighting is less than polished, "The Wedding Banquet" is such a genial, openhearted sitcom that only a confirmed grump could resist it. [16 Aug 1993, p.61]

Intimate, moving and playful.

The uncontestable triumph of Goblet of Fire, however, is Brendan Gleeson's Alastor (Mad-Eye) Moody, the grizzled new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

It happens to be one of the most wildly (and disturbingly) inventive animated films I've seen.

Shankman and his screenwriter, Leslie Dixon, prove you can make a lightweight Broadway musical into big movie fun.

Exuberantly theatrical yet every inch a movie, and some numbers ("The Cell Block Tango") are so entertaining you might want to applaud.

A surprisingly tender, even heartbreaking, film. Like the original, it's a tragic tale of beauty and the beast.