If you require a plot, look elsewhere.

Eat Drink Man Woman is a piquant delight. [02 Sep 1994, p.3H]

With such supercharged material under the hood, a magnetic man behind the wheel and a nimble director manning the pits, Senna is simply the greatest sports film I have ever seen.

It’s an enigmatic and austere film from a region where political, sexual and religious repression are as stifling as the sooty air.

Most biographical docs contain a montage of old footage, but this one is especially haunting. As Campbell watches home movies, he has to ask Kim to identify the people on screen, including his ex-wives, his children and his younger self.

Few mainstream movies, let alone disability dramas, are so frank about sexual mechanics, yet notwithstanding the nudity, The Sessions isn't voyeuristic or sleazy.

Portman is eminently watchable as Lena, who slowly realizes that she’s in way over her head. And “Ex Machina” star Isaac virtually redefines creepiness.

Like Elizabeth Olsen in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Oduye brilliantly slips inside the skin of a sensitive young woman who's having trouble finding her place in the world.

A sexy, edgily funny suspense film set in a small Western town, could be a symbol of the plight and the tenacity of independent American film makers. [22 July 1994, p.3F]

One one level, Pride is as fake as a lip-sync revue, yet the emotions it arouses are real.

Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere, who combined on the most recent adaptation and screenplay, have opened up Rostand's work far more than could be done on a stage - and it works brilliantly. [26 Dec 1990, p.3F]

The most provocative thing in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is the moment during the opening credits when we glimpse the comedy legend without makeup.

That action is bloody, but Fiennes' choices as director are unassailably apt and artful. Coriolanus is a triumph.

A far more interesting film than its title implies. And a film you’ve never seen before.

I Am Love is easy to savor but tough to swallow.

Ultimately what makes Gone Girl so watchable is the three-headed monster of Fincher, Pike and Affleck. The director bathes the B-movie scenario in the queasy-green hues of a morgue, while Affleck flashes his million-dollar smile like a dime-store Dracula and the beautifully inscrutable Pike absorbs the light like a wax mannequin. If it’s true that Nick and Amy were made for each other, they were made in a fiendish lab.

Although the characters don’t lapse into stereotypes, neither are they sufficiently funny or fierce to engage us in the issues they raise.

Far from being preachy, Loving is a beautiful film about daring to love, without fear or compromise.

This may not be Scorsese’s best film, but it’s unquestionably his most impassioned.

As Refn is riffing on thriller cliches, he gets solid support from the ensemble. Brooks, a comedic standout since the '70s, makes a sympathetic villain, and Gosling stokes the young-Brando comparisons - instead of settling for Richard Gere.

Director David O. Russell ("Three Kings") delivers a film of staggering impact.

With a mad captain at the helm, this documentary version of Jodorowsky’s “Dune” is probably more entertaining than what Hollywood would have done to it, with a clearer message: Our lives are like sands though an hourglass, so dream the impossible dream.

The world Nair shows us is, on the whole, an unpleasant one, but there is never any sense of false melodrama or of the camera selecting only shocking or hopeless images. And as a whole, the film documents how difficult it is to defeat the human spirit. [24 Mar 1989, p.3F]

An enthralling lament for an era in which beauty is in danger of becoming extinct.

It’s not only a fresh and funny spoof of the movie business, it represents a real-life triumph within it.

Oyelowo takes full advantage of his close physical resemblance to King, but he wisely avoids mere impersonation, delivering a performance that’s as sensitive as it is spellbinding.

Remarkable...For All Mankind is a lovely film. Brian Eno's soundtrack is majestic without being overly sentimental, and Reinert's choice of images ranges skillfully from the ironically ordinary - astronauts eating, listening to country music and teasing one another about personal quirks - to the awe inspiring. [2 Feb 1990, p.3F]

In one of the most wickedly funny scenes in sci-fi history, Koba uses monkeyshines to bamboozle some gun-toting yahoos and scuttle the peace treaty.