Le Quattro Volte may sound like art-house tedium, but in fact it's a movie of grave beauty, serene pace and surprising humor.

Although the movie goes too far, you can hardly get enough of its delicious atmosphere - and of Turner, in particular, who has never looked better on the big screen. [8 Dec 1989]

To be clear, there are dazzling sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, and virtually every minute has something interesting in it. It’s absolutely worth seeing as a curiosity. But as a work of narrative art it doesn’t sustain itself for its full two-hour running time. After an hour, you might even have to struggle to stay awake.

It doesn’t make cows into human beings. If anything, for some 90 minutes, it turns us into a cow. In doing so, it shows us — in a way that we actually feel it — how amazing it is to exist.

A long documentary that's very hard to watch - at times, it's harrowing.

Morgan finds the right elements of action and character through which to make history leap off the page.

A must-see.

Wildlife isn’t dazzling entertainment but an intelligent, low-key and satisfying film with a rare respect for every character.

Director Ang Lee ("The Wedding Banquet") spared no effort in giving the food its perfect preparation and display. Brace yourself for a visual orgy.

The film details how constant propaganda, lies and outright gaslighting can effectively numb and coerce a populace.

Powerful and outrageous.

Funny and sweet enough to delight kids and inventive enough to satisfy adults.

The movie deals with themes of secular and religious love, of how they may intersect and diverge, that are suggestive of Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Follows the country pop singer on what has to be one of the most amazing farewell concert tours in music history.

The Sessions is moving. At times, it's even erotic, which is unexpected, to say the least. It sends viewers out of the theater with a heightened sense of the physical and a real feeling for all the things that sex means in human life.

An astonishing documentary.

One of the year's most important documentaries, a real must-see.

Benefits enormously from Aiello's down-to-earth magnificence.

It's the kind of unpretentious movie that falls between the cracks, and for a certain kind of audience, the thoughtful kind, it would be a shame to miss.

It's the kind of small but amazing character study (think ``Marty'') that film lovers yearn for while griping that this type of picture no longer gets made. Turns out it does.

In the 2002 South Korean film Oasis, one can appreciate one of Asia's best directors (Lee Chang-dong) and one of the region's best actresses (Moon So-ri).

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

This is the defining feminist film of the decade and one of the most important women's vehicles in popular American cinema. [15 Jan 2006, p.28]

Brutal, tough to watch but impossible to ignore.

The film benefits most of all from Rees' careful screenplay, which dances that shifting line between fear and emergent hope. One of Alike's poems says it best: "Even breaking is opening. And I am broken. I am open."

Red Rock West' is filled with delightful twists of plot, and the twists start coming early -- so we'll leave off talking about the story. [28 Jan 1994, p.C3]

Quite simply, one of the best movies of the year so far.

In watching Ava, a visually inviting and sharp portrait of teenage life in Iran, one must admire how writer-director Sadaf Foroughi was able to play her own tune in life.

An extraordinary and effective film.

Babygirl likely will divide viewers, but no matter what side one takes — and despite a bit of a shaky denouement — it is more than just a provocative talker.

You can take it straight as an example of a bygone day of outsize filmmaking or enjoy it as kitsch, but it's exhilarating either way.

Midnight Traveler gets the bulk of its humanity from little Zahra and Nargis. The resilience of children is often amazing, and near the end of the film, when they play in the snow for the first time, you get a glimpse of hope for their futures.

Ultimately, Whose Streets? is timely not only because of its social message, but also because it fully embraces the cell phone footage and tweets that have been crucial tools in the Black Lives Matter and other movements.

It is ensemble work of the highest quality, but it is Depardieu's graceful and illuminating performance that is unforgettable. [19 Dec 1990, p.E1]

It's one of the best documentaries ever made about show business, about what it really consists of and what it demands.

Can and should be appreciated as a work of delicate and unmistakable beauty.

Chunhyang is an extravagantly beautiful movie that many viewers are going to love and others are not going to be able to sit still for. That's their problem.

Terrific.

Fiennes thrives under his own direction, but such is his sense of balance that everyone else thrives, too.

Sean Mullin’s documentary It Ain’t Over is literally inside baseball. The film is essentially a Berra family project, an attempt to rehabilitate the professional reputation of someone who often doesn’t get his due as a player.

The real reasons to see it are Barrymore, Barrymore and Crawford, the beating hearts of the picture. [21 Jun 2018, p.E5]

There's no shortage of well-staged oater action by director John Farrow (including some trick 3-D effects lost in this otherwise 2-D version) as Wayne and his buckskinned pal Buffalo Baker (Ward Bond) ride out to save a band of settlers from marauding Indians. [23 Oct 2005]

As a great New York story, it’s also a great American story about ambition and failure, about the kind of people who make it, the kinds who don’t, and all the things that can go wrong.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

The late film critic Roger Ebert called movies an “empathy machine,” and “Io Capitano” stands as Garrone’s plea for empathy in a debate that sorely lacks it.

Gone Girl is a great thriller until it stops being one, about 20 minutes before the finish. Until then it’s brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy, a movie that keeps the audience grasping and reaching in all the wrong directions, while consistently delivering something a little better, a little crazier and a little more disturbing than expected.

Worth seeing, both for the ways it's timeless and for the ways it encapsulates an era.

Jia’s languid style and exquisite framing complement his understated approach to the material, which opts for depth over melodrama. But Mountains May Depart is grounded in Zhao’s delicate performance, which is her best.

It's sober, never flashy or exciting but always engrossing.

The film's impact has a lot to do with Fabio Vacchi's original score, which is both plaintive and coldly modernist, with echoes of Charles Ives.

For a bighearted effort like this one, some patience on the audience's part is not too much to ask. Go ahead. Take a chance.

This warm, celebratory and very public film is punctuated by sudden and luminous private visualizations.

Extraordinary.

A vicious horror flick with an actual beast and someone who just acts like one.

Riveting.

This is an important movie, but it’s not a perfect one. It has one enormous flaw, and it’s a testament to the smartness of the writing and the inherent fascination of its viewpoint that it doesn’t wreck the experience: Director Justin Simien doesn’t know how to shape scenes or pull performances from his actors.

A study of middle-class, middle-aged disappointment in its varying forms, a sober look at different life choices.

The atmosphere of Loving, the feeling it evokes, is the film’s most distinct quality. The mood is somber and restrained, and the characters — not just the principals, but the people they know — seem beaten down.

Instead of settling for a tour de force from McKellen, Soderbergh goes for something better — a fascinating give and take from start to finish.

Still, when you’re making a Christian epic and the best thing about it is the guy playing the inquisitor, you have a serious problem.

Kristin Scott Thomas' performance in I've Loved You So Long is one of a small handful of highlights by which people will remember this year in movies. This is acting at its most exalted.

Overall, Dolphin Reef is spectacular. The filmmaking team does an excellent job of detailing the delicate ecosystem that supports these creatures. Although Echo and his fellow dolphins are the stars, there is a vast supporting cast of humpback whales, sharks, razorfish, sea turtles, mantis shrimp, parrotfish.

As painstaking as a documentary but without the satisfaction of a documentary or the impact of a drama.

Reprise has a smart and knowing script and will compel audiences to reflect on themselves at that age.

Bright Leaves' takes on a sizable foe -- in this case, big tobacco -- but with such grace and wit that his message never seems medicinal.

Jones uses Furie’s story, and some gorgeous animation, as a wonderfully succinct window into the way social media has changed the country. By letting 4channers speak for themselves, the film also puts a face to the bad actors without ever letting them off the hook.

A study in unexpressed emotion, but Mamet turns the flame so low that his film lacks the emotional payoff we expect.

Things happen in a flat, deadpan way.

It’s a remarkably life-affirming message coming from a mess of animated puppets and a monster-loving filmmaker.

It's a lovely and wistful celebration of youth, time and moments of connection -- and about the experience of living in the midst of a simple, perfect day that you know you'll remember for the rest of your life.

For le Carré fans, The Pigeon Tunnel is a must-see, but the film will also be useful to people wanting an introduction to his work.

An engrossing new drama from France.

It’s true that “Dune 2” is as depressing as watching the news, but that doesn’t make it relevant, because it isn’t the news. It’s more like unnecessary self-torture, like watching a depressing newscast from another planet.

By the end, it is clear just how much in control Sayles has been all along. The resolution, though typically restrained, forcefully puts over the movie's point, that we're all more connected than we think.

Blume’s insistence on first-person realness, on the page and in life, centers this thoroughly delightful documentary from directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, who met at Stanford University. But don’t expect the same degree of exploration Blume brought to her own protagonists.

The most important mainland Chinese film this decade.

Mainstream audiences will probably be confounded by Drive, while lovers of gritty filmmaking will defend every exaggerated shotgun wound as art. Know which camp you're in before you enter the theater.

Ultimately, The Fighter loses its courage and betrays the terms of its own story by fashioning an interpretation designed to please the people it portrays. It does a switch on us, by changing its focus from Micky's character to Micky's career and then pretending it was really about the career all along.

In The Five Obstructions, we meet the Danish filmmaker for an extended period, and he's exactly what a fan might hope and expect him to be like: impish, insightful, unpredictable, mildly sadistic and rigorously honest.

The world here is so ugly that only beautiful tracking shots, rich close-ups and adroit handheld work could make it bearable.

Where it really counts, though, it's the same good old comic action fantasy.

The strength of the Coens is that they are so witty, skilled and smart, so in command of their medium, so fluid and agile, so capable of surprising and delighting from every angle, that they can make the grimmest story bearable, even palatable.

A new restoration takes a flawed bit of monster camp and turns it back into a strong, serious-minded and occasionally moving science-fiction film.

I hope casting agents and other industry types see Fourteen, because I want them to see Norma Kuhling (of the NBC series “Chicago Med”), who plays Jo. She takes this strong role, by writer-director Dan Sallitt, and hits it exactly right.

Portrayals of transgender people in movies and television are a vast and complex subject, but Netflix’s new documentary Disclosure does an admirable job of covering many issues and contradictions a century of mostly insensitive screen depictions have raised.

The Visitor, is, if anything, more imaginative and touching than his first.

The story itself is arresting, and if that’s all “Bang” offered, that would be enough. But “Bang” does more.

The cinematography and direction are particularly compelling; the complicated sequences on the tight sets must have forced camera operators to play cinematic Twister in impossibly small corners.

An action sci-fi blockbuster extravaganza that provides cartoon thrills for thinking people. It's the best movie of its kind since the second "Spider-Man" movie four years ago.

A film filled with beauty and pain that moves at the pace of molasses and snails. That is to say, some of it is in real time. Audiences would be advised to stay caffeinated.

One of the year’s most significant films.

The great strength and slight weakness of “How to Have Sex” is that it’s just like being there — except you might not want to be there.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

With "Flynt," Love does what Madonna has been trying to do for 12 years -- create a performance filled with humor, intelligence and soul.

For starters, it's a movie to make you happy to see the next movie written, directed and starring Lake Bell. She has an engaging presence and has a distinct comic sensibility.