It's the kind of fun and quirky film that you don't see very often in art houses this time of year.

An unabashed paean to Kerry's character at a time in the presidential election when Kerry's character is being questioned. It's also a riveting film.

Imaginative and properly wicked.

The documentary Watermark is close to the cinematic equivalent of a coffee-table book. It relies heavily on visuals and offers minimal context. The project has a pro-environment feeling, which comes across implicitly, not through browbeating or preaching.

An arresting portrait of a fascinating and somewhat mysterious personality.

There have been many movies about cops working undercover, but The Infiltrator is different. It shows the difficulty of it, the almost-second-by-second stress involved in having to be yourself without being yourself, and having to seem relaxed without ever relaxing. It’s possible to get nervous just thinking about this movie.

This Place Rules isn’t the last or best word on the events of that day in 2021, but it’s a fresh angle and one that was hard-won. Callaghan didn’t just turn over a rock to get this story, he burrowed under the rock and lived there for months.

Jay and Claire are exquisitely played by Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox.

The result is a lovely wash of humanity, served with affection.

Tender but unsparing, heartfelt and unapologetic.

It doesn't analyze or explain it; it just presents it. The result is funny and disturbing at the same time.

The appeal of Mr. Brooks is as obvious as it is hard to resist: Kevin Costner as a serial killer.

It may be as emotionally exhausting for the viewer as for the participants.

For such a torment-filled story, the ending is surprisingly satisfying, with an important message that a lesser filmmaker might have telegraphed too much.

For the most part, The Five-Year Engagement has charm and emotion.

At its best, the effect is like seeing life panoramically, past and future, simultaneous and magnificent.

Sometimes corny, often funny and just as often touching, their act has been wowing Kiwis for decades.

Among the film's more intriguing revelations is the key role California's almond crop plays in the nation's bee industry.

I found myself enjoying Lionheart, mostly because Van Damme is appealing and easy to root for. I like the steady, oddly unjudgmental look that crosses his face when he's about to beat someone to a pulp. [12 Jan 1991, p.C3]

It's really, really funny.

A little abhorrent yet strangely appealing. I found it arty and pretentious, but still couldn't turn my eyes away from its almost hypnotic coolness and fascinating psychological horrors. [23 Sept 1988]

It's striking how much emotion Satrapi is able to convey through blocky drawings.

Sometimes unapologetically stupid and joyously crass, it’s often brilliant in its absurdity, one of those rare comedies where the audience sits there dumbstruck, wondering what crazy thing will happen next. It takes really smart people to make a movie this silly.

Witty, adult treatment of an offbeat subject: a pubescent boy's infatuation with an older woman.

If Wrath of Man has a weakness, it’s that even when everything is explained, it doesn’t quite make sense. But a movie like this is about pleasure in the moment, and on that score, it delivers.

Strange, compelling and hard to classify, it's both a romance and a character study, and it's set against a historical backdrop.

At one point, this movie had me so on edge that I had a fleeting impulse to run out of the theater. It might be weird to say that and mean it as a compliment, but good thrillers work that way sometimes.

Good storytelling.

If you have even a passing interest in outsider art, you owe it to yourself to see Marwencol.

Sly and insightful fable.

More than just culinary recommendations, he provides a cultural guide to the Los Angeles that is almost never seen in movies — and then the film makes an argument that Gold’s L.A. is more relevant than the one we all know.

Sick does a remarkable thing in presenting extreme, sometimes revolting material and simultaneously making us like and admire Flanagan.

A potboiler but entertaining enough to rise above its flaws.

It becomes stronger and more honest than most character studies on film.

This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Faye's presence provides an unexpected context for the photographer's circle, where the gay and straight worlds overlap, and adds a delightful dimension to Chop Suey.

The film perhaps shines brightest when it depicts two telling relationships Nannerl has outside her family. The first is with Louis XV's 13-year-old daughter, Louise...The other relationship is with Louise's troubled brother, the dauphin.

In many ways a meandering film, a collection of good scenes.

Life With Mikey is friendly and funny and ought to renew a lot of lost affection at the movies in coming weeks -- it's solid entertainment with heart and an ever- so-gentle contemporary edge. [4 June 1993, p.C1]

Exhilarating not only for its dreamlike images and fierce, frequently reckless imagination but also for the fact that it got made (and released) at all.

This is a lean, fast-moving and effective movie, with an undersea world that is as vast and lonely as outer space.

Denis' viewpoint and sympathies are sophisticated, complex and humane.

Retro escapist fun.

The film bolsters its case with plenty of facts, charts and expert testimony - evidence typical of this sort of advocacy documentary. But what makes the movie compelling is its focus on a handful of victims, who make the statistics painfully real.

I liked every minute in it. Other films are like empty containers; this one's full. It's full of invention, full of moments, full of business, full of the nuances of human interaction, full of feeling.

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.

Entertaining and suspenseful, the movie shows the politicking and strategies that go into this annual ritual, and Costner is at his beleaguered best.

That the film happens to be in 3-D, with digitized settings and backgrounds, doesn't detract from the timeworn charm of watching blob-like characters lurch erratically through harebrained comic pratfalls.

A gentle comedy.

The plot alone is a thing of beauty.

L'amour Fou engages and moves viewers in two distinct ways. It engages us by showing us something we don't know about that's interesting. It moves us by showing us something we immediately understand, that has nothing to do with being a big shot and everything to do with being just another person at the mercy of time.

Almost satirical.

Even if you’d never in a million years want to ride with these guys, “The Bikeriders” makes you understand why they wanted to ride with each other.

Like many first-person medical documentaries — such as the recent “Gleason” — Unrest can be really hard to watch. Brea’s film, though, might be the beginning of hope for millions of sufferers who might see the film, and could be a conversation starter for additional funding into research.

The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.

No one emerges unpunished.

A funny comedy, and sometimes an even better drama.

It’s an engaging product, typical of its era and elevated by Crosby’s non-singing breeziness and Astaire’s all-around brilliance, plus the appeal of Marjorie Reynolds, who has to pretend that she’s enthralled every time Crosby warbles something in her direction. Now that’s acting.

Director Jacques Audiard beautifully lays out the story of a charming nobody named Albert who becomes a master of the half- smile and nonchalant gestures of deceit. But the story is also a cogent metaphor for French collaboration with the Nazis.

It is all thoroughly entertaining and even, at times, gripping.

An absorbing, educational, sad, humorous and ultimately uplifting film that is easily accessible and entertaining even for those not familiar with the grunge rock scene, or with the considerable role that Schemel played in that milieu.

It’s a strength, not a weakness, of Jacquot’s that he makes movies about people. The ideas can take care of themselves.

The humor is all over the place, veering from light to dark and from broad to subtle -- as if an "I Love Lucy" episode had been retooled by Woody Allen.

This Belgian crime thriller makes compelling viewing out of a "you can't be serious" plotline.

For those who have seen the previous 'hood films, Don't Be a Menace isn't just funny. It's a relief. Things might be bad, the movie suggests, but they're not so bad you can't laugh.

A potential problem with the movie is that it can be a challenge watching people hand-wringing over moral decisions. But the acting is so good that it makes it worth sticking with during the slow patches.

The story told in Victoria and Abdul is so far-fetched that it really helps to know that it is, in its broad outlines, true.

Cohn was a strange mix of self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, or maybe that’s a familiar mix. In any case, he emerges from the film partly sympathetic, if only because he seemed so miserable all his life, but mainly as the prime example of what Shakespeare meant when he said, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

Has a goofy enthusiasm for itself that's contagious.

BlackBerry was ultimately left behind — in the cemetery plot next to Myspace. Still, if you ever had a BlackBerry, there’s something not only entertaining but nostalgic in watching this movie.

It's a serious subject handled with humor -- not the ha-ha kind, but the hard laughter that comes from recognizing parts of yourself in the Perelmans.

Though the storytelling is a bit lopsided, the slapdash quality is charming overall, and the movie benefits from colorful characters and a couple of hilarious scenes.

Everything in Water Lilies is more guarded, more complex and far more interesting than it seems.

It's clear by the end that one Ruth Gruber is worth more than 100 pundits fighting about partisan politics.

In its small, stubborn way, the film is a love letter to traditions that have endured since cave dwellers painted the walls at Lascaux.

The film presents a compelling portrait of mental illness, but looking at Bale may make audiences feel as though they're watching a documentary.

The results are often comical, but Pickering who made the film in tribute to his mother, the real Linda White - imbues them with faith in something, maybe dignity, maybe love, maybe just the simple human urge to keep on moving.

It’s a master class with a director who profoundly loves the movies, and, in his best work, has shown dazzling skill at making them.

An impressive effort and an impressive result that opens up a world that most of us have never thought about and renders it with sorrow and vividness.

Herzog is not able to go into a lot of depth. That keeps Lo and Behold from greatness, but it is nonetheless compelling, because of the way Herzog organizes the material.

Haakon VII is a hero in Norway, and The King’s Choice tells us why.

His (Seidl) camera is shocking in its intimacy, his film surprisingly casual in its depiction of extreme behavior and the randomness of violence.

The picture... is simple, sweet and elegantly written, and it benefits from the presence of Marlon Brando.

Because Benavides is a south Texas town, the screenplay touches inevitably on the flow of immigrants at the border - and resentment at their presence. But All She Can puts a new face on this resentment, highlighting the frustration of legal Mexican Americans.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in this role but Redford. Without him, there would be little here worth seeing.

Entertaining in a pulpy kind of way, like the fight films of the 1930s and '40s, and more accessible than most of Mamet's movies.

An impressively compelling film.

This breezy action comedy is a noisy affirmation that life goes on after 50, that retirement doesn't mean redundancy, and that nobody - young or old - can wear a long cream evening gown like Mirren.

When one performance in a movie is exceptional, you can credit the actor. But when everyone is great, it has to have at least something to do with the director. That’s the case with “Bob Trevino Like It,” which has three standout performances.

The movie also benefits from the presence of Anne Heche as Ellis’ wife. Heche doesn’t say much, but she conveys a lot.

Doesn't allow the story's considerable nostalgia and sentimentality to overwhelm it.

Fascinating and impressively balanced documentary.

In The Hero, as elsewhere, Haley really is dealing with the subject of heroism, but the kind of heroism not usually found in movies, the heroism of daily life.

It’s a taut erotic thriller with the obligatory plot twists and a surprise ending that isn’t all that much of a surprise because Careful What You Wish For is the kind of taut erotic thriller that comes with a surprise ending.

Warriors of the Rainbow is Taiwan's "Braveheart," with a nod to "The Last of the Mohicans."

A fine example of how anime uniquely contributes to world cinema.

A surprisingly clever lunatic comedy that may prompt some sniping from liberal fussbudgets, but has undeniable comic vitality. [15 Oct 1993, p.C1]