Beneath all that baloney and bombast, there's a lovely, inspiring story in Lorenzo's Oil. [15 Jan 1993, p.C1]

A highly amusing combination period film and mockumentary.

An entertaining slice of American political and cultural history.

A rare film about the class and educational divide that can happen even within families.

A brilliantly realized, Hollywood-sleek documentary produced by Cameron Crowe, A-list director and onetime boy wonder Rolling Stone reporter who not only conducts the film’s current interviews, but is also shown at age 16 in 1974 doing his first interview with Crosby.

So just showing a glacier breaking off, or a hurricane in full force, doesn’t prove there is climate change. Perhaps if Kossakovsky had provided some context — something to indicate this is happening more frequently, for example — Aquarela might have had more impact. Then it would have been more than just a series of pretty pictures.

This is history of a personalized and meditative sort, and you ought to give it a chance.

One of this year's better studies of the human soul.

The fly-on-the-wall style is a slow build that leads to an immersive experience, and then an ultimate payoff as the change-minded department detours into another scandal. The Force is like watching a drug addict take a few meaningful steps toward recovery, only to relapse again.

Ultimately, this is not one of the Dardennes' masterpieces. They've made a few of those, but the effect of Lorna's Silence is more modest. It leaves the audience with neither a sense of uplift nor devastation, but, rather, with something more akin to intellectual appreciation.

It’s not a combination most of us would’ve thought of, but Stewart and Binoche bring out the best in each other.

What a shrewd achievement for writer-director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas"), to have made a movie that everyone will acclaim as beautiful, when perhaps the most beautiful thing about it is the sheer ugliness of it all.

The exquisitely shot Demon is not gory or particularly scary, but it has its fair share of chills.

Angelopoulos returns to the same poetic terrain he explored in Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist. In place of "action" and conventional narration, Eternity deals in philosophical ruminations, slippery shifts in time and long, hypnotic tracking shots that seem to whisper to us, "Slow down, observe. Listen."

Goodbye First Love doesn't badger the viewer into drawing conclusions. It's interested in showing, with great compassion, how Camille comes to a fuller understanding of the world and herself, without the sort of prefab lessons more often found in films than in real life.

Sly, near-perfect comedy.

A highly effective, psychological horror thriller.

What Sweetgrass lacks in context it makes up for in voyeuristic camera work that reveals a gritty beauty in the landscape, along with the human and livestock characters.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in this role but Redford. Without him, there would be little here worth seeing.

An inspired mix of spirited family entertainment and harrowing drama.

Le Quattro Volte may sound like art-house tedium, but in fact it's a movie of grave beauty, serene pace and surprising humor.

Although the movie goes too far, you can hardly get enough of its delicious atmosphere - and of Turner, in particular, who has never looked better on the big screen. [8 Dec 1989]

To be clear, there are dazzling sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, and virtually every minute has something interesting in it. It’s absolutely worth seeing as a curiosity. But as a work of narrative art it doesn’t sustain itself for its full two-hour running time. After an hour, you might even have to struggle to stay awake.

It doesn’t make cows into human beings. If anything, for some 90 minutes, it turns us into a cow. In doing so, it shows us — in a way that we actually feel it — how amazing it is to exist.

A long documentary that's very hard to watch - at times, it's harrowing.

Morgan finds the right elements of action and character through which to make history leap off the page.

A must-see.

Wildlife isn’t dazzling entertainment but an intelligent, low-key and satisfying film with a rare respect for every character.