Cat's Eye is a slickly efficient and very funny omnibus of tongue-in-cheek menace, reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone episodes. [20 Apr 1985]

Beyond the eerily evocative impersonation, Hoffman's brilliance lies in not only playing the shrewd puppet master but also revealing that he too comes with strings attached, the most dominant being his consuming need for acclaim.

The best American movie so far this year.

Fontaine’s flirtatious pastiche stands on its own. For Flaubertians, however, it offers up even more droll entertainment. Though admittedly some of the laughs will be from recognizing their own cleverness.

A sensual and heady stew of romance, family drama, police procedural, political polemic and ghost story, Atlantics marks the debut of a ferocious talent in Diop.

Kaurismaki is a master at infusing his movies with apparently contradictory qualities. The best of them -- and The Man Without a Past is surely that -- are hard to describe precisely because they seem to exist, to balance precariously, in the tension between opposites.

It has the staccato wit of a drawing-room comedy, the fatal flaw of a tragic romance and the buzzy immediacy of a front-page headline, all powered by a kinetic engine typically found in an action flick. And that's just the opening scene.

An utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty.

Fred Schepisi's sensuously staged film version of John le Carre's spy thriller, is energetic but thoughtful, a virtually perfect adapatation of a virtually perfect novel. [18 Dec 1990]

Is it, the debate asks, a truly substantial work or just a stylish cop-out? Well, for once, I'm voting with the French.

It's appalling, it's wicked, it's bleak, and it's very funny. In fact, the movie's ability to disturb us is directly linked to its ability to amuse us. We're made to feel guilty precisely because we're made to laugh - seeing something so sordid shouldn't be so engaging. [28 Jan. 1994]

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin paints the picture of a man who was complex, complicated, talented and unparalleled. And perhaps above all, very loved.

None of this would work with anywhere near the power it does without Nicolas Cage, whom Green has smartly cast in this sometimes maddeningly erratic and ill-disciplined actor’s most perfectly suited role since "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation."

The Martian is nearly all things to all audiences: a ticking-clock drama, an intimate character study, a sci-fi comedy, a rollicking space adventure. It’s almost impossible to dislike, which is perhaps its only flaw. When a huge film reveals its eager-to-please intentions from the get-go, the stakes evaporate awfully quick.

Call it what you like – a modern Russian epic, a crime drama, a black comedy or a scream in the dark – Leviathan is a shaggy masterpiece.

A funny, strange and wondrous little film. [31 May 1988]

A precise, subtle and emotionally affecting portrait of the fraying friendship between two men, director Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is an increasingly rare sort of American independent film: It aspires to be something other than a Hollywood movie with less money.

A refreshing take on vampire lore.

Moore leads this fresh and loving English-language take by Chilean director Sebastian Lelio of his own 2013 film "Gloria," but is well supported by other loves in her life, present and past: Brad Garrett, Holland Taylor, Rita Wilson and others.

Past the surface flaws of Color Out of Space, there are shiny Cage diamonds to be found.

It’s hard to describe Nickel Boys. It seems like an injustice to call it, simply, a film. It’s a remarkable piece of art, even more impressive when you consider that it’s photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut feature film – in fiction.

Defining a politician’s titan legacy in a singularly unexpected way, Meeting Gorbachev meets its expectations.

It is beautiful, delirious, frustrating and so wedded to that film-critic notion of the unimpeachable “Kaufman-esque” sensibility that there is little point in arguing with its power, with its immeasurable impact. It works, even (especially?) when it’s not supposed to.

Everything about The Queen of Versailles, a documentary both sharply observant and deliciously funny, is jumbo-sized – the riches, the rags, his ego, her breasts, their steroidal pursuit of happiness.

Unwieldy but moving, simultaneously grandiose yet unadorned (like a Japanese tea ceremony), distanced but compassionate, Kagemusha is less a movie than a monumental frieze - it's Kurosawa's Ivan the Terrible, animated by the socially outraged, sweetly sentimental heart of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. [18 Oct 1980]

The no-contest wildest comedy of the season, will keep your mind busy for weeks.

For all its fuss and fury, Flight of the Red Balloon succeeds magnificently.

A remarkable documentary as important as it is compelling.

Inoffensive in its simplicity; its high, if naive, spirits send viewers out into the all too real streets clothed in the glow of a fantasy well-spun.

This Hollywood movie about a gay man afflicted with AIDS is evocative, understated and ultimately deeply affecting. Hard-earned tears of truth. [22 Dec 1993, p.C1]

Rocketman is Broadway razzle-dazzle of the best kind.

A twisty, cerebral drama that just happens to involve aliens, Denis Villeneuve’s film is a truly beguiling take on both the sci-fi canon and what, exactly, a grown-up Hollywood film is supposed to be.

That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.

Journeys more often than not are not what we expected. And neither is Cook's unpredictable and reflective work, set to a brooding solo-cello score and filled with whatever metaphors you need. We are alone on this trip – take it, and this marvellous film, at your own pace.

Serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability. It's the flip side to the defeatism of "Distant," but with parallels, both in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit.

My Own Private Idaho achieves more than most movies dream of attempting. The Shakespearian allusions aside, Van Sant has essentially remade "Of Mice and Men" for the nineties, with Mike as the "mouse," Scott as the "man." It is the mouse who roars.

Mainly the director’s decision to eschew the pulpit in favour of the parishioners pays off handsomely, creating an unaffected yet touching account of this civil-rights victory.

The secret of the film's success is performance, performance, performance.

For all his daring, the brazen creator maintains control - there's aesthetic order in the disorder, and calculated reason in the madness. Seldom has it felt so good to seem so lost.

A searing tale effectively told. And superbly acted. [18 Aug 1989]

Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) once again proves he can craft a gripping tale that never collapses under its own moral weight. Sicario is not an easy film to watch, but it is a riveting and essential one.

You may well hate Crash, but if intensity is what you seek in a darkened theatre, you'll hate missing it even more.

In art there are no rules, just stuff that works. And for the second film in a row, Marsh has created a movie we can't keep our eyes off.

Canadian director Guy Maddin is an artist supreme - he steals with a liberal flourish and with enough sheer imagination that his previous films (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel) are often described as boldly original. Careful, his latest offering, is no exception - it's an honours graduate from the same school of dusted-off originality. [10 Oct 1992]

Lee has forged a work of art in the classic sense -- art that delights and instructs.

Although sometimes dizzying and disorienting, the visual language of Between the Temples is relentlessly alive, with the camera never considering-slash-allowing for the possibility that its audiences’ eyes might wander.

The Fly is a mass-market, horror- film masterpiece that is also a work of art; it is the very movie the timorous feared "Aliens" would be - a gruesome, disturbing, fundamentally uncompromising shocker that accesses the subconscious. [15 Aug 1986]

It takes you on an emotional, uplifting journey across many countries and through civil unrest, with music ultimately winning out over dark forces that would otherwise challenge and limit free expression and art.

It’s an engrossing nature documentary – of human nature – and while for most it is also a fairy tale, the takeaway can be vicarious.

Great describes The Band Wagon, which followed Singin' in the Rain by a year and has similar fun satirizing the excesses of show business. [18 Mar 2005, p.R33]

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

This is a near-masterpiece, an intimate and nerve-wracking shocker that deserves as big an audience as the mystery box can conjure.

A funnier, faster, altogether more energetic film than Star Trek I, The Wrath of Khan doesn't linger over its modest special effects. This is really down-home week with Captain - now Admiral - Kirk and the boys. [5 June 1982]

From its quiet opening sequence to its silent final shot, everything about A History of Violence is deceptive, and deceptively simple.

This hip morality tale is by no means perfect - it's not the masterpiece "Miller's Crossing" was - but it is stylish, intelligent, witty and more than slightly creepy.

Alternately deploying twisty monologues and quick back-and-forth exchanges, Montague and Sanger are clearly having a ball. They’re not only riffing on obvious inspirations like Orson Welles’s "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast and "Twilight Zone" mastermind Rod Serling, but also the modern ubiquity of podcasts, and their propensity for devolving into audio fabulism.

Blissfully entertaining sequel to last year's Spy Kids, Rodriguez is once again just as good -- if not better -- than the gadgets at hand.

A gorgeous, witty, seductive movie.

The winner of Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.

It's an unpredictable, mesmerizing journey nearly every shady second of the way.

As a history of this war of ideas and as an introduction to Jacobs, the film is essential. But it also pivots toward a great challenge: today’s global urbanization.

There is a distinct, and welcome, lack of sentimentality here, too, with Baumbach able to swerve the tone into a more cerebral version of National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, of all things. Imagine if Clark Griswold studied fascism and carried around a teeny-tiny pistol, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Disclosure is a well-acted, slickly directed shell of a picture. The veneer is so polished that you look on with something approaching genuine satisfaction, and only after the final credits roll do you begin to feel the void.

Whiplash is an intense, unmelodious, highly amped and probably unrealistic drama set in the fictionalized Schaefer Conservatory in New York.

Slipping in references to everyone from Kubrick to Fellini, Gray creates a truly intoxicating experience, overwhelming in the best possible way. It is this close to being an all-time classic, if only Charlie Hunnam’s central performance as Fawcett didn’t slip out of Gray’s period trappings every now and then (you can’t help but wonder what Gray’s long-time collaborator, Joaquin Phoenix, would have done with the role).

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

With Monsters, Edwards transcends the special-effects auteur label, creating a memorable sci-fi story in which the hero and heroine are true equals in the adventure. How's that for an alien concept?

It's fierce, it's lean, it's mean, and it has at least three first-pumping "Hell, yeah!" moments.

The Doors is excessive, unsubtle, emotionally brutal and stylistically sadistic, but that's exactly right for the dark side of the sixties Morrison and his band embodied. [01 Mar 1991]

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

A film that transforms a popular work of teen fiction not just by faithfully exploring its themes but, more important, by proving those themes have a very grown-up resonance.

Like the stationary figures it portrays, Kicking And Screaming is alive at the edges; it comes with a vibrant border of trenchant asides, tossed-off remarks that blend the solace of protective irony with the sterner stuff of hard truth.

Like a Keret story, Jellyfish is economical – a mere 78 minutes – but it packs into its taut, intersecting storylines a charming melancholy and a surprisingly rich depth.

Polished, intelligent, impeccably well-bred, it's an upscale kids' flick designed to appease the fears of discriminating parents: If those stubborn tykes refuse to crack a book, then this is the next best thing - Young People's Masterpiece Theatre. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

At times, it approaches self-parody, but that’s just Woo having some much-needed fun.

Video-game developers: Geeks, nerds, socially adrift obsessives. Indie Game thankfully gets past such base introductions in a flash and graduates to far more engrossing levels – levels which open up into the real worlds of the best independent game developers working their craft.

The Love Witch handily achieves its goals, employing Biller’s strong sense of retro style and Robinson’s wink-wink performance to deliver a subversive homage to a host of out-of-fashion genres.

Is Neruda a cinematic play, a poem, a biopic? In this near-perfect homage to a literary giant, it’s all open to interpretation.

The Usual Suspects filled me with a highly unusual urge - to be a true "reviewer," to rewind the projector and figure out this humdinger once and for all.

A delightfully satiric comedy. [29 May 1987]

On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it.

The film belongs to Whitman, who, fresh off a five-year stint on the now-defunct TV series "Parenthood," infuses her first big-screen leading role with a unique charm. If Whitman looks familiar, but you can’t quite place her, that’s about right.

It’s elegantly filmed and well constructed, building to a haunting climatic sequence that could sear your eyeballs.

The film’s many tiny dramas add up to a thoughtful, though sometimes shaggy, study of hopes and regrets, aspirations and reality. It is not groundbreaking, but it is funny and sad and completely relatable.

A documentary as inspiring as it is flat-out bizarre.

Besides the movie’s weight in our contemporary, post-Ferguson historical moment, Straight Outta Compton may also be the funniest, most exhilarating and flat-out best Hollywood movie of the summer.

The intelligence and wit of this glass-slipper heart-of-gold fantasy are shocking.

A French rat as a master chef? Absurd. But a brilliant French chef with an American accent? C'est grotesque!

The surprise lies in Linklater's ability to breathe so much fresh life into a tired formula...This is a picture that recollects not merely a period in time but a state of mind.

A terrifying, pitch-black kind of horror movie that takes up residence in your mind for days, even weeks later – but it is also a family film.

Age in Being 17 comes in awkward bursts, and yet the film moves sublimely. Director Téchiné, 73 years old, is wise beyond his years.

Paul Sylbert's production design is handsome, William A. Fraker's cinematography is beautiful and Dave Grusin's music winning. All in all, Heaven Can Wait is a fantastic fantasy. [28 June 1978]

Elvis is as much a ride following the highs and lows of the musician’s fabulously rich and sad life as it is a one-way journey into the extremities of its director’s exhaustive imagination. For better, and worse.

Demanding a full audience of sickos to unlock the film’s true communal madness, Dicks: The Musical is destined for midnight-movie deification. Worship its transgressive power, or denounce it as unholy. The film thankfully offers no in-between.

Arnett delivers something warm and genuine here, especially every time he’s paired against Dern, who perhaps knows this territory better.

Moondi’s film feels of a piece with his previous work – films in which relationships are tested and almost pulverized – while also pushing into new, more emotionally complex territory.

Misha and the Wolves is as much a documentary as it is a wrestling match: filmmaker versus subject, truth versus fiction. Ultimately, the viewer comes out the winner.

Miller’s go-for-broke visuals and his stars’ fiercely committed work allow Three Thousand to speed by on wit, energy, and gushy, bleeding-heart passion.