Appropriately structured like a ride on skateboard: It swoops back and forth in time, hovers in midair, twists back on itself over and over again, then rolls into silence.

[Soderbergh] plays with time and narrative to reveal character, mood and longing in ways you just don't find in a mainstream crime picture.

For those of us too young, this will give you an idea of what it meant to watch those baby steps that led to one giant leap.

By tossing out all these voices and opinions, Lee and screenwriter Reggie Rock Blythewood have created both a time capsule and a movie audiences will talk about.

Beautifully acted and suffused with warmth and humor, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret is a film worthy of the long wait in bringing Judy Blume’s classic 1970 children’s book to the screen.

The Truffle Hunters takes us to a part of the world where time appears to have stood still.

Children of Men is Cuarón's run for freedom, with a riveting story, fantastic action scenes and acting so universally solid that even the dogs perform masterfully under his direction.

Judas and the Black Messiah quietly announces its modern relevance by presenting as sophisticated a depiction of systemic racism as you could hope to see in a movie.

Love has become a tired movie theme, but rarely is it relegated to a subplot as it is in Broadcast News. That's just one of the reasons that makes James Brooks' ingenious film a different sort of movie. Another is how it subtly reveals the complex mingling of work lives and love lives, showing how they feed each other and, indeed, feed off each other, careers devouring entire relationships in hungry 30-second sound bites. [10 Jan 1988, p.17]

An extraordinary film, mythic in feeling.

A master of minimalism, Finland's Aki Kaurismaki makes films that are so dry, so delicately ironic that they seem on the verge of crumbling in front of us -- but they never do.

That's why American Movie cuts so deep: It's about the American dream, about not giving up, about being true to yourself.

Husbands and Wives ultimately reveals itself as an extremely bitter film, with the kind of sour conviction that tries to pass itself off as wisdom. Allen knows how people talk and how they evade really talking. But his jaundiced vision -- as though he just found out that a marriage can't always be like the first month of dating when you're 17, and now he can't believe how crummy it all is -- just makes him seem naive. In the end his perception yields no insight. Old men like young women. Really? [18 Sept 1992, p.C1]

Throughout the film, Pitt exudes charm and a philosophical nature, but also the possibility of explosiveness. He doesn’t show you everything. What do you say about a performance like this? Scene by scene, Pitt seems to know what to do, all the time — and he never makes it look like work.

After the Storm has what the Japanese call mono no aware, which translates as “the pathos of things.” It is a film that is aware of the of the transient, impermanent nature of life.

The formality of Moonrise Kingdom - the orderly structure and dreamlike perfection of it all - is as poetic as any film I've seen this year.

Winner of both the Camera d’Or and an audience award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Hasan Hadi’s feature debut is both beguiling and unforgiving, culturally specific yet universal, funny and heartbreaking.

It is a spellbinding hour and 45 minutes of pure music, Latin jazz to be specific.

Remarkable.

Concubine demonstrates that Chinese films are growing by leaps and bounds in their technical sophistication, but also reveals how much they borrow from the energy and style of American cinema. [29 Oct 1993, p.C1]

This is a fascinating portrait of an artist.

Leaf applies a documentarian’s dispassion to the telling of this fictional story, and to a large extent that works. One of the virtues of documentaries is also a virtue of this narrative feature — it depicts a kind of person who usually doesn’t get movies made about her and tells the world her story with respect and empathy.

You know what movie is even better than this? “Never Goin’ Back” (2018) from writer-director Augustine Frizzell, about two 17-year-old girls trying to raise money for a weekend getaway. It’s something like Booksmart, minus the rich Californians and the faint whiff of politically correct self-congratulation. Unfortunately, no one saw “Never Goin’ Back,” because it’s about working-class girls in Texas.

Overall it's a remarkably eccentric work coming from a cagey old Hollywood hand who directed Bogart and Hepburn in their primes. [28 Jun 2009, p.Q30]

Writing With Fire, directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, tags along with these remarkable women as they go about their work. Viewers sit in on editorial meetings and training sessions, and go out in the field...It’s well worth seeking out.

Stuns with writing, acting, direction.

It is stark, realistic and resolutely downbeat. Yates' work is lean, and he has a nice way with action sequences. [17 May 2009, p.R28]

It's a movie about a scrubwoman who paints - so don't expect lots of sex scenes or car chases. Just expect a great performance by Moreau, who will convince you that she painted every one of those paintings - and lived them all before she painted them.