A beautifully told story of a child's innocence and faith, filmed with exquisite detail and stunning cinematography

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]

Lynch comes amazingly close to the logic of dreams and nightmares, in which successive layers of reality seem to dissolve, sucking you into a terrifying vortex. [11 Sep 1978, p.95]

This courageous film breaks new ground in movie musicals. [21 Dec 1981, p.49]

The result is fascinating -- a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking.

Lyrical, original, misshapen and deeply felt, this is one flawed beauty of a movie.

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

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

An epic both raw and contemplative, is neither a flag-waving war movie nor a debunking.

What a sumptuous canvas Lean gives us, and what a superb cast. [24 Dec 1984, p.53]

In the hearts of losers, Zwigoff’s found a real winner.

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.

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]

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

At its tense, funny/melancholy best it hits notes other movies don't even attempt. It was probably folly to film this unfilmable book in the first place. But what an honorable, fascinating folly. [15 Feb 1988, p.71]

This film has everything for the all-important female audience: feisty heroines, lots of slapstick, great clothes.

People seeing Peter Bogdanovich's version of Michael Frayn's clockwork farce might find it hard to believe that the Broadway show, under Michael Blakemore's direction, was twice as funny as the movie. It was. But the movie happens to be twice as funny as anything else around.

Quiz Show is supebly shot (by Michael Ballhaus), and the acting ensemble could hardly be better..."Quiz Show is witty enough never to need to get on a soapbox to make its points.

Sarandon and Davis give superb, wonderfully interactive performances: funky, fierce, funny and poignant. [27 May 1991]

[Rudolph] may compose from borrowed parts, but his synthesis is uniquely his own -- nutty and gorgeous and moody as all hell. [31 March 1986, p.72B]

Mel Brooks's To Be or Not To Be has the ingenious plot twists, the breathless comic cadences, the blithe spirit of a classic '40s comedy, and for a very good reason -- it's almost a scene-by-scene and line-by-line duplicate of Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be or Not To Be" of I942. To those who know and love the Jack Benny-Carole Lombard original, this may seem like sacrilege. But because the copy is so entertaining in its own right, it seems more a tribute than a rip-off. [19 Dec 1983, p.66]

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

Jerry Schatzberg's gripping, darkly satiric Street Smart, written with great savvy by David Freeman, keeps you in a state of agitated suspense as it springs one booby trap after another on its compromised and foolish hero. [06 Apr 1987, p.66B]

Akin's raw, powerful, multileveled movie takes us places we never expected to go.

The results are wondrous, wrenching and crazily funny to behold.

Ryder, Hawke, Stiller and Garofalo turn these paradigms into wonderfully tasty characters. Written with verve and played with grace, Reality Bites is too smart to pass itself off as a definitive statement, but it gets the details delightfully right.

It's as smart, quiveringly alert and fleet of foot as a purebred pointer on the scent of fresh game.

Rozema's handling of the entangled amours and social gamesmanship at Mansfield Park is delightful and the open-minded moviegoer will have a hard time resisting this stylish and stirring movie.