Kramer vs. Kramer is one of the most sensitive and least judgmental film about relationships ever made in the United States.... One of the important films. [15 Dec 1979]

An intense story about an all-powerful Chinese crime lord and his extended family. [26 Jan 1996]

A riveting, impossible-to-shake masterwork that leaves the audience spooked, not by its telling but by its commitment to abstract themes of grief, solitude and coming of age.

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.

The result is a political thriller refreshingly long on grown-up dialogue yet lamentably shy on, well, thrills. This chatty thing does go on.

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.

The Hunting Ground’s film’s biggest journalistic “get” is the first on-camera interview with Erica Kinsman, the Florida State student who accused star quarterback Jameis Winston of drugging and raping her.

What we have with Barry Avrich’s inspiring and eloquent documentary Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz is the American Dream meeting humankind’s nightmare.

While We’re Young is more commercial and less innovative (or whimsically self-indulgent, depending on your tastes) than Baumbach’s last feature film, 2012’s "Frances Ha," though it shares some common ground.

Both the Chicks and this doc are left to deal with the aftermath as best they can. The film chooses to pad with an occasional over-reliance on cutesy filler -- a pregnant Emily having an ultra-sound, giving birth, recuperating at her beloved ranch away from it all.

Cancer, ironically, turns out to be a hard subject to dramatize. We spend the majority of the doc accompanying Jones to doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy sessions. As compelling as this is to the person going through it, it’s not fascinating to watch.

The dramatic set-up courtesy of director and co-writer Clint Bentley (whose family has a long history on the track) isn’t exactly novel, but the film’s acute sense of place and specificity of profession lends Jockey an authenticity that is irresistible.

The movie stands or falls with Newman, and it does neither: it coasts. His acting in the second half is safe and self-assured, while his acting in the first - watch for his announcement of his erupting integrity - is not only shy of good, it's downright bad. It would be ironic but predictable if he were to win an Oscar for his weakest performance in years. [17 Dec 1982]

Better Man is a triumph of cheek and imagination. Gracey attempts much but actually manages to accomplish all that he set out to do.

More about Ali as media star and social figure, less about the quicksilver athlete.

The utterly bizarre story made national news when it broke, has since provided much magazine fodder, and popped up only two years ago adapted into a dramatic feature. Now it receives the documentary treatment and, in the devilishly manipulative hands of director Bart Layton, what a treatment it is – the weirdness just gets weirder.

If this doc is sometimes elegiac in tone, there is nothing mournful about it. Dorfman is too much the odd-ball optimist, telling funny anecdotes – a lifelong friendship with poet Allen Ginsberg began when she was a young publishing-house secretary and he asked for some mysterious thing called “the can” – and tossing off provocative insights into the nature of photography and life.

The real trick of the film, though, is how it constantly steadies itself in the face of ever-mounting absurdity. This is a movie of such sexual outrageousness and stylized depravity that it should topple over every few minutes. And yet Glowicki and Petrie (who plays multiple roles) ride the razor’s edge of delirium to create something fantastical, even beautiful.

It asks similar questions about millennial New York life as Girls. And its naturalism is straight out of mumblecore. Yet Arnow carves out her own style. But what is truly groundbreaking is her depiction of BDSM.

Ultimately, The Promised Land is a testament to not only the resilience of Denmark’s agricultural homesteaders . . . but also to the fierce power of Mikkelsen’s presence.

Then again, Colin Firth is enough. Every movie is a performance, but very seldom is a performance a movie.

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]

"The Hurt Locker" may be getting all the attention and awards but The Messenger is at least as good and perhaps, given its delicate handling of a sensitive subject, even better.

Like its predecessors, Under the Sea is family-friendly viewing -- the great white shark swims by, as opposed to tearing prey to shreds. Its goal is to show biodiversity and offer information on how reefs grow, reminding us of threats to these environments.

An uncomfortably fascinating document of a man whose bipolar disorder and artistic ambitions are inextricably connected.

Thrilling and beautifully crafted.

Deeply playful while never falling for the more hoary tendencies of the genre – remarkably, Soderbergh seems to have invented a new way of filming a “jump scare” here – Presence keeps its audience close and tight, building to a finale that forces you to reconsider the entire experiment.

Just as John Carpenter seems to generate box-office smashes incidentally to his search for intriguing shades of blue, Miller is so enthused with his camera angles that the movie has ended before he's aware there's only 20 lines of dialogue in it and not a single character better defined than Max's mutt. [22 May 1982]