What's most singular about the project — beautifully shot in black-and-white 3D, which often gives the images a beguiling disembodied quality — is that in addition to providing access to the creative process and deepening the album experience, it serves as a profoundly affecting reflection on the pain of parents who have lost a child.

The beautiful closing landscape shots of the jungles and mountains suggest that memory extends even beyond the human dimension.

Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have performed a small miracle in adapting for the screen Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The Coens' typically superior filmmaking sustains the electrifying mood for most of the picture, but they are undone by being too faithful to the source novel by Cormac McCarthy.

It’s a modestly proportioned movie of quiet magnificence, one that feels spun of gossamer summer light and rooted in unshakeable depths.

A kinetic blend of a fictional Afro-futurist narrative, archival research on decades of Black visual and multimedia work, and personal history.

Claire Denis, not always an easy director, is in top form here directing an almost all-black cast with grace and delicacy. For the happy few, this is French art house cinema at its unpretentious best.

Remake is certainly a movie about memory, especially bad memories, but in a Proustian sense it’s a movie in search of lost time — both the time McElwee spent with his son and the time slipping away as the director and his peers grow old and die.

Final Cut will be screened theatrically ... and it demands to be seen there, both by longtime admirers and by young viewers lucky enough to have their first viewing be in a theater. ... This is an overwhelming sensory experience, with deep colors and nuanced sound amplifying the film's hypnotic effect.

What saves the movie's sobering latter developments, giving it an emotional wallop that overrides the flaws, is partly the sadness playing across Dafoe's face as Bobby watches from the sidelines.

The film’s methods are boldly unorthodox and its constantly alternating moods and shifts in tone from drama to humor, joy to tragedy can be disconcerting. It’s not a film for all audiences, but despite its eccentricities it is always watchable, thanks to strongly drawn characters and the soul-stirring poetry of its imagery.

The film’s minimalist aesthetic makes little concession to the usual forms of cinematic expression and extends to the set design: living spaces devoid of furniture, the nondescript hotel room, the typical street scenes. The two actors are similarly inexpressive, their faces blank as though personal interaction was a major risk.

For viewers who resist the temptation to flee for the nearest exit, this fascinating and probing look at modern surgery is a memorable experience, making us ponder our own humanity as we watch humans reduced to pure flesh-and-blood organisms.

Steven Spielberg has done it again. He has created another instant American classic.

Perhaps returning to Apocalypse Now will reinvigorate the once brilliant storyteller. Certainly, the images, colors and design still astonish. And let's hope that Apocalypse Now Redux will become the definitive version. For the movie hits home even harder now. [14 May 2001]

The teen-abortion factor tags Never Rarely Sometimes Always as an issue drama, and in the most unconventional way, it is — raw, haunting and painfully real. But it's perhaps better defined as a moving snapshot of female friendship, solidarity and bravery.

It's a marvelously quirky film, with not quite something for everybody.

A fully rounded and complicated portrait of both the man and a company that somehow managed to survive under devastating circumstances.

At this point it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Jonathan Glazer is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original.

The incisive beauty of the documentary, and its power, is that it's not a thesis or an argument but a full-blooded, multifaceted real-life drama.

In this brilliant depiction of the early years of TV and the phenomenal powers it asserted in breaking down the walls of America's living rooms and homogenizing our culture, director Robert Redford has crafted a superb piece of cracked Americana. Buena Vista will win heartfelt plaudits from mature audiences and, come awards season, will certainly increase its viewership through anticipated nominations. [9 Sept 1994]

Simultaneously a modern essay on suffering, an open-ended thriller, and a black social comedy, it is most importantly of all a thinly-veiled political parable drenched in bitter irony that takes aim against the corrupt, corrosive regime of Vladimir Putin.

Woody, Buzz and playmates make a thoroughly engaging, emotionally satisfying return.

This is an illuminating (self-)portrait of a young artist as well as a mesmerizing chronicle of a consuming, destructive relationship that steadily inches its way under the viewer's skin.

The Look of Silence is perhaps even more riveting for focusing on one man’s personal search for answers as he bravely confronts his brother’s killers.

As the melee comes to feel like it may never end, the film executes a masterful narrative shift that will produce instant lumps in many viewers' throats.

It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year.

This is a beautifully crafted film loaded with glancing insights and observations into an understated triangular relationship, one rife with subtle perceptions about class privilege, reverberating family legacies, creative confidence, self-invention, sexual jealousy, justice and revenge.