Kiss of Death can't keep its tangled web of a plot together. The film loses momentum, it falls back on surprisingly hackneyed generic devices, and the editing gets jumpy, abrupt. In the end, the film is a lot less satisfying than its early scenes promised. [21 Apr 1995, p.10]

A beautiful, head-spinning mystery that requires keen attention - and rewards it with a tricky and poetic payoff - The Double Hour is a topflight Euro thriller right up there with "Tell No One."

Undefeated is undeniably inspirational stuff.

Standouts are Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, Harry's sly father-surrogate, and Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge.

Paradise Now plays like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," but with explosives.

Oddly enough, though Land of the Dead is more clever and grand than Romero's early classics, it is not as haunting.

Though one gets a sense there is part of the story Marks isn't telling, we do pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

It's a good story, a sad story, a story of triumph and prejudice and terrible hypocrisy. And Cumberbatch aces it all - another smartly realized but deeply soulful performance from an actor who seemingly can do no wrong.

Emily Watson, looking at home in her '40s frocks, plays Angus' mother - coping not only with her son's obsession with what she believes to be an imaginary friend, but also with her own worry and grief about her husband at war.

A crushingly sad, beautiful film.

Smartly acted, achingly simple love story.

Yummy and weightless.

Stanford and Neuwirth are performers of such nuance that a mere glimpse of his body language and her bawdy language speak volumes about the difference between love and sex, the ideal and the real.

In a sense, Everyone Else traces, over a stretch of days on the sunny Mediterranean, the whole trajectory of a relationship. It's a marriage in miniature: courtship, consummation, conflict; love and hate; the longing for freedom vs. the need for companionship.

An intriguing study of identity, marriage and, perhaps, madness.

A taut, German-made thriller, Jerichow adds a bit of European xenophobia to the pulp traditions of passion and betrayal.

Tedious sports inspirational that genuflects before the mythology of Notre Dame football with the story of a walk-on who fulfilled a lifelong dream of suiting up for the Irish. [26 May 1994, p.E05]

For those who enjoy the non sequiturs common to Cheech & Chong comedies and Raymond Chandler mysteries, The Big Lebowski is a hoot. For those of a more serious warp, the film is a lexicon of postmodernism, a textbook example of recontextualizing earlier styles, what with its '60s casualties driving '70s cars and enjoying '50s pleasures in the '90s. In other words, this is not a movie for those who demand narrative thrust and coherence, although even they will be startled by the contrast between Bridges' teddy-bear affability and Goodman's corrosive hostility. [6 March 1998, p.04]

Funny stuff.

There's humor in it, and sadness, and an acid-tinged humor that is miles away from the branded levity of "Friends." More power to Aniston for feeling the need to try something different, and then doing it -- well.

There are laughs here aplenty, and sexy, goofy, off-the-cuff charm.

Light and droll, but with an undercurrent of moody suspense.

Raunchy, raucous and riotously funny.

The relationship between the young American and the old Frenchman is as rich as one of Perrier's sauces: the pupil and the teacher, the son and the father, the keen protégé and the stubborn classicist.

The music, of course, resonates. And so does this exquisite heartbreaker of a story.

Murphy, in the boogeyman role, toggles between seductive and sinister with enough conviction to make you forget that his character makes no sense at all.

Trumbo, a rousing documentary as ornery, orotund and captivating as its subject (1905-1976), is an anatomy of irony.

Fulfills the promise of its title: It's transporting, it's magical.

Moviegoers of a certain age may feel as though they are watching a lost Bertolucci film.

Much as I enjoyed this diversion, I couldn't help but think that The Princess and the Frog had better songs and (hand-painted) animation, and that Mulan was a ripping adventure that didn't need tweaking to qualify as an action flick.

At its best, Edge of Tomorrow plays like a tripwire time-travel thriller. As it progresses, though, the built-in repetition can, and does, grow tedious.

It's a character study, nicely realized.

Garfield melts into his Doss character in a performance that seems impossibly still and tranquil. He’s mesmerizing. It’s almost impossible to imagine he ever played Spider-Man.

22 Jump Street's scattershot approach to comedy is rooted in the belief that for every anatomical, scatalogical, sexual, or pop-cultural reference and pun gone awry, another will stick to the wall like, um, bodily fluid.

"The Silence of the Lambs" gave us an articulate, Euro-suave gourmand cannibal, but served up pretty much the same stew.

A pitch-black comedy steeped in bitterness and regret.

It is understatement to say that Nicholson does some of the finest work of his career here, easily equaling "The Shining" for gargoyle monstrousness and "As Good as It Gets" for tortured humanism.

A jazzy, immensely absorbing thriller.

What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

The Road Home takes a path few movies choose to travel these days, but it's a very affecting journey.

At once a deeply personal film and an important historical document, The Man Nobody Knew leaves us with an incomplete portrait of a man. Did Colby have a moral core? Did he know what was truth, and what was a lie? Did he sanction assassination plots? Did he love his family? Was he even capable of love?

A crowd-pleaser of immense proportions.

The tone is surreal, at once visceral and clinical, making Bronson an unsettling experience: savage, disturbing, and yet somehow fascinating.

This beautifully taut and terrifying thriller is faithful to its source in just about every way that matters.

For its intended audience, Horton's agenda is overt: Listen, be a friend, and most important - have fun!

Enormously satisfying.

If Macbeth comes off at times like a Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptation (there is one, from 1955), it can also be quite moving, quite troubling, haunting, even.

The two leads, Edgerton and Hardy, pull off their respective roles - rising above the cliches and the melodrama - with ferocity and focus.

DuVernay has confidence in her actors that is reciprocated in kind. Richardson-Whitfield gives a remarkably empathetic performance.

Aronofsky has fashioned a chilling vision that lives up to the caustic irony of its title and gives us a nightmare that is not lightly forgotten.

So gin-and-tonic dry, so deceptive in its deadpan-ness, that it's not always clear that Julian Fellowes is having fun. But he is.

A satisfyingly moody, melancholy, madcap live-action romp.

The structure of Lelouch's pedal-to-the-metal story commands attention and suspense. The three principals are enormously engaging, and Gérard de Battista's succulent cinematography creates the sense of actually being there.

A bit of a one-joke wonder.

Although the pervading mood of Twin Falls Idaho - a beautifully shot, noirish thing - is one of sadness and loss, the Polishes' film is playful, too.

Searing and hypnotic docudrama.

Foxx makes what he does look effortless. He's the reason to see Collateral, as he walks into the frame and walks off with the picture.

Remember the name Shohreh Aghdashloo. The heartbreakingly fine Iranian actress is only a subsidiary character in House of Sand and Fog...But she is the soul of this pungent film.

Like its music, the film's emotions proceed from lament to screaming screed to chorus of hope.

One of the most suspenseful, terrifying, and devilishly original horror pics in recent memory.

Training Day has the best performances and worst third act of any movie you're likely to see this year.

Spinney comes across as a man whose warm spirit is literally at the core of the loving, if loopy Big Bird.

Part of its appeal lies in the truth and specificity behind the clunky presentation.

Best of all is the ride through the architect's own domestic space in Santa Monica, dubbed by locals "the house that built Gehry."

This Santa Claus story is for a midnight movie crowd, not the kiddie matinees.

A super-taut and superbly acted three-character piece.

Black Book doesn't let the grim facts of the Holocaust get in the way of some ripping pulp.

Those who give into its spell will find this a gentle, moving, and deeply intelligent portrait of the awkward, fumbling steps teens make into adulthood, and the promise of first love that draws them on.

An examination of loneliness and the need to connect in an increasingly disconnected world, What Happened Was . . . is disturbing, funny and unpredictable in the way people themselves are disturbing, funny and unpredictable. [07 Oct 1994, p.05]

Directed with tremendous style and vibrant, buoyant energy.

Funny, wry, tragic, and deeply moving.

Francofonia is a brilliant meditation on art, on war - and what happens to art when nations go to war.

Redmayne should be getting a lot of notice for his performance; it's palpable, it's poignant. Jones, too, is terrific. And Marsh, who won the documentary Academy Award for his Philippe Petit Twin Towers caper Man on Wire, brings a keen artistry to The Theory of Everything.

Amid this unrelenting ferocity, Marshall gives his characters emotional depth, and elicits terrific performances from the cast.

Rain is a quiet, disquieting triumph.

A powerful film.

The real-life career criminal Jacques Mesrine is seen in all his wild, scary, violent glory.

As superb as Boseman is - moving with athletic grace, doing splits with hair curled in a sky-high pompadour, approximating Brown's rapid-fire, guttural speaking voice without descending to Eddie Murphy SNL parody - he's never quite good enough to convince you you're watching the Hardest Working Man in Show Business up on screen.

Too bad it's hog-tied by a ridiculously familiar plot, uneven direction and characters of such dizzying simplicity that you wish the demons would get to them just to smack some sense into their heads. [26 Sept 1983, p.D3]

In its juxtaposition of voluptuous nudity with the horrors of war, in its evocation of idealized beauty draped like gods and goddesses of Grecian art, the film invokes classical ideas about how the life force asserts itself most aggressively in the face of death.

There are points, most notably and predictably in the action sequences and set numbers, where The Swan Princess comes within hailing distance of the Olympian standards that are now almost routine at Disney. What the film lacks is an equal sophistication in story-telling that talks to children on an almost subliminal level about their fears and fantasies while royally entertaining them. It is that quality, as much as technical skill, that sets Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King in a class by themselves as the finest achievements of the Disney renaissance. [18 Nov 1994, p.06]

Comparisons to HBO's "Girls" will abound, but Fort Tilden has a more satirical bent than Lena Dunham's much-talked-about show.

Y&J could have been made anywhere, really; it's a tale of being scared, of being hopeful, of the unsettling intersection between commitment and loss.

A devastating psychological thriller, Prisoners pulls us deep into our worst fear: the Amber Alert. Then it holds us under.

Shannon is flawless.

Loose, eminently likable stuff.

It's a work that preaches to the choir, and the song has been more subtly sung in better movies.

A feel-good movie, in the absolute best sense.

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

Burton gives us SuperDude; Nolan gives us Sir Subdued.

In presenting their testimony to the jury of public opinion, Morris would seem to be building a case for absolving some of them of mistreatment charges and implicitly asking for an investigation of those who were not charged.

ILYM is the comedy that Rudd lovers have been waiting for since he first charmed us silly in "Clueless." It explores both the dweeby and heartthrobby sides of this guy whose crooked smile fails to mask his social anxiety.

Does what the best movies can do: take viewers to what might be unfamiliar places, into a culture with unique customs and traditions, and show, through drama and comedy, how the fundamental truths of the human experience need no translation.

As a celebration of agility, ability, and outlandish human behavior, The Walk is a winning thing. It may not get inside the head of its pole-balancing protagonist - it doesn't really even try - but Zemeckis' movie takes you skyward.

Where Denys Arcand's delightful 1986 comedy "The Decline of the American Empire" celebrated the good life, his profoundly funny sequel The Barbarian Invasions heartily toasts the good death.

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

Striking a balance between Howard's harum-scarum comedies such as Night Shift and Splash and his fuzzy family "dramedies" such as Cocoon and Parenthood, The Paper delivers the goods - and also babies and the news. [25 March 1994, p.03]

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.