Full of drama, poignancy and some heartbreaking moments.

A film of audacity and total gut-level appeal.

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.

The 1931 version, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, is the standout, featuring two great performances, one by Fredric March (who won the Academy Award for the title role) and the other by Miriam Hopkins, as Ivy, the lovable trollop. [28 Dec 2003]

The story is minimal, just a series of events in the life of a young man and his circle, but every scene is rendered with such authenticity that it’s riveting, almost like it’s a privilege to be stepping back in time.

This wonderful romp of a movie looks magical on the big screen: colors are a picnic for the eyes, details loom so clearly you can practically touch them and there's a sense of the larger-than-life with a film that's already larger than life.

Life Is Sweet, a comedy with wonderfully touching moments by off-beat British director Mike Leigh, is an absolute gem of eccentric humor about family life. Fresh and quirky, the film dishes up astonishing vitality in its look at what is ostensibly a plain, lower middle-class family in Middlesex. [22 Nov. 1991, p.C5]

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is a perfect thriller. It may not be as good a movie as ''Cape Fear,'' which is a sort of cinematic extravaganza, but in many ways I liked it more. It's stripped- down and lean, without a moment wasted, and the plot works like a delicate machine. [10 Jan 1992, p.C1]

Leaves its audience with many troubling questions. Among them: Should a film console us with its own brilliance when it aims to discomfit us with its content?

Out of the Past is cinematic perfection, a Hollywood classic that's as great and as enjoyable as its reputation has promised.

There's such a thing as smart angry, and such a thing as stupid angry, and after seeing Inside Job, audiences will be smart angry.

It's a special movie that can make you laugh out loud numerous times at gross comedy and then make you think and feel something, too. There’s also something to be said for a movie that seems like the most fun these actors ever had.

One of the best Hong Kong films of 2002.

It touches, in a way movies rarely do, on some essential current of life.

One of the best films to open in the Bay Area in 2007.

Loose, buoyant and bracingly original.

Cassandro takes place in an inherently goofy arena — this is over-the-top, stagey fighting, after all — but the filmmakers avoided the temptations of cheap laughs and produced a satisfying dramatic story that will appeal to both fans and non-fans of this outlandish wrestling genre. That’s a rope move worth cheering for.

The movie's satisfactions are subtle, but they run deep, and there are many.

None of the advance hype on Kids can prepare you for the raw, stripped-down reality that Larry Clark captures in his astonishing first film. Nothing can prepare you, because no other film has ever caught the recklessness, sweat and tingly heat of teenage sexuality so effectively.

A funny movie, but also a serious movie, and — who knows? — maybe an important one.

It is pure, retro-cinematic joy.

What's much more fascinating and enriching is Eastwood's Olympian vision, the sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth.

More than a high concept stretched to feature length. This is a funny and extremely satisfying comedy, the best in a while.

Virtually everyone who sees this movie will be galvanized to do something about global warming -- and everyone should see this movie.

Intimate, heartfelt and wickedly funny, it's a movie whose impact lingers.

Here's another thought: This old man who can't leave the house has just made the first important film of 2010.

The film, winsome and tragic at once and finely attuned to the rhythms of childhood, always seems quite close to real life.

It's a bleak, fatalistic tale about rootlessness and the changing moral order in the machine age, but the wondrous details of the film trump any grand thematic concerns.