In pants or skirts, Hoffman remains true to character, and his perplexity is real, especially when one girlfriend (Teri Garr) suspects he is a gay male, while the other (Jessica Lange) believes he is a lesbian female. Both actresses are excellent, and Miss Lange continues her promise to become a superstar of the 1980s. [27 Dec 1982]

The film is a heady, gentle and emotional journey, but Wang also packs the frame with layered conversation and funny background action. She makes the family dynamics feel universally familiar while also presenting an authentic portrait of China and Chinese families.

Is this the best animated movie of the year? Totally, so far. It might even be the best movie of the year.

Brilliant and hilarious. [29 July 1987]

Marriage Story is such a perfect blend of writing, unflashy direction, spot on performances and score (by Randy Newman) that you hardly even notice all the individual ingredients making up the whole. Its triumph is that it just feels like life.

This dark, socially conscious film about the intertwining of two families is an intricately plotted, adult thriller. We can go up, for sure, but Bong can also take us deeper down. There’s always an extra floor somewhere in this masterpiece.

I thought that The Muppet Christmas Carol was a wonderful movie. The Muppets' re-enactment of the story was funny and touching and full of Christmas spirit. Michael Caine was a perfect Scrooge, in looks, manner and expression. [9 Sept 1992]

Wildlife isn’t just a great first film, it’s a great film.

Noises Off is a raucous, riotous romp that will leave you delightfully giddy from the wonderful on-screen frenzy and non-stop laughs. It's the kind of comedy we haven't seen in a while, one that doesn't rely on righteous dudes or far-out babes to make us laugh. It's all silly farce, played out by an effective ensemble of screen and TV actors. [19 March 1992]

Anatomy of a Fall may not be a film with many concrete answers, ultimately, but the truths it uncovers are irrefutable.

There is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus.

No matter how cursed or unlucky the so-called “Scottish play” is in theater lore, the stars seem to be aligned here.

Robert Redford's intricately woven and brilliant movie Quiz Show paints a witty but poignant portrait of that tainted time on television, when Eisenhower's America lost its innocence. [15 Sept 1994]

[A] nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothée Chalamet.

Yes, it’s a dazzling technical feat. One could also consider it a gimmick, or at least a method that threatens to distract the viewer’s attention. But that ignores the fact that this very filmmaking style is also hugely effective at delivering this particular story, in the most visceral way possible.

In spite of its wild sex scenes, it's one of the year's more cerebral films - a contradiction which makes it all the more interesting. [22 Dec 1992]

A dynamic political drama with superior acting and wide significance. The competing forces of city governance have rarely been portrayed with such immediacy and incisiveness. [17 Feb 1996]

Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” is less than two hours long and yet contains nearly a quarter-century of time’s relentless march forward. Few films course with history the way it does in the Chinese master’s latest, an epic collage that spans 21 years.

There’s plenty of good music in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, including Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and one of the most gloriously unhinged uses of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” ever conceived. If the previous film had a Fellini-esque vibe, this one has punky, anarchic feel.

Hold Your Fire... burrows into the real roots of an oft-replayed movie scenario with insight and care.

A film in which everything feels stunningly fresh, raw and new.

The whodunit turns out not only to still have a few moves left but to be downright acrobatic.

Hanks is such an obvious choice to play someone as beloved as Fred Rogers that his performance is something that could be in danger of being taken for granted or overlooked. He just makes it all look so easy — the almost uncomfortably slow way that he speaks. But it’s a testament to Hanks that you can’t “see” the work. But much like Fred Rogers, you don’t have to understand it to be moved.

How Coogler pulls everything off at once — and makes it cohere, mostly — is a sight to see.

Based on Freida McFadden’s novel, “The Housemaid” rides waves of manipulation and then turns the tables on what we think we’ve just seen, looking at male-female power structures and how privilege can trap people without it.

By burrowing within the brutal propaganda of apartheid, Hermanus, in his intensely expressive, achingly sorrowful fourth film, has captured a mean machinery at work — one that still abides, long after the end of apartheid.

By exponentially multiplying worlds and Spider-Men, Across the Spider-Verse risks making itself dizzy. Yet it surprisingly, even movingly, stays true to the teenage emotions at its core and the parent-kid relationships driving all these multiverse convulsions.

As in Lord and Miller’s animated movies, their tone and pace remain singular. Project Hail Mary might blow past a two-hour runtime and yet there’s rarely a dull moment with all the problem-solving, earnest irreverence and unabashed commitment to imbuing life and wit into every molecule of the story. Daniel Pemberton’s unusual, buoyant score and Joel Negron’s sharp editing are key.