Lake of Death is a slow burn that fizzles out under the weight of its influences. The tech elements are significantly better than average B-movie fare, but the writing never matches them.

It fails to rise above certain clichés, dulled further by stiff performances and a clumsy handle on the movie’s interwoven time periods.

Police Story is one of the great 1980s action films. It’s also one of the most 1980s action films.

It is in every frame a beautiful and powerful film — a masterpiece.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

Towelhead presents material that cries out to be handled with quiet empathy and hammers us with it. I understand what the film is trying to do, but not why it does it with such crude melodrama. The tone is all wrong for a story of child sexuality and had me cringing in my seat.

You have to be prepared to see a film like this, or able to relax and allow it to unfold. It doesn't come, as most films do, with built-in instructions about how to view it. One scene follows another with no apparent pattern, reflecting how the lives of its family combine endless routine with the interruptions of random events.

Bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, bad music, bad sound and bad fight choreography can only take a film so far. A film must be entertaining on its own terms in order to be worth recommending, and Dangerous Men is, for the most part, a bore.

There are so many themes that could be unpacked through the details of the true story of The Watcher, but Murphy and his team don’t trust the facts, adding more and more ridiculous twists with every episode, until the whole thing collapses under any suspension of disbelief.

This is a film with a dread fascination. McKellen occupies it like a poisonous spider in its nest.

Start to finish, the movie is delightfully dorky, irreverent and scrappy, the exact kind of project a young filmmaker would make if they just wanted to make fellow nerds laugh and were pretty good at doing so.

The kind of meandering apathy that Reichardt is going for in River of Grass can be tough to connect to as a viewer, and it’s interesting that her films became more resonant when they switched from what is kind of a comedy to drama.

The movie is more stunning than ever, a daring blend of history and personal storytelling with one of the most striking performances of its era from Leslie Cheung, a performer who left us way too soon.

Gerima’s Sankofa is an invocation not just to African ancestors, but also the present-day viewer. It calls to attention how history exists in the present, how the spirits of the long-gone can still affect today.

The plot loses its way in some of the later moments, as when Caan suddenly turns from a smoothie into a sinister, uptight threat (maybe it would have been funnier if he had simply continued to be a nice guy, to Cage's mounting frustration). But by then the movie has already inspired enough laughter to pay its way, and that's with the skydiving Elvis impersonators still to come.

What The Rookie feels like is an assembly of scenes that were not attached to characters we can care about. The dialogue is wooden, or artificial, or self-consciously cute. Most of the characters are not given even perfunctory development.

Avalon is often a warm and funny film, but it is also a sad one, and the final sequence is heartbreaking. It shows the way in which our modern families, torn loose of their roots, have left old people alone and lonely--warehoused in retirement homes. The story of the movie is the story of how the warmth and closeness of an extended family is replaced by alienation and isolation.

It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.

The people in this movie have intelligence in their eyes, but their words are defined by the requirements of formula comedy. If this had been a European film, the same plot would have been populated with adults, and the results might have been magical.

If there is such a thing as a pulse in movies, there are sections of this one where a defibrillator would come in handy. This is not due to a lack of action scenes but those included are strung together with long, slow stretches.

To watch Possession again is to realize that it remains one of the most grueling, powerful, and overwhelmingly intense cinematic experiences that you are likely to have in your lifetime.

The movie is an ambitious experiment, but a long and tedious one, and our revels end long before Mazursky's.

The Chosen retells one of the most dependable stories in literature, the story in which two people from different backgrounds overcome their mistrust and learn to accept each other's traditions.

It has not lost an iota of its power to shock, amuse, and simultaneously perplex viewers. If anything, it seems to have grown even bolder with age in its willingness to take on sacred cows in the craziest manner imaginable.

A small but wonderful gem of a thriller: A film in which complicated people and a very complicated plot come together in a mechanism that leaves us marveling at its ingenuity.

It leaves us with a series of stark images (of the struggle to harvest wheat during a snowstorm, of lamp-lit farmhomes, of Sorenson’s tireless Model T). And it also acts as a reminder of how much of American history stands in danger of being overlooked just because it happened outside the American mainstream.

Here was a film that took elements that one might have encountered in other movies in the past—black humor, gore, surrealism, erotic imagery, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and oddball performances—and presented them in such a unique and deeply personal manner that the end result was something that literally looked, sounded and felt like nothing that had ever come before it.

Suspiria truly is one of the absolute classics of the horror genre and anyone who considers themselves to be true students of the cinema owe it to themselves to experience it for themselves, especially if they get a chance to see it on the big screen where it belong.