Writer-director Caroline Vignal could have made "My Donkey” into a 90-minute monologue, with Antoinette talking to the donkey. Instead, there’s lots of variation, smart turns of story and well-drawn, well-defined characters. Vignal makes even the bit characters, the ones with just three or four lines, vivid.

It's that rare kind of movie that comes along only a handful of times each year -- gut-level entertainment that's oddly profound.

A rage-inducing expose.

Both very funny and a bit of a tearjerker, with an on-the-money performance from Ricky Gervais.

An exquisite tale about coming of age and coming to terms.

Ultimately, Marriage Story celebrates life and the journeys all of us are on. Noah Baumbach is the writer-director, and to watch such an incisive, deep-feeling script be given life by actors — Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and those around them — at the top of their game is to rediscover movies as a powerful medium of personal expression.

There’s something so deeply right about this movie, so true to the time depicted and so welcome in this moment; so light in its touch, so properly respectful of its characters, and so big in its spirit that the movie acquires a glow.

Either Live Free or Die Hard will go down as the summer's best action blockbuster, or it's going to be one exceptional summer.

Doesn't sanitize its tale of African American loss and survival -- the way Steven Spielberg's “The Color Purple'' did -- but delves deeply, heartbreakingly into an American tragedy.

In color, style and humor — even in its graphics and editing — it’s very much like a Godard film from the mid-1960s. Thus, the experience is like watching an actual Godard film — the first great Godard film since “Masculin Féminin” in 1966.

Hauntingly tells a story older than the Odyssey and as timely as today's body count from Iraq.

Don’t mistake his movie’s lack of sentimentality for callousness. Babylon is coarse, hard and wild, but its emotion is undeniable. Babylon is what movie love really looks like.

A movie that's loving and wistful and often hysterically funny.

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

This was Davis' return to the screen after her own legal battle with the studio to get meatier roles. She got one here, and she gives it her all. [09 Jul 2006, p.32]

The most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded.

So comically fertile and yet so grounded in the reality of its characters that it's really a kind of marvel.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is one of Chevy Chase's best movies. Though more or less a comedy, the picture gives Chase a chance to do much more than smirk and be a wise guy, while providing a good showcase for his dry style of humor. [28 Feb 1992, p.D1]

Stuns with writing, acting, direction.

Every year, we get only a few of these, movies that come out of nowhere, that are different, unexpected and wonderfully right. Moonlight is that kind of movie, one of the gems of 2016.

The complexity, richness and fullness of what Leo does here is acting at its most illuminating and useful.

One of the most incisive and perceptive Hollywood films about Hollywood.

If you liked Whitney Houston before, you’ll like her even more after seeing this. You’ll also admire her and feel pity for her and feel frustrated by her.

In a deceptively low-key manner, Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen has beautifully crafted one of the most provocative movies of the year.

Benedetta continues Verhoeven’s strong run with as good a movie as he’s ever made.

A bittersweet film that tells the story of Palestinian life as eloquently as anything ever done.

The film documents how Lucy used her clout to get her husband cast as her co-star. It was a way for them to see each other. The rest is history, but a really interesting history.

It is full of joy and laughter, as well as tears. It is about many things, among them sisterhood, the difficulties of parenting, processing trauma in a patriarchal society, and religious extremism. But most of all, it’s filled with life, and all the triumphs and pleasure, pain and disappointments that go with it.