Deliriously original.

The filmmaker’s default setting is to tell each person’s story with dignity, a significant achievement that goes a long way.

After watching Project Nim, a distressing portrait of a misguided 1970s language experiment, you'll be glad you're not a chimp in a cage. But you might want to revoke your membership in the human race, which comes across as a narcissistic, hedonistic, self-absorbed, neglectful, anthropomorphizing and arrogant bunch of hippie-dippy know-it-alls.

Captures an artist who has decided not to burn out, but to fade away with dignity.

The Lighthouse is more than four times longer than a “Twilight Zone” episode, and 100 times worse.

Smart, fun entertainment.

While “Viet and Nam” is filled from beginning to end with outstanding visuals and thought-provoking ideas, it is perhaps too lethargic and, at a little over two hours, overlong. Yet there is still much to enjoy.

On a deeper level -- and this is where When We Were Kings exceeds its expectations and becomes a great film -- Gast examines African American pride.

Vast, beautiful and meticulously detailed.

20th Century Women is not especially dramatic. At times, it eschews drama. Every time the story is on a knife edge and can drop deeper into turmoil or recede back to the normal flows and ebbs of life, Mills chooses the latter. But this time, the strategy works. It feels real.

It's a remarkable film: A gritty, gut-churning, crime thriller based on a true story. Its greatness lies in its unwavering fidelity to human nature and the unstoppable laws of the wild.

The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual.

Wild Reeds is a sober, heartfelt piece of work, sensitively directed and lovingly photographed -- though slightly dull, if we're going to be perfectly honest.

The movie is a wonderful surprise, cleverly written and executed brick by brick with a visual panache.

Tough, mean and unsparingly honest, Ladybird, Ladybird is the kind of movie that people resist going to, feel edgy while sitting through and then can't shake off for weeks afterward. [31 Mar 1995, p.C3]

If you can stomach the projectile-sputum gags and stapled-eyelid attack scene, it's hilarious.

As impressive as it is geeky. Most of the principal characters look like they haven't seen daylight since "Pac-Man Fever" was on the charts.

In this small and very smart film, Cronenberg does several things at once and makes them all look effortless, capturing various shadings of consciousness and versions of reality.

Dumont makes movies that almost nobody wants to see. That doesn't make him a great filmmaker, but he's a great filmmaker all the same.

Ixcanul provides a window into a culture that we rarely see. But it’s not just an anthropological study — it has a powerful story to tell, too.

To see Come From Away onscreen now — directed by Christopher Ashley, who won a Tony Award for his Broadway direction of the show — is to see a path to mercy and compassion off in the distance and wonder if we can still get there — or if it’s too late for us.

For all the beautiful scenery and Thoreau-like contemplation, Evil Does Not Exist stalls, then implodes.

An elegant study in perversity.

In the end, that just might be the takeaway from the "Up" series, that a 28-year-old, say, has more in common with another 28-year-old than with his own incarnation at 70. Who knows? There are mysteries of life captured within the frames of this film that are eluding our grasp. We're still too close to it.

This is an extremely violent movie, with one long gory scene that's particularly hard to stomach. The great majority of Triad Election is about political maneuvering, but when the conversations end, the blood flows mightily.

Crisply funny and fleetly paced, it's in its quiet way one of the saddest things in the theaters all year.

With Milk, a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.

Riveting.