From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.

Gripping and thrilling, Nanfu Wang’s debut documentary is a raw look at women’s-rights activism in China.

From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]

A film I had to watch with my hands over my face at times. Part horror, suspense thriller and comedy, Come to Daddy gives us some very creative mutilation, plenty of second-hand embarrassment and laughs in a perfectly paced hour and a half.

Bathed in dusty hues and rain-forest greens, Ixcanul is gorgeously shot and skillfully frames Maria’s curbed sexuality (look to a scene where she waits for her younger crush in the evening shadows).

LaBeouf’s script crackles with penetrating dialogue. His acting – LaBeouf portrays a version of his own father – might be the finest of his career.

Director Maggs tells a tough, sympathetic story in an imaginative way that makes Goalie feel like a war story.

Here's a gorgeous little film.

Some movies, a very few, possess the purity of myth, and they don't have to be great to be greatly important. "The Wild One" is an example; "Saturday Night Fever" is another. Now add 8 Mile to that short list.

A bouncy, witty, pleasurably scary children's movie that adults will enjoy more than they may care to confess. [02 July 1982]

Days of Heaven is so unapologetically beautiful, so calculatingly gorgeous, it is certain to arouse resentment in the minds of those who find visual hedonism a sin in movies, and to arouse suspicion, if not outrage, in those who require that movies have heart. [22 Sept. 1978]

To Live and Die in L.A., for all its amorality and downright immorality, is a cracker-jack thriller, tense and exciting and unpredictable, and more grimy fun than any moralist will want it to be. It has big hit written all over it: the premise, Miami Vice Meets The French Connection, may be perverse, but it's also inspired. [1 Nov 1985]

It may be true that in gambling money won is twice as sweet as money earned, but inart, only the earned has savor; The Color of Money earns enough of it to turn most other movies persimmon with esthetic envy. [17 Oct 1986, p. D1]

One of the most original, good-hearted comedies in a long time, Rushmore is the sort of movie where the strangest sequences of discords somehow keep managing to reach giddily improbable resolutions.

The reason for the city’s proliferation of cats comes late in the film, and it’s delivered as quickly as the rest of the doc’s information: long story short, the cats arrived on ships, figured their journey was over and never returned to port.

It’s an astonishing, often challenging and sharp examination of race in the United States.

One of Robert Altman's lesser known gems, Thieves Like Us, brings Depression-era rural Mississippi to life with the story of three convicted killers on the lam from prison.

Fosse carries the movie to its conclusion steadily and superlatively, with a directness that is devastating and with a depth of insight that ameliorates, if only slightly, the ghastliness of the carefully choreographed images. [10 Nov 1983]

A home invasion story that is as artfully terrifying as "Home Alone" was entertainingly hilarious.

Whitewash is a small but sparkling gem on ice.

A cheeky black comedy and worthy Norwegian successor to "Kill Bill."

Unlike Hollywood's starting point of hopelessly beautiful and yet inexplicably unentangled principal characters, Italian For Beginners'raw material is something of a more dirty-fingernail variety.

Guy and Madeline is a decidedly modern film, whose frightened, impulsive, charming characters could walk into our lives tomorrow.

Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]

Sophisticated and unsentimental political film.

Never before has Allen been able to integrate comedy and pathos as deftly as he does in Manhattan. [28 Apr 1979, p. 17]

French director Julia Ducournau, however, delivers a mindblower that keeps you guessing for all of the film’s excellent 108 minutes. She shocks; she entertains; she wickedly defies expectations.

These are simply incredible performances, captured stunningly on film.

Spencer works best when Princess Diana gets to be wickedly alive – playing a game with her sons, joking with Hawkins on the beach. When Stewart is given permission to play a person, not a dynasty, she offers up some of her best work yet.

Mesmerizing.

John Sayles's heartrending new film is a many-splendoured thing.

Add it all up, including the nifty twist at the end, and what we have here is a fun Hollywood flick with a good head on its shoulders.

A movie perfectly engineered for home viewing. Particularly with the best set of headphones that you own.

The homages that Edwards and his co-writer Chris Weitz make are honest, and instead of stealing the best ideas of other films, The Creator uses them as the source code to create a next-generation story that is pure, foot-on-the-gas entertainment.

The most successful film ever released in Japan, and co-winner of the top prize at this year's Berlin film festival, Spirited Away is a complete reversal of the Hollywood way with animation.

More frightening than most horror movies, more erotic than most pornography, The Postman Always Rings Twice (at the Imperial) is a sour slice of bona fide Americana, a relentlessly pessimistic melodrama that conjures memories of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather and Chinatown. [21 March 1981]

The writer’s adage that the specific is universal comes fully alive in this family drama, written and directed by Stephen Karam, based on his Tony-winning play.

A loopy, loving nine innings full of comic curve balls, emotional home-runs and euphoric, summertime music.

A riotous and gleefully delirious assault on the senses. It is vulgar. It is absurd. And it is completely enthralling.

The Great Invisible is a dense, disturbing look at the effects (personal, political, economic, ecological, macro, micro) of the disaster.

Mock-heroic yet still lyrical, faux-mythic but honest too, uniquely and absurdly and often hilariously Canadian, My Winnipeg is like no documentary you've ever seen.

The Painter and the Thief might be the best documentary of the year, if it could be fairly called a documentary. Instead, director Benjamin Ree’s film is more a mesmerizing, and potentially transgressive, investigation into just how far the documentary form can be torn apart and put back together – and whether the audience should accept such a wild reconfiguration.

With its visual, sonic and cultural gestures, the film is nothing less than a love letter to West Indian life, and makes home in its political figures and artists, its iconography, its food, its music, its gestures and movements all shared here on screen.

Hair is entertaining - even fabulously entertaining - because it is so strange, so young, so innocent, so beneficent and adolescent, so lovable and so loving; it is entertaining because it is - all of it is - so impossible, so remote, so inconceivable in any place anywhere outside of a Hollywood musical. [28 Mar 1979]

Maison du bonheur is a thoughtful, affecting study of the space we choose to take up in this world, and what happens when we grow old enough to realize the truth and consequences of those decisions.

Scored intensely and photographed vividly, the electric film imagines a small slice of doomsday with horrific believability.

Giddily impudent in its execution, pummelling in its message, To Die For is finally a comedy black enough for the tabloid television age.

Things other studios might frown upon are its greatest strengths, including a charming ensemble of actors often relegated to bit roles (Michaela Watkins, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Lil Rel Howery and Micah Stock are all fantastic), frank vérité-style cinematography and intimate storytelling.

Except for the ending (more about that in a minute), Brainstorm is near the pinnacle of popular entertainment, just below "WarGames". [30 Sept 1983]

Director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) is highly adept at having his cake and eating it, too, throughout the film, wowing audiences with effects and amusing them with talking animals, all the while insisting The Jungle Book is a difficult story about a human whose presence threatens to disrupt the jungle’s peace.

In nearly every way Civil War represents the dizzying heights of the genre.

A powerful, brutal, funny, tragic, vibrant, very human movie.

The performances are pitch perfect; the soundtrack is evocative; the photography is artful. Nothing is overdone, and nothing is really resolved.

The year's best man is a lady. [17 Dec 1982]

Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune is a breathtaking film worthy of the visionary Herbert’s rich, sophisticated source material.

The racial context is incisive; the retelling is tense, tight and chilling. These kinds of stories are emotionally wrenching to watch but can’t be told too often.

Sure, the premise is identical age-reversal comedies, but this one uses a much higher octane, animating a tired idea with a timeless script, and the result is pop humor at its most appealing - wit and charm spiced with a measured pinch of farce and just the right hint of melancholy. [3 Jun 1988, p.E1]

The movies have given us plenty of loquacious teenagers – from such fast-talking truants as Ferris Bueller to such overachieving political animals as Tracy Flick ( Election). Hal Hefner is not one of these kids.

A powerful and affecting piece of work.

Lee’s is more of a hard-edged, hammer-and-nail noir than Park’s existential horror, and it’s far less concerned with the internal state of Joe’s mind than the external havoc it creates.

An astonishing multimedia diary.

Palindromes is a cracked American picaresque.

Where’s My Roy Cohn? is brash and relentless, much like the man himself. We won’t need to wait for a sequel. Because of the ascension of Cohn’s most eagerly unscrupulous student, we’re watching Part II unfold as we speak.

While it also boasts an array of dick jokes (of which there are many, and they are great), it also holds a magnifying glass up to the culture that we’ve all had a hand in creating.

Russia’s stark landscape makes for breathtaking and sometimes comical scenes. This is a trip well worth taking.

Extraordinarily gross, metaphorically blunt, but also perversely and wildly entertaining, the new Spanish splatter satire The Platform is the perfect movie to watch while the world seemingly teeters on the edge of existence.

A movie that gets wonderfully under your skin.

One of the blackest, funniest, most disturbing and annoyingly lingering American films of this or any other year; the annoyance occasioned by the film's tendency to linger is not because River's Edge is not good, it's because it's too good.[05 June 1987]

Succeeding where most docudramas fail, it turns a slice of recent history into a revealingly intelligent entertainment, without being didactic at one extreme or sentimental at the other.

The virtue of Midnight Run is not that it does anything new; the virtue is that it does everything old so well.

A jagged slice of life, What Happened Was ... converts an ordinarily clumsy date into an extraordinarily touching encounter, without the aid of melodrama and with no loss in credibility. For us no less than the star-crossed characters, it's a leap into a shallow end that turns perilously deep. [30 Sep 1994]

You may be of the opinion that taking in an art film, especially the haute brand that disdains conventional narrative, is like watching paint dry. If so, happy surprise, Holy Motors is definitely the art film for you – it's like watching paint blister.

The cinematography is evocative – rainy, rich, gritty and raw, for this inspiring but not always pretty story – and Curtis is 100-per-cent watchable as a puffy, mumbling shuffler whose chess lessons double as life strategies.

Can a little-read 18th-century literary masterpiece be food-spittingly funny? Can it also include contemporary English actors riffing about their bad teeth, getting drunk and kissing their personal assistants? The answer is yes, as long as you agree that the best way to adapt an original book is with a correspondingly original film.

The intensity of the film verges on the intolerable.

Like its titular fairy tale heroine, Cinderella is sincere, not an ironic bone in it.

There are performances that shock you, that ground you, and that break you apart before building you back up. It is not often when an actor is able to deliver all of those reactions and more in the span of two hours, yet here is Vanessa Kirby proving herself as one of the most capable and ferociously talented stars of the moment.

My Summer of Love may sound like the title of a hot teen flick, but it is a truly refreshing grown-up big-screen film, a rare gem in this summer of duds.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

For its slightness and silliness, its concerns are grander. Here, the undead ghouls represent nothing but the cold prospect of death itself. “This isn’t gonna end well,” Driver’s omniscient copper keeps intoning. And it never does.

It's silly, it's serious, it's outrageous, it's mundane, it's blowsy, it's lovely. Yet this fickle film has a constant heart - warm and very likeable.

Republicans or loyalists, Catholics or Protestants – this film is not about political or religious trenches. People died, but it’s more than the bombs, bullets and bodies. The more fascinating damage was done to psyches and souls, and Demange, with ’71, comes for yours.

The detached tone of Tess - contemplative and fatalistic, resigned and melancholy - may be non-romantic and in the end not entirely true to Hardy, but it is full of love and compassion for those who seek both in a world where there is so little of either. [14 Feb 1981]

Indeed, as the film unreels to its extraordinary climax - a scene that will make your skin crawl - Frears has the larger target right in his sights and, bang, pulls the thematic trigger, taking no prisoners.

This could have been a thriller, but thrills are cheap and Moratto aims for something more documentative, sombre and meditative. It’s about paying debts and the illusionary concept of freedom.

In the end, whether the performances are driven by real-life trauma or by acting doesn’t matter. Life might be imitating art or vice versa, who knows? One thing is certain: The Peanut Butter Falcon is a wonderful piece of art.

The documentarian Victor Kanefsky paints a vivid picture of an entertaining rogue, one who finally gets his due with this film. Then again, Cenedella might refuse to accept the recognition. There’s no bastard like a principled bastard.

Yet this surprisingly lyrical movie more than satisfies overall. De Niro, who has a rare eye for detail and nuance, shows himself at ease with action, comedy and romance. He also has a fine touch with actors. [1 Oct 1993, p. C5]

Billed by the director as his tribute to cinema, One Second is affectionate and sweet – perhaps a bit too sweet, considering this premiere was much delayed after the film was held back by the Chinese government for supposed technical reasons in 2019.

The Last Mistress proves that Breillat has found something in the luscious language of the 19th century that makes sense to us today.

THE THREE hours and 10 minutes of The Right Stuff fly by faster than a plane snapping the sound barrier - there's never a moment that's not entertaining, and there are very few that are not wonderfully photographed and choreographed - but for the non-American, the excitement is confined to the filmmaking. [22 Oct 1983]

En route, what emerges is the kind of film, rich in paradox, that's common to Reichardt but so rare anywhere else – a film ponderously slow in pace yet kinetically charged with insight; starkly realistic yet allegorical too; psychologically astute yet politically resonant.

Coixet occasionally overplays her hand – a dropped headscarf, a sudden death – as does a constipated Bill Nighy in the role of the reclusive widower who is Florence’s one ally, but overall, the film is stealthily impressive.

In the midst of his many other achievements here -- his documentary realism, his wry humanism, his allegorical subtlety -- Panahi even manages to redeem the good name of toilet humour.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is certainly indebted to the plastic and neon schlock of Hollywood director Frank Tashlin, but the farcical epic of actress Pepa Marcos is closer in innovative energy to the transformations of Fassbinder than to the recycling of Spielberg and De Palma. [20 Jan 1989, p.C1]

There’s voyeurism, fetishism, bondage, lingerie and high-flown naughtiness galore, but that’s hardly the movie’s most conspicuous achievement. Also at work in this transfixing account of a sado-masochistic relationship on the ropes (so to speak) are a probing intelligence, a catalogue of inspirational cinematic references and – perhaps most impressive – a big, sad, beating heart.

Brought to life with a smooth and almost restrained kind of animation – all rounded edges and frames designed to breathe, rather than hyperactively cram in as much action as possible – and paced with a confident speed, Orion and the Dark will charm and entrance.

Labaki is bearing witness here, and Capernaum (the name means “chaos”) doesn’t flinch from the fact that there are villains in the system. But none of them – none of them – are children.