It's a strange film, very original and very good. Just by virtue of the subject matter, it can't help but be erotic, and yet eroticism is not the movie's purpose.

Although we know the outcome, Silicon Cowboys feels like a suspense thriller.

Sex is a persistent theme in the movie, and it’s handled forthrightly.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

By the end, we’ve experienced one of the best films about street hustling ever made.

Fundamentally, though, “My Dead Friend Zoe” is a tricky story told exceedingly well. It earns our attention — and a few salutes.

It's a witty, intelligent scramble, and it's beautifully mounted.

The bottom line on Joan Baez I Am a Noise is that if you absolutely love Baez and her work, you will find nothing here to challenge your preconceptions and will probably learn some things you didn’t know. But if you’re merely Baez-curious, this documentary will not satisfy and might even make you less curious.

The result is a gutsy little picture and a nice slice of life.

Evokes grand emotions -- anxiety, sadness, joy -- sometimes within moments of one another. Broken Wings has heart and a poetic soul.

The film is a touching, detailed portrait of an important and often overlooked band. Filmmaker David C. Thomas has done a wonderful job of stitching his filmed interviews together with the extensive vintage footage he scrounged.

Turns out to be the most unnerving film of the year. Easy.

A nice gift for science fiction fans.

There’s already a small library of films about the Who and its music, but this is the first I know of that examines the men who almost accidentally wound up managing one of the most incendiary of ’60s rock groups.

A gentle movie. It’s valedictory, with a sense of the ephemeral nature of life, the inevitability of regret, and the bittersweetness of looking back on past happiness.

The obvious thing to expect here is that writer-director Christian Petzold is using the Undine”myth as a metaphor. But no, he’s doing the actual myth.

It may surprise you to hear that in the end there is a sliver of hope offered in Under the Tree, so thin that it’s almost not there. A less interesting movie might simply have served up a headlong plunge into the abyss — but Sigurdsson gives us a tiny flicker of light.

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

It is the best and most enjoyable American film to be released this year.

The filmmakers investigate, but can't answer every tough question. There are so many people who could be potentially taking advantage of these players, it's hard to sort out the wrongdoers.

A complex story.

In “My Name is Alfred Hitchcock,” Cousins gives us a new way of looking at Hitchcock, as a filmmaker with an evocative visual world, and a case could be made that it would be easier for viewers to appreciate that aspect of Hitchcock on a second or third viewing.

Who can resist a good horse story? Simply and directly made, Dark Horse is a rousing documentary.

An unusual look at love and how it can unexpectedly develop. Those for whom the concept of an arranged marriage is foreign will get a little history lesson on the immigrant experience watching this sweetly engrossing film.

The Two Popes is movie nirvana, but anyone watching could appreciate the clash between these opposing dispositions and world views.

The hits just keep on coming in Muscle Shoals, a hugely entertaining, perhaps overlong, documentary about the renowned recording studios in the small Alabama town of the film's title. It's mandatory viewing for fans of the classic rock, soul and rhythm and blues of the 1960s and '70s.

Rosi endlessly proves that he can turn the region’s agony into the finest art and proves that he hasn’t lost sight of the human factor in the process.

In a way, Misery is a ghoul comedy. But it's more than that, because it's genuinely, consistently scary. With his enthusiastic direction -- the cutting, the odd angles, the unexpected timing -- Rob Reiner takes what might have been a static set-up, a couple of people talking in a room, and makes it harrowing. [30 Nov 1990, p.E1]