Viewers engulfed by the movie's intense romance and spectacular action could leave the theater exhausted. But it's a good ride: The Last of the Mohicans creates its own vibrant world, hurling audiences into it and allowing no relief from the excitement until the end. [25 Sep 1992, p.13]

This impressive film feels more like a display, if an often dazzling one, than a genuine experience.

The spirits of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are alive and well in the Southern-fried coming-of-age tale Mud. It's got all the ingredients.

Gyllenhaal is in almost every frame of writer-director Dan Gilroy's first feature, skinny and wide-eyed, running down a driveway with his camera or cutting across oncoming traffic in the Challenger. It's an intense performance, the flip side of Ryan Gosling's in "Drive," playing the angles and filling space with empty words instead of soulful silences.

Lawrence steps up. And her character's fierce independence provides a welcome alternative to certain vampire-fixated young-adult heroines who define themselves entirely through the attention of much-much-older men.

Lee Marvin does the best acting of his life as Hickey, the usual life of the party who shows up this year sober and intent on ridding his drunken pals of their "pipe dreams." [04 Apr 2003]

Submarine pulls off a nice little feat: It's a reference-heavy coming-of-age indie flick that feels fresh despite being, well, a reference-heavy coming-of-age indie flick.

Filled with nasty, nasty stuff.

Throughout, Sophie exhibits the quality common to all of history's great martyrs, a preternatural calmness that perseveres despite (or perhaps because of) the inevitability of her doom.

Seems deeply influenced by American film noir, the Western fairy tale (in this case, mermaids) and the works of Alfred Hitchcock in particular.

It's a refreshing sensation, even if it makes you feel a touch seasick at first, and the fittingly eerie conclusion to a lavish and unsettling movie.

Neither the social commentary nor the story ever overpower the other, a feat that allows this remake to stand proudly alongside the original, its equal in every way.

Overall, though, the combination of Gondry’s whimsicality and Chomsky’s stoicism creates fascinating oil-and-water patterns that reveal more the longer they’re contemplated.

Why would you watch a film about a creep like Greenberg? Well, aside from the fact that it’s well-done and intense and occasionally funny (in a dark, dark way, mind you), there’s the sneaking suspicion that there’s a little of this fellow in all of us, and self-knowledge of that sort is a gift that, often, only art can give.

Among the many documentaries about the Iraq war, this one stands our for its intelligence, variety and measured emotionalism. [06 Apr 2007, p.26]

Though it's handsomely made and peppered with seamlessly achieved visual glories, Narnia is ineptly acted, crudely staged and burdened with a score that only a masochist could love.

A rousing and agreeable movie that resurrects a small but important episode in baseball history that parallels the larger history of the nation.

Watching the teachers whip these kids into Wilder recitations is especially intriguing, particularly when their personalities come out during the sometimes-arduous process.

Bouncing giddily from subplot to subplot and wisecrack to wisecrack, Mamet and company (and this is one of the truest ensemble works in years) satirize the slippery morals of the film racket and the surface-only decency of small town America.

Mistress America is a different kind of channeling, straight through the screwball comedies of the 1980s, "After Hours" and "Something Wild," back to "Bringing Up Baby," where Katharine Hepburn sang "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard while Cary Grant looked for the last bone (the intercostal clavicle) for his Brontosaurus skeleton.

If Young at Heart were merely a cheeky presentation of codgers belting out inappropriate tunes, it would be a curiosity and nothing more. But by getting inside the lives of a few of its members, the movie ultimately paints a moving portrait of senior citizens who believe it's better to burn out than fade away.

The funny and powerfully weird Rango is probably the closest I've seen a big-budget, computer-animated feature get to the comic vibe of my favorite Chuck Jones cartoons -- specifically, the Bugs/Porky Western spoof "Drip-Along Daffy."

Packed with more intrigue and excitement than one might expect.

This is a first-class film that will appeal to anyone who wants to see a plausible, witty, absorbing human story told well -- indeed, told gorgeously.

In an unassuming way, the film sizzles -- a perfect embodiment, as it happens, of the marriage of the bad man and the man of letters.

That the audience is forced to examine its own assumptions about the situation is the result of an extraordinary, moving performance by Andrew Garfield.

Director Sini Anderson compiles interviews with Hanna and her husband, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, as well as archival footage, into an admiring portrait of a sometimes combative figure.

The film sometimes feels like the kid brother of “Fog of War,” Errol Morris’s far more compelling account of the mind of Robert McNamara, Ellsberg’s one-time boss. There’s reality and depth here, but a chill, too, that the filmmaking never quite manages to melt.