The Coens, with this film, are like people who fly all the way to Paris on vacation and then eat at McDonalds every night, because that's what they know. Why bother making the trip at all?

Stagecoach both revived and elevated the Western.

Superb.

Blanchett is so convincing, and Field’s approach is so authentic, that it feels like an event, not just a movie.

Anderson almost brings off a picture worthy of his grandiose ambition.

Has more originality, nitty-gritty humor, spirit and spunk than all the summer blockbuster retreads combined. Underneath the jousting and jiving, there's a sharp, uncompromising look at the anatomy of a race riot in the movie. [30 June 1989, Daily Notebook, p.E3]

An indelible statement on loneliness and spiritual thirst.

Brother's Keeper is a thoroughly engaging examination of the whole curious affair by two New York City-based film makers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who document with a distinctive underlying humor and a feeling for contrasts between urban and rural America. Sometimes that contrast is touching, sometimes painfully hilarious, and often a little gloomy as the film delves into the lives of the surviving brothers to reveal a community with genuinely humane values, but one ripe for exploitation by the big city media. [16 Oct 1992, p.C4]

Crumb is one of the most provocative, haunting documentaries of the last decade.

Like all his films of the last dozen years, “No Bears” brims with paranoia and metaphors for the trouble Panahi’s pictures have gotten him into. This time, though, he implicates himself in a complex exploration of how his work can exploit and even exacerbate the real-life tragedies it’s always so powerfully depicted.

Spotlight one of the best movies about journalism ever made, at once gripping and accurate. It doesn’t just get the big things right, such as how news stories evolve, but the small things, such as what offices look like and how staff tends to react to a new boss.

To watch Ozu's films is to watch elegant simplicity, although they are meticulously complex. It's even a relaxing experience - you can almost feel your heart rate lowering - yet there is much human drama on the screen, and much wisdom.

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.

[Apichatpong’s] films are well-thought-out experiences, unique, disciplined, gorgeously composed and irascibly moving to their own rhythm. What sets Memoria apart from his other work is a new setting: Colombia.

By the end, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly achieves a victory over difficult material, but celebrating that fact doesn't preclude recognizing the story is not a natural for movies and remains an uneasy match.

This is the most realistic film about teaching that you're ever likely to see.

Feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.

Hushed minimalism is a rare and appealing quality in the cinema these days, but so little happens in 35 Shots of Rum that I'm hard-pressed to describe the plot. It doesn't exactly have one.

Leigh goes right to the core of his character's lives and mines the place where we're weakest, most alone and sometimes the cruelest.

The results in an experience that is smooth sailing for the first 45 minutes, but then hits a slog that goes on for another 40, before the movie revives again in its last half hour. Obviously, a film can’t be great if you spend 40 minutes wishing the thing would end already. A 95 minutes, The Florida Project could have been a masterpiece.

This Alfred Hitchcock film on his familiar theme of the wrongly accused man is outstanding in every respect. [19 Sep 1999, p.52]

You have never seen anything like this.

Kore-eda weaves these images and others, building a multilayered fugue that contemplates death, asks if mourning ever truly ends and addresses the ephemeral nature of love, family and home. Everything we value and use to define and frame our lives, he suggests, is always at risk.

Spielberg's sledgehammer way with emotional moments, never more obvious than here, kills some of the pleasure for adults and robs the movie of the ultimate laurel -- classic status. [2002 re-release]

Apocalypse Now is a mixed bag, a product of excess and ambition, hatched in agony and redeemed by shards of brilliance. The new Redux version isn't a better film, but for Coppola fans and film lovers, it's essential viewing.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has made a controlled and reserved film, and she has placed at its center a reserved and controlled protagonist named Autumn, played with restraint by newcomer Sidney Flanagan.

Gets it right. It's a wonderful movie. Watching it, one can't help but get the impression that everyone involved was steeped in Tolkien's work, loved the book, treasured it and took care not to break a cherished thing in it.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.