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.

In every detail - the superb soundtrack, the rich cinematography, the dinstinctively edgy editing - Rain Man reveals itself as a movie made with care, smarts, and a refreshing refusal to settle for the unexpected. [19 Dec 1988]

Junky, freaky, sadistic, masochistic, Mad Max has a perverse intelligence revving inside its pop exterior. It's a crazy collide-o-scope, a gear-stripping vision of human destiny careening toward a cosmic junkyard. [21 July 1980, p.71]

A terrific piece of work: smart, inventive and executed with state-of-the-art finesse.

Vertical Ray slows our rhythms and heightens our senses: it's a shimmering, tactile experience.

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

Taxi Driver is a disturbing, frightening film, but it has the desperate excitement that goes with its vision of the city. Scorsese's verminous New York is a descendant of Baudelaire's "anthill" Paris, Eliot's "unreal" London, the nightmare Berlin of such German films as Fritz Lang's "M." In this vision the great modern city is the crossroads where fenced-off forces break loose and collide. The overworld and the underworld embrace each other in a dance of mutual lusts that can only lead to violence. [1 Mar 1976, p.82]

Puiu's is the art of the seemingly artless: he takes a story that's utterly unglamorous and mundane, and transforms it into something mythic.

The superbly acted Spider is muted in comparison: it’s a quiet nightmare, painted in hospital greens and rust browns.

Brutal and precision-made, Thief is a high-tech crime movie that closes in on its subject with such relentless purpose that it approaches abstraction. Nothing enters Mann's frame that is not designed to be there: the expertise he honors in his criminal hero is mirrored by his own meticulous craftsmanship. He gets the job done--and blows you away while doing it. [30 Mar 1981, p.82]

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

Indoors, it's Jane Austen. Outdoors, this red-blooded, exuberantly romantic version of Pride and Prejudice plays more like Emily Brontë. Purists may object, but most will find this love story irresistible.

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

Brilliantly strange, often funny and ultimately heartbreaking film.

This shamefully underpromoted, gloriously silly romp made me laugh harder than any other movie this summer. Make that this year.

An actor of great integrity, Scheider at last makes the powerful impression we've been waiting for; he plays Joe with wonderfully delicate and telling detail. You see all the lusts and weaknesses, but you see also an underlying sweetness, a kind of forlorn and desperate innocence that makes something deeply human out of good, bad, weakness, strength, triumph, defeat and all that jazz. [24 Dec 1979, p.78]

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

A heavyweight contender unafraid to take on some of the most harrowing moral and social dilemmas of the day... Prince of the City takes us into the jungle and into the halls of justice, and forces us to see how precarious the line between them is. It's a true horror story. [24 Aug 1981, p.67]

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

A wicked delight. Adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoe Heller's acclaimed novel, it's at once a comedy of cluelessness and class, a melodrama of two women in the grips of wildly inappropriate obsessions, and a "Fatal Attraction"-style thriller.

Director Carl Franklin is a talent to watch: he gets subtle, textured performances from his fine cast; he knows how to let a scene breathe; how to create dread without strong-arming the audience. And on the subjects of racism and crime and the way the rural and inner-city experiences are linked, this modest film noir has a lot to say between the lines of its action plot.

Splendiferous.

Dr. Dolittle is a zoo-and a blast. [6 July 1998, p. 67]

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]

Filled with delicious backstage drama, and superb actors reveling in the opportunity to play their 19th-century counterparts.

Hill has never been better in shaping and pacing a movie that has the excitement, romance and resonance of the best popular art. [15 Oct 1984, p.118]

For diehard fans, X-Men is full of in jokes and sly references -- For everybody else, there's the thrill of the unknown.

Wayne's proud, quietly anguished performance, one of his very best and certainly his most moving, has a richness that seems born of self-knowledge; he lends the film a tremendous sense of intimacy and a surprisingly confessional mood. [16 Aug 1976, p.68]