Intelligence and beauty -- and teasing romance -- shape Mansfield Park into a gorgeous, enchanting experience.

Breaks the formula for teen romances. Martin Short, as the vain and zany drama teacher, does not disappoint.

Rich with physical and psychological texture, and boosted by Thomas Newman's muted score, Unstrung Heroes is that rare mainstream film that doesn't shout in our ear to make its points. It draws us in, subtly and gracefully, and casts a lingering charm.

An unforgettable examination of a host of dark impulses.

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, the latest installment of the venerable PBS “American Masters” series, does a thorough job of laying out and appreciating all of the cartoonist’s significant, consistently subversive works, as well as the psychological factors that informed them.

Every now and then, a film comes along that both defies and compels description. District 9 is one such movie: a science-fiction action vehicle so brilliantly and fully imagined that real life, when it resumes after the credits, arrives with a new sense of dread.

Both a memoir and a history lesson, the film looks back on their late father - a crusading civil rights lawyer who later defended a host of unsavory characters - with a combination of love, admiration and bafflement for the man he was and the career he forged.

In a way, Misery is a ghoul comedy. But it's more than that, because it's genuinely, consistently scary. With his enthusiastic direction -- the cutting, the odd angles, the unexpected timing -- Rob Reiner takes what might have been a static set-up, a couple of people talking in a room, and makes it harrowing. [30 Nov 1990, p.E1]

A one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. This musician may not be a genius along the lines of Brain Wilson, as Feuerzeig claims, but Johnston has a knack for revealing innermost thoughts in an offhand way that is eerie and uncanny.

It’s as realized a thriller as you are likely to find, not only in the precision of its performances, but in its evocative use of location (Rome, London), its period detail (especially Williams’ clothing) and the tension of the younger Getty’s months-long captivity.

All things considered, The Long Day Closes is a remarkable film -- tender and intelligent, long on mood and short on ''action,'' a cinematic poem that stands head and shoulders above the summer harvest of bonehead action thrillers. [23 July 1993, p.C9]

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 French crime thrillers go, this is about as good as it gets.

The language is brilliant, and the laugh lines come so quickly that you'd probably have to watch the movie twice to get them all.

A rare, sumptuous movie treat.

In many ways, the film is typical Hitchcock, with his camerawork check out the scenes with the umbrellas, the windmill, Big Ben, an airplane crash and others, thrilling plot lines, casting against type and employing attractive lead actors and actresses. But it's also very unusual because of the director's use of propaganda, unusual for him. [06 Apr 2014, p.R19]

Sparrows is a kind of cinematic fable. At times funny, sad, poignant and suspenseful, Sparrows is a showcase for Majidi's masterful storytelling - and Naji's superb acting.

Humpday succeeds, often beautifully, by grounding its risque premise in the awkwardness and humor of real people trying their damnedest to communicate. A lot.

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.

It must be fun to make a film about a con artist when the con artist is a full and willing participant, literally going to the ends of the Earth to prove she is the real deal.

It's hard not to come away in awe of a director in complete control of every frame.

This one is dazzling.

This wacky buddy road film... has a brilliant glow of intelligence behind the stupidness. It's easily the funniest movie of the year.

The film is a damning look at a key Bush operative.

Movie magic.

A superb documentary.

Inspiring and largely unsentimental, this is as much a love story as a tale of courage.

First, this movie should be enjoyed. Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed.

What makes The White Ribbon a big movie, an important movie, is that Haneke's point extends beyond pre-Nazi Germany.

Photographed in lush black and white by Sergei Urusevsky, who worked with the amazingly inventive camera operator Alexander Calzatti, "I Am Cuba" unfolds like a cinematic Olympics of complex, acrobatic camera moves.

I'll go ahead and call Drug War the best Hong Kong action movie since "Infernal Affairs" (the 2002 film that Martin Scorsese remade as "The Departed"), even though technically it's a Chinese film.

The Departure is an excellent example of a filmmaker finding a perfect wavelength with her main character.

Polish actress Joanna Kulig has been waiting for years to show what she can do, and in Cold War she gets the chance. She takes the role of a lifetime between her teeth, chomps on it, pounds it into the ground and never lets go for a second. Ferocity and intensity are present in every moment of her performance, even when she’s contained. With Cold War, Kulig breaks out as a lioness of international cinema.

Chilling, superbly acted.

Cool, chiseled and savagely funny, Kubrick's cautionary doomsday farce never ages but gets more relevant with time. [12 March 1999, p.D15]

You could rightly call it a thriller, but a slow-burning one, and a film that’s driven by character, not plot points. And that won’t do in Tinseltown. So enjoy the original, preferably in a theater, and revel in the rich, layered performances of veteran actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye (men are incidental in this movie, another Hollywood no-no).

It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.

Documentaries can be informative, entertaining and provocative, but rare is the documentary that makes you feel so engaged (and enraged) that it prompts you to action somehow. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion is that kind of film.

The experience of seeing this film is cumulative, sober and profound.

Ailey weds forthright interviews and archival footage of abstract beauty with those sweeping dance sequences to conjure a haunting portrait of what it means to be an artist — from the triumphs to the empty, lonely feeling that you’re never as good as you’re supposed to be.

Typically, films about '60s subculture recycle the same set of media cliches and teach us nothing. Harron approaches the milieu with curiosity, compassion and an anthropologist's eye.

Glatzer and Westmoreland live in Echo Park, and they have given their film a remarkable sense of place.

A first-rate thriller about arrogance at the top.

Climate change is never explicitly mentioned in the documentary The Biggest Little Farm, one of the year’s best films, but it hangs all over the deep, rich story of the Chesters, a pair of hardscrabble idealists who move from the concrete jungle of Santa Monica to start a 200-acre, sustainable farm from scratch.

A terrific documentary.

A film of wisdom, emotional subtlety and power.

Tigertail, mostly a period piece that’s also a well-wrought portrait of a man closed off from life whose despair is etched in every line on his face, isn’t satiric or comedic in the slightest.

The director has said that, though the story was inspired by the deaths of his parents, he hoped to make a film "brimming with life." He's succeeded.

Comedy is getting more and more nasty and more and more funny. But it’s hard to imagine any movie more nasty-funny than Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.

Allen's most satisfying film since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) and his most compelling since "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989).

To say it is about a debilitating disease is as reductive as saying "Little Miss Sunshine" is about a beauty pageant. Both are intimate stories of family ties that bind but sometimes also choke.

The most important mainland Chinese film this decade.

The resulting film is neither better nor worse than the Swedish film, but it's more cinematic.

An ungainly masterpiece, but Chaplin's ungainliness is something one can grow fond of.

Funny People is a true brass ring effort, a reach for excellence that takes big risks. It's 146 minutes, with a story that's more European in feeling than American.

A hell of a movie.

Nothing about Of an Age seems forced. The film delicately embraces grand sentiments without ever being sentimental. And throughout the journey, we can’t help but be enthralled.

Bujalski's writing is so good, and every shot and edit seems exactly right. Hopefully, there will always be a place for a film like this on a theater screen, no matter the whims of the marketplace.

A great achievement: tense and passionate, a film that one feels not just emotionally but also physically.

A film so rich and pleasurable you’d be forgiven if you thought about it each time you have a glass of red.

Filmmaker Michael Almereyda gives the most persuasive possible account of the upswing in Eggleston's critical standing.

Three years ago Tsang made “Soul Mate,” an enchanting tale about female friendship that offered an engrossing look at modern, urban China. Yet, that film isn’t quite adequate preparation for the emotional wallop of Better Days. Don’t think, just close your eyes, and jump in.

Maria By Callas finds lots of press footage that most of us have never seen, filmed interviews either for television or newsreels, and it’s all fascinating.

You can view the film narrowly as commentary on the soul-crushing fury of being HIV positive, or take a few steps back and see Araki's film in a more universal sense as the disintegration of human values caused by an obsessive culturewide drive for self-satisfaction and indifference to others. The Living End is much more than a time capsule, thanks to Araki's daring as a filmmaker.

All the requisite talking heads pop up - Dylan, Springsteen, Baez - but it is Seeger himself who towers over the landscape. The filmmakers treat this aged curmudgeon almost too reverently, but it is hard not to be awed by this gentle, resolute soul because of the ideas he steadfastly and faithfully represented.

A great movie.

A masterpiece.

Using documentary-style Super 16 film and staged cutaway interviews with friends and family, James and his photographer and co-producer, Peter Gilbert, fashioned a movie with an affecting, candid look.

It's a beautiful machine, thought out and revved up to the last detail, with no other purpose but to delight - and it delights. [24 May 1989, Daily Notebook, p.E1]

It's the kind of movie you may approach with a show-me attitude, only to be won over to its hip sense of fun and a gentle humanity that lets you walk away with a glow. [1 Oct 1993, p.C1]

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

The first great Hitler movie.

A mesmerizing documentary.

The movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful.

Boorman enlivens The General with a number of scenes, like that one, that play against the con ventions of crime movies. He and Gleeson, both of whom were denied the Oscar nominations they deserve for this film, do exemplary work and give us one of the liveliest, smartest and most surprising films in a long time.

The picture, written and directed by Francis Veber, the screenwriter of "La Cage Aux Folles,'' is a complete success.

A wonderful parody of the birth of talkies that has great wit, an intelligent script, terrific music and dancing that can't be beat.

It's screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny. It's so inventive…This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the subliminal appeal of the dragons — why these animated creatures look adorable on screen and not menacing at all — here’s why: Their movements, behaviors and expressions are based on cats. Once you know, it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

The beauty of Morris' achievement is the way he fuses Hawking's work in theoretical physics with his subject's life history -- finding subtle connections between the two, and avoiding the pat, predictable structure of biographical film. [28 Aug 1992, p.C3]

Excited with the possibilities of the relatively young film medium, Russia's Dziga Vertov took to the streets of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev to give us a portrait of an ever-changing world that is more essay than documentary. It's a 1929 silent film that added its punctuation in the lab - jump cuts, dissolves, split screens, etc. - to create an indelible work in cinema history. [13 Apr 2017, p.E8]

Detroit is a movie that will make you angry. It is designed to make you angry, and it does nothing to soften the blow or create some artificial uplift. But there is something about honesty that’s exhilarating. Detroit is tough, but it’s worth it, every minute of it.

One of Miyazaki's most kid-accessible movies, but still an unnerving film.

The Devil's Advocate is a sharp, suspenseful and completely satisfying movie.

Uncertainty is a genre trope this director is particularly gifted at manipulating. So many horror films are incoherent due to a lack of good writing; if anything in McCarthy’s script isn’t fully clear, it’s in the same manner that life itself fails to make sense.

A mystical masterpiece about a lonely man who helps a widower perform last rites for his wife, is an astonishing, haunting, sensual, lyrical, bleak and ultimately beautiful road-trip movie.

The picture gently caricatures the folk music scene with dozens of delicate brush strokes, creating a picture that's increasingly, gloriously funny -- as in entire lines of dialogue are lost because the audience's laughing so hard.

Almost frighteningly alive.

Toy Story 3 is a better film than "Wall-E" and "Up" in that it succeeds completely in conventional terms. For 103 minutes, it never takes audience interest for granted. It has action, horror and vivid characters, and it always keeps moving forward.

One of very few films to accurately portray the experience of growing up male.

If it all sounds rather heady for a Disney movie, well, it is. And it is one of the curious delights of The Lion King that a moralistic patriarchal drama can be played out in a Darwinian setting and still emerge shining in a dream coat of Hollywood entertainment values. [24 June 1994, p.C1]

It is, simply, the alienation-invasion movie to beat all alien-invasion movies: meticulously detailed and expertly paced and photographed, with sights so spectacular and terrible that viewers will have to consciously remind themselves to close their mouths when their jaws drop open.

A first-rate crime thriller and further proof that Soderbergh is one of our great contemporary film stylists.

Jim Jarmusch has come up with something strange and amazing.

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

This is sublime filmmaking, a textbook example of how indies can tell groundbreaking stories in a way that Hollywood simply can’t match.

First-time feature director A.V. Rockwell, working from her own script, tells an epic tale in miniature.

Apart from the excellence of this film, Fennell may have tapped into something tonally that truly expresses the moment we’re in. Point being, we’re in a time of horrible ridiculousness, and ridiculous horribleness. The revelation of Promising Young Woman is that its heightened reality feels more real — closer to actual reality — than comedy or drama.