Overall, Pio's accelerated passage from adolescence to adulthood is depicted with moving honesty and sensitivity.

Despite fine performances by Stephen Fry and Jude Law, Wilde is a disappointingly predictable and uninvolving film portrait of Victorian wit and writer Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned for being homosexual. [01 May 1998]

Given no one is a novelist or a poet or a filmmaker here, this represents a bit of an adventure for Hong beyond his usual milieu. That said, this is still profoundly slight stuff, thin and ineffable as mist.

Superbly made and winningly acted by Brad Pitt in his most impressive outing to date.

Ultimately, the film, for all its evident verisimilitude, never really demonstrates a compelling reason for being.

A film whose fascination with bees and their mammoth impact on the global food chain extends far beyond the subject of colony collapse disorder. Arthouse audiences will eat it up.

Hedda is a delightful, sexy ride made that reminds us that Thompson is a star and DaCosta has many more tricks up her sleeve. It’s good to hear her unique narrative voice again.

Though the script's handling of the decision itself is uncomfortably abrupt, everything leading up to it benefits from a convincing, lived-in vibe.

Sensitive performances from the young cast ensure that the story ultimately acquires poignancy, and the arresting physical setting helps disguise the familiarity of some of its coming-of-age signposts.

The main virtue of the film lies in the thoughtful interviews given by the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, both the accompanying voiceover commentaries and their later on-camera appearances.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.

Rodeo is a combustible fusion of crime story, character study and existential mystery, a tale of celebration and lament, and it announces the arrival of a gifted and adventurous filmmaker.

This is a fresh, unsentimental yet touching story.

The cast's likability keeps us on board, watching the sometimes baffling behavior onscreen just like those on the streets of Seoul, who gape up at a monster in horror but can't make themselves flee to the suburbs.

Blank City may not be groundbreaking, but it's vibrant and well researched.

The baseline is a drama of criminality and redemption, but then there’s an unforced current of Almodóvarian humor, along with moments of melodrama, noir, social realism, a hint of telenovela camp and a climactic escalation into suspense, ultimately touched by tragedy.

Enjoyably shaggy ... Both [Maron] and [Shelton] seem happy to play to their fans in this modest outing, worrying little about straying beyond their comfort zones.

With Monkey Man, Patel offers an allegorical story that combines the technical and heroic sensibilities of his favorite action figures (Bruce Lee, John Wick) with the mythologies rooted in his ethnic identity.

The film's timing is fortuitous, as a worldwide calamity might conceivably make governments more receptive to Piketty's proposals for redistribution and reform. But it leaves one wishing for a longer-form project.

With her debut, Xiao Jiang has created the Chinese equivalent of "Cinema Paradiso." The Beijing Film Academy graduate's confident first feature is a lovely, elegant paean to the joy and liberty that films offer as a symbol.

The film never becomes morbid, though, which is both its strength and weakness.

This is an illuminating close-up on a vital cog in the moviemaking machine and a fresh perspective on key episodes in the birth of the New Hollywood.

It's an unsettling, "Taxi Driver"-like character study that shows the underside to hero worship and the primal world of professional football.

The idyll is all so jolly that when the film swerves into misfortune in the final act, it feels not like a necessary dramatic corrective but just a dreary downer, like medicine there to stop the spoonfuls of sugar from going down so easily.

The result is an effects-laden goofball comedy in which anything goes and nothing matters. Not that this is an entirely plot-free extravaganza or just an excuse for comic riffs. But the filmmakers are so cavalier about the idea that any of this is supposed to make any sense that there's a certain liberation in not burdening two human-brained insects with the fate of the entire universe.

Simplicity and maturity of vision are the virtues here, good qualities but perhaps a little too understated for major attention-grabbing.

Though Sun Children lacks the visual lushness and poetry that made Children of Heaven so seductive, its condemnation of child labor and the inaccessibility of basic education to the poor comes across with great force.

Good Trouble is more symbolic than it is eye-opening, and that’s not necessarily a problem. It’s the film equivalent of a textbook, telling us everything we want to hear about Lewis — even though most of it we already know — and arriving at a moment when reflecting upon America’s long history of racism is more relevant than ever.