The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

This is a grimly thrilling movie that falls somewhere between clear-eyed realism and the improbabilities of an action flick.

If there’s a glaring oversight in Hail Satan?, it’s in the film’s singular devotion to the Temple of Satan. There’s little-to-no mention of other Satanic cults.

Fonda and Hepburn work gallantly against the mythic: Norman and Ethel are specific people, New Englanders, a middle-class pair without any special abilities or beliefs that might ease their slide into the oblivion at the end of life. They are Every Couple, delineated with a sharpness that only two consummate professionals working at the peak of their powers could provide. [18 Dec 1981]

Truth be told, Wrong isn’t as funny as "Rubber," which played kamikaze games with horror-movie tropes. The tone here is flatter and more meandering, and more than a few of Dupieux’s digressions feel like dead ends. At the same time, there’s a winning confidence to the filmmaking, which is deceptively stylish.

A supernatural winner.

Loving Vincent is gorgeous. It's a film of immersive beauty.

A subtext of the film is a focus on classical music, as if to ask how humans can be capable of both intense beauty and ruthless inhumanity.

The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.

For all that The Sessions does well, it offers some telling deviations from the real story.

A butterfly metaphor is employed by the time-flipping Takahata, a filmmaker whose delightful Only Yesterday took 25 years to arrive right on time.

In My Bodyguard the warfare is entirely internecine, and the movie, for all its shortcomings, is an exceptionally perceptive (and funny) study of the terror that can be visited upon an innocent victim. [23 Aug 1980]

The dialogue is often mundane...and the actors' lurching delivery of these lines, often flattened, sometimes speechifying, sometimes rushed, but never naturalistic, forces the viewer to question the point of the action as Lanthimos crafts a dark satire about responsibility, justice and retribution.

Handsome, profoundly austere and vaguely traumatizing, Black Hollow Cage has no fun at all with the time-travel trope. But, then, one man's kitchen knife to the neck is another man's hot tub or Michael J. Fox.

If there’s a low-key disappointment to Vic and Flo, it’s that the film teases the mind and pleases the eye without requiring emotional commitment.

As usual, Levine rounds out his supporting cast with a suspiciously stacked roster of comic actors – Randall Park, June Diane Raphael, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Bob Odenkirk, and Andy Serkis, the latter taking his love of heavy makeup a bit too far this time – and keeps the story moving with a breezy briskness that should be studied by any aspiring rom-com director.

In lesser hands, this chaos might tumble into melodrama or farce. But Stolevski’s actors deliver such naturalistic performances, and he writes such specific dialogue . . . that you care deeply about what happens to these people.

Marshall treats everything, from the feminist themes to a soundtrack that features period chestnuts redone by contemporary singers, with a unique mix of the furiousand the subdued - a broad knee-slapper one moment, a delicate caress the next. No wonder we root for it. With the count full and our hopes wavering, A League Of Their Own smacks a stand-up triple and dares us not to cheer. Go ahead - give in and be a fan. [3 July 1992]

In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.

Making his directorial debut is actor John Carroll Lynch (no relation to David Lynch). This first-timer quirks things up occasionally with surreal scenes of a nightmare and an on-the-nose allegory (Lucky walking toward an exit sign and standing at an abyss).

Adventure, romance and fabulous travel opportunities, all for a few bucks. [23 Dec 1994]

Surf's Up is that rarity in a children's movie, a comedy that's actually exciting.

Short Term 12 is a triumph of modesty.

Even its structurally weaker moments give Garfield an opportunity to expand on Jack's physical and mental dislocation. Given Boy A's final floating reel, it's an anchoring performance in every sense of the word.

The very name Orson Welles stands for genius wasted and betrayed, and the movie offers some foreshadowing of his triumphs and failures to come.

He’s a fox who’s used to being hounded by journalists, and as such he’s a very elusive subject for a documentary – even one by a filmmaker who’s renowned for getting his subjects to talk.

Even when their material is not much more substantial than a punchline overheard in a playground, Cheech and Chong, in their routines together, make being funny look as effortless as Ella Fitzgerald makes singing sound.[23 July 1980]

The Beautiful Game shines because of Nighy.