One of the year’s great films, and somehow you can tell from the opening moments.

Make no mistake, this is advocacy cinema; interviews with Defense Department and military officials notwithstanding, there's not much effort, on Dick's part or anyone else's, to consider any point of view besides the victims' and those who love or speak for them. That's what makes it difficult to watch. And that's what makes it necessary.

Superior animated film from Japan.

A superb film.

Pike’s Colvin is brave, but she’s not tough, and, scene by scene, she reveals more and gives more than she probably means to.

Perrotta and Field succeed, not by guessing, but by knowing this world. They understand it enough to see it with cold precision -- and to approach it, at times, with disarming warmth. The characters aren't types, but people.

Terminator 2 imagines things you wouldn't even be likely to dream and gets these visions onto the screen with a seamlessness that's mind-boggling. [3 July 1991, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

In short, a nice, predictable film unlikely to linger in the memory.

It's a tribute to Day-Lewis that he can play a character like Danny -- cautious, withdrawn, inarticulate -- and endow him an eloquence and grace that aren't dependent on language. Without him, The Boxer might still be a powerful tale of loyalty and love, with a core of moral complexity; with Day-Lewis in the lead, it approaches greatness.

It’s the actors’ emotional intelligence, though, that creates the movie’s true onscreen magic. This is like an Ingmar Bergman scenario directed by Sam Raimi. However you slice it, Together is a great love story. The ghastliness of it all is the chef’s kiss.

By the Grace of God begins to spin its wheels, with unnecessary scenes that give color to the events, when we’re more interested in the grand movements.

Robert Downey Jr. gets to remind everybody that before this blockbuster turn he was actually a serious actor and may still be again. Stark’s frustration at the rigidity and short-sightedness of his confreres and his anguish at where it all leads are vivid and felt.

No documentary could explain the enigma of Thelonious Monk, the eccentric genius who reshaped the language of jazz in the 1940s with music that was so original it still mystifies and delights. [13 Oct 1989, p.E9]

Downbeat as it inevitably is, the film...is sure to delight for nostalgic Boomers and music historians, with its unseen footage and insights from survivors who were there.

A film about profound ideas deserved more imagination.

Does an admirable job of telling the stories of the obsessive Savitsky and other important Soviet artists, such as Alexander Volkov, Aleksei Rybnikov and Mikhail Kurzin.

An engaging documentary attempt to probe her mystery, and it offers some answers - she was secretive and stubborn, a hoarder of epic proportions who seems to have had fits of instability. She also wasn't always nice to her young charges.

The new film by documentary editor (“RBG”) turned director Carla Gutierrez distinguishes itself by using the artist’s own words — largely taken from Kahlo’s illustrated diary — to tell her story.

What makes Middle of Nowhere a break-even proposition, rather than something to avoid, is that it deals with an aspect of life and with characters rarely seen in movies.

Fascinating.

An eye-opening documentary.

A steady undertow of sex gives this French thriller a scintillating surface.

Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy has created full characters as vulnerable in their personal lives as in their work.

Clever, exceptionally well-written film.

Has integrity, but the way he bends his tale to make a statement is overly deliberate.

For filmgoers who like dramas that are spare yet evocative, that focus on the subtleties of relationships, and that feature foreign settings completely off the beaten path, Deserted Station will be a masterpiece.

The film pays off eventually with a lovely story of friendship between two lonely men.

The Square really tightens the screws - it's so skillfully made it makes you shift uncomfortably to the edge of your seat. It's a binge of cringe.

Although the director’s multipronged approach may dilute the impact of Intent to Destroy, there’s no denying the film’s value as an introduction to a major piece of history that continues to inspire debate of the most intense kind.

Utilizing plentiful archival footage, contemporary commentary, recent interview observations from people who were there and some dramatized recreation, director Cristina Costantini gets some sly laughs, edged with appropriate anger, out of the sexist mindsets Ride deftly steered her career through in the 1970s and ’80s.

Stone's feisty, intensely personal style of film making is well-known. With Born on the Fourth of July we are treated to a poignant, spirited and captivating - for the broken heartedness of it all - performance by Tom Cruise. [25 Dec 1989, p.E1]

If you liked Whitney Houston before, you’ll like her even more after seeing this. You’ll also admire her and feel pity for her and feel frustrated by her.

What lingers in the memory is the impression of having experienced a frolic, a ride through the park on a bright winter day.

Most important, there is an emotional undercurrent in this installment that the earlier films only aspired to. When for a brief moment, the younger Charles Xavier meets the older, there is the sense of time's mystery - and also of the long, magnificent slog of a purpose-driven life.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

That story proves paper thin, and requires believing Amanda is devoid of empathy yet devoted to Lily — concepts too at odds to be plausible together.

If they can swallow the intensity of the musical numbers, fans of the show will feel at home with this adaptation, which is just a higher-stakes version of a typical episode (with shadows).

Bring Her Back belongs in the trapped-in-a-house subgenre of horror, but it has a creepy psychological depth and is filled with disturbing but impressively composed images. It really gets under your skin.

A minimalist masterpiece.

The Lego Batman Movie is less awesome than its predecessor, but it’s a clever, well-paced, self-aware and completely satisfying kind of less awesome.

This is not one of the good Altmans. This isn't even one of the mediocre Altmans.

From its first minutes, Mid-August Lunch establishes a special tone and quality that could only be Italian. It's a mixture of warmth and gentle farce, tender observation and absurdity.

It’s a moving meditation about our unwavering need for creativity, and finding ways to express it.

It’s a nice movie, and perfectly watchable — yet it’s hard to escape the sense that it should have been more.

Baadasssss! is the portrait of a visionary with a blind spot, a man starved for kindness who can no longer recognize the responsibility to be kind, even to his kids. But it's a portrait of a visionary nonetheless.

Romantic comedies can go in all sorts of directions, but they depend on the audience’s believing that a couple should get together and stay together. But in Trainwreck, that belief is hard to come by.

This is a likable documentary that casts light on two respected but relatively unknown people, who made major contributions to film and managed to have a normal life — and in Hollywood, of all places. It’s nice to know such things are possible.

A terrific documentary.

Too contemplative to be really funny.

The movie's shift into an implausible thriller magnifies its lack of character development. But Gosling gives an impassioned performance throughout.

In addition to being a smart comedy and an excellent showcase for Grant, it's an honest movie about childhood that avoids sappiness and sentiment and goes in unexpected directions.

By humanizing an immigrant/refugee crisis that is not abating, Winterbottom does a cinematic service that happens to be damn interesting, too.

It’s all rather enjoyable, and O’Connor, having starred in “Mansfield Park” (1999), certainly knows her way around 19th century romance. Yet the question remains: What is the point of all this?

Extremely amusing.

It’s hard to know what to make of this, but it’s quite enough that it happens at all. The film has some longueurs — it isn’t scintillating for every second of screen time. But Marques-Mercet and his actors establish an intimacy with the audience that’s practically unique. Even if you love it only a little, not completely, you will probably remember 10,000 Km for the rest of your life.

The movie starts to fray once we realize that DuVernay is not going to make a case for Wilkerson’s ideas. Rather, she plans to serve them up as undeniable truths.

The movie is directed by Anjelica Huston, and like a lot of actors who direct, Huston shows an ability to elicit strong emotions from her actors. But Huston also demonstrates a sense of where to place the camera. [13 Dec 1996, p.C1]

This one is dazzling.

A film with no context, it is a sporadically interesting, overlong look at the legend as she nears 70, still performing before her legions of fans.

The quiet machinations of this Frenchman and commodities trader helped win the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and bring an end to South Africa’s apartheid system.

Bleak, dark and strangely arresting throughout, Blast of Silence is not quite a can't-miss proposition, but one comes away from it feeling as if one has seen a minor classic of some kind. Yes, minor - but still a classic. [04 May 2008, p.N36]

A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.

the movie comes perilously close to implicitly justifying the killing that sparked the plot - a killing, by the way, that is close to senseless.

To director James Ivory's credit, however, he has recreated that period in pre-World War I England and endowed the platonic passion between two upper-class Englishmen with singular grace in Maurice. [25 Sep 1987]

Without a compelling - and convincingly compelled - character at its center, the details in this film lack an agonizing drop-by-drop tension. The various pieces fall apart like the shattered mirrors that figure in the crimes. [15 Aug 1986]

The story is the story, and you’ll either connect with it or you won’t. But no matter how you react, Titane has the integrity of sincerity and the authority of a filmmaker’s real skill and vision.

McQuarrie devises a film that’s a succession of riveting sequences, filmed in a way that’s active and yet elegant. The camera keeps moving within shots, but not in a subjective, jittery way, but rather like a third person narrator calmly emphasizing the essential points.

The studio made a great film.

Hatching has the quality of a fable, and like the best fables, it has meanings that reverberate well beyond its story.

An extraordinary and heartfelt film.

The least appealing of the trilogy.

Diamantino is one of those movies that looks super fun to make but is mind-numbing to actually watch.

True History of the Kelly Gang may not be history as recorded by historians, but it’s history as recorded by a director with verve and vision. In this case, that’s enough.

It wonderfully explains elements of life with autism, offering a primer for the uninitiated, while profiling a family that was rewarded for its willingness to approach an obstacle with patience and love.

Waitress deserves an essay, not just a review. There are perfect moments that stand out, and the reasons for their perfection are interesting.

Harrowing and unforgettable film.

The Skeleton Twins suffers from a glaring deficit. Suicide is ever present throughout the film, yet Johnson never seriously examines it.

It may not sound funny, but there's a bleakly comic air about the story, and a bit of surrealism, suggesting the most caustic side of the Coen brothers.

Claude Chabrol has a wonderful way of making audiences nervous.

They Cloned Tyrone can be heavy-handed times and runs a bit long, but the committed performances of its plucky triumvirate of stars go a long way toward the fun.

An entertaining but exhausting satire on tabloid media and the way they feed our thirst for violence, Natural Born Killers stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, in banshee-out-of-hell performances, as serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox -- a trashy, gonzo/weirdo version of Bonnie & Clyde. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]

So this is a very worthy movie, not that this will hold any sway with illness-phobes, who’d rather stare at the wall for 105 minutes than see a good movie about sickness.

Backed by a feral, driving score from Ukrainian folkloric quartet DakhaBrakha, “Porcelain War” makes the case for art as another protective weapon against imperialism. Like Ukraine, the film concludes, the delicate but resilient sculptures may break easily — but are very hard to destroy.

For the most part, though, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead spends its time celebrating an era in which the comedy frontier was distasteful, brutally honest, and innocent at the same time.

It's impossible to listen to Francesca's parents, deadly serious about art as a higher calling, without feeling both saddened and disturbed.

Sicko will scare people, and it probably should.

Theron is nearly unrecognizable in the role. She's also astonishingly good. Obscuring the movie star has liberated the actress.

It's a fascinating concept, gorgeously rendered. Seeing the paint actually dry, however, would probably be more fun than most of this overly expository film.

The film's grungy, ultra-low-budget look, thanks to the Safdie's handheld camera, is just right for catching the crummy, hardscrabble, rat-infested milieu.

A Bigger Splash takes four characters with strong needs, drops them into a single location and invites us to watch what happens. It’s strange how compelling that can be.

Morris is a storyteller of the highest order, and within seconds, he draws us into his subject, doling out details, making us wonder what will happen next and dropping bombs for maximum impact.

With more than a hint of the magazine’s trademark insouciance, the film gives us a close look at how the selection process works and introduces us a to a handful of younger artists, as well as such stalwarts as George Booth and Roz Chast.

Dunye's engaging personality quickly wins you over. She deserves to be a character in a movie; she's more interesting than most.

It’s impossible to resist a film that has such rich characters, and makes a complicated subject both enlightening and entertaining.

The documentary “Amy” left viewers feeling a little shame, as if the audience and society was an accessory in Winehouse’s death. Janis: Little Girl Blue is a more clinical treatment, with more complicated messages.

It is pure, retro-cinematic joy.

Romantic and even silly -- a combination that makes Divine Intervention an almost irresistible work of art.

It is an exceptional accomplishment.