The screenwriter, Carlos Treviño, crafts frank dialogue and the director, Kyle Henry, films the scenes with an eye for the intimate, dividend-paying gesture. The superb actors, given opportunities to go for broke, make each one count, and make the movie worth watching.

It’s a sweet, strangely modest tragicomedy about the pleasures of (mostly banal) excess.

The film is much more than a biography of the Clash’s guitarist and lead singer: It’s history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud.

In following two young women employed as range riders in Idaho, the film presents its own modern-day picture of hard work and camaraderie.

It’s rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.

A hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing.

The charms of Sing Street should not be underestimated. Partly because its manner is unassuming and its story none too original...it’s easy to overlook Mr. Carney’s ingenuity and sensitivity.

Mr. Kerrigan isn't just playing with our sympathies; he's also playing with our assumptions. That keeps the tension going.

For one thing, the buildup is so grippingly patient that we’re more than halfway through before the titular battleground is reached. And for another, this painstakingly paced thriller displays an intensity of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss as well-executed trash.

Yellow Submarine is a family movie in the truest sense.

It's undeniably a trifle, but rarely is something like this done with such skill and, well, savoir-faire.

By keeping its focus admirably tight, the sober and sobering Israeli documentary The Law in These Parts presents a devastating case against the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In the end, this is a one-joke movie — a shaggy-dog meta-narrative — but it’s not a bad joke.

Absorbing if unsettling documentary.

The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.

Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.

Morris has fashioned a brilliant work of pulp fiction around this crime. [26 Aug 1988, p.C6]

Love is a mournful thriller about the myth of assimilation and the way nurture - or, more precisely, the lack of it - fashions identity and character. Elegantly directed by Vladan Nikolic using multiple viewpoints and an elliptical, nonlinear narrative, the movie presents a New World disrupted by old grievances and a neglected community living by its own rules.

Delirious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching film.

Ms. Chaplin, in one of her most touching screen performances, imbues Anne with a world-weary melancholy that makes your heart sink.

The movie is a worthy time capsule and a must for Cohen devotees. Its occasional meanderings into artiness, which take the form of interpolation of outside footage (war atrocities and home movies, mainly) are emblematic of the time it was made and mercifully brief.

While the immediacy of the storytelling may blur out precise details, it excels at building stakes.

Die-hard Elvis fans will no doubt call some of the characterization in Priscilla slander, but part of the achievement here is that Elvis is not simply a monster. Fame has merely given him the superpower of not having to pay attention to anyone else.

Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.

Tykwer deliberately blows away all traces of the mundane and the familiar, so that not even the closing credit crawl moves in the expected way.

Over all, this movie is less “you are there” than “you had to be there.”

Balsam is marvelous throughout, precisely measured in portraying a state often teetering on abjection. Balsam’s Lila can turn from luminescent to hangdog in a flash. The character’s inner worlds register with exceptional vividness.

In a sense, it’s less a documentary for posterity than an urgent broadcast. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth hearing.

By covering so much ground, it doesn’t have room to dig too deep. But along with some very funny footage of a master of his craft, it offers a convincing argument that while Gregory became famous for his comedy, what made him such a riveting cultural figure is what he did after he left it behind.

Black Swan is visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

The film resonates most deeply during its raw, vulnerable scenes.

The movie plays like a well-crafted game, one with stable rules and safeties, perfectly enjoyable but limited. The director and the performers circle ideas about how intimacy can be manipulated to satisfy artistic ambitions, but the experiment feels easy to leave behind.

Discrimination against nomadic populations is hardly restricted to Romania, but the integration of that country's largest ethnic minority seems particularly pressing. If only that view were shared by the Romanian adults on screen, most of whom display a shocking degree of prejudice.

Much like the Dardennes, Mr. Joachim holds to the truth that the personal is political, which is why this isn’t simply a movie about a woman and an unspeakable crime, but also an exploration of the power and cruelty that brought her to that very dark place.

16 Shots remains valuable as a record of past events that hold sway over the present.

One of the liveliest, gayest, wittiest and naughtiest comedies of a long hard season.

What is most impressive is the care with which Mr. Chung manages this risky undertaking. He seems to have made this film above all by listening and looking.

One of the most insightful and wrenching portraits of the joys and tribulations of being a classical musician ever filmed.

This is Kaufman’s most assured and daring work so far as a director.

The moral rot and callous corruption depicted in Angels Wear White has a particularly bracing effect in part because, cultural specifics aside, the inhumanity on display is hardly alien.

It takes its time at first, but once it really gets going, Lurker is snaky and disconcerting and smart.

Not the best he has done in this line. It is a coyly romantic story, done with animals. The sentimentality is mighty, and the use of the CinemaScope size does not make for any less awareness of the thickness of the goo.

He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.

Indignation might be dismissed as a small, exquisite period piece, but it is so precisely rendered that it gets deeply under your skin.

Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.

Mr. Hong's casually brilliant feat of storytelling, akin to an ingeniously wrought suite of literary short fiction.

Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle.

Bird is less moving as a character study than it is as a tribute and as a labor of love. The portrait it offers, though hazy at times, is one Charlie Parker's admirers will recognize.

A Brief History of Time is a kind of adventure that seldom reaches the screen, and it's a tonic.

It’s a sneak attack of a movie, one that invites your laughter, even as it jabs you in the ribs.

Mr. Tsai's films are held together internally, and connected one to another, by an elusive, insistent logic that is easier to recognize than to describe. But once you do start to recognize it, each new movie offers passage to an exotic place that feels, uncannily, like home.

This film works hypnotically, with great subtlety and grace, in ways that are gratifyingly consistent with Gould's own thoughts about his music and his life.

Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory and an implicit rebuke to the raunchy, sloppy spectacles of immaturity that have dominated the genre in recent years.

While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.

It is not simply that the movie fails to make sense. A lot of good movies are weak on sense—though they don't often require a leading man to be quite so dense for quite so long in interpreting the behavior of a psychotic leading woman. But they must not be weak in sensibility, in that logic of emotional response that is the real motive power of the atmospheric thriller.

There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.

As a chronicle of how San Francisco has changed over the years — and as a salute to the city’s role as a back lot for masters like Erich von Stroheim and Howard Hawks — The Green Fog is a wonder of excavation and urban history. What it says about Hitchcock is more ambiguous.

The details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.

28 Weeks Later is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It is brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying, as any respectable zombie movie should be. It is also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and in its techniques.

Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.

The Age of Shadows might tempt another filmmaker to dwell on issues or delve deeper into its characters’ hearts. Yet, for this director, exposition can’t hold a candle to elegantly staged shootouts. And who can blame him. He knows his strengths.

Chile ’76 is a sly genre exercise, an example of how political repression can squeeze a domestic melodrama until it takes the shape of a spy thriller.

Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.

The anomalous proliferation of scenic beauty gives Mr. Nolan irony to play with, and he uses it spectacularly. The director and his gifted cinematographer, Wally Pfister, are clearly turned on by all this wasted beauty.

Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, Kajillionaire is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence.

Mr. Richard's film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art.

You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.

In what has been called the Year of the Documentary, "My Flesh and Blood" stands beside "Capturing the Friedmans" and "The Fog of War" as an unforgettable experience.

It is a contrived fable but a bittersweet legend with laughs that leaves the spirits soaring.

Private Property embraces the banal and the monstrous, and affords Ms. Huppert opportunity to astonish rather than overwhelm.

Comprehensive, fulfilling film.

Joanna Lipper’s documentary shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.

It’s surprising there has never really been an extended cinematic exploration of the band. Long Strange Trip, ambitiously assembled and elegantly directed by Amir Bar-Lev, fills that void.

Powerfully gritty.

Ms. Bohdanowicz’s self-interrogation is clearly important to her art, but I think she worries too much, at least where this subject is concerned. Her hostess, a model of charm, good humor and senior wisdom, is a movie unto herself.

If some one could just have decided who should carry the ball, instead of letting it pass from one to the other, The Westerner might have been a bang-up, dandy film. And that, we are sorry to say, it isn't. The trouble, as indicated, is that the picture has no core.

A taut moral thriller, Styx is a story of what happens when self-reliance runs into other people’s desperation.

It uses animation to depict a conflict in fresh dimensions.

From Kathryn Hulme's novel The Nun's Story, which gives an amazing account of a young Belgian woman's experiences in becoming and being a nursing nun, screen writer Robert Anderson and director Fred Zinnemann have derived an equally amazing motion picture of an extraordinary dedicated life.

It’s a film of sensations and mystery that feels like it’s wafting toward us from another century, like much of the Quays’ work, channeling uncanny realms of Central European puppetry.

Though you may hear otherwise, Top Gun: Maverick is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie. But it is also, and perhaps more significantly, an earnest statement of the thesis that movies can and should be great.

A wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy.

There are subtly etched characters, effortlessly fine performances, and a moving story that is not easily forgotten.

What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.

The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.

An immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor.

Coolly executed and seductively simple, Oddity, the second feature from Damian McCarthy (after the unsettling, underseen “Caveat” in 2021), is a fun, back-to-basics supernatural thriller that cares more about making us jump than making us cringe.

A landmark feat of Japanese animation from the acknowledged master of the genre.

Malta’s views are arresting, but the images Camilleri chooses would never be found in a travel brochure. In his subtle, vérité approach, he captures something special — not one man’s crisis, but a community’s culture.

No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.

That old master of screen melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock, and Writer John Steinbeck have combined their distinctive talents in a tremendously provocative film—indeed, a surprisingly unique one—titled Lifeboat.

The theme music, from Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps" album, is a haunting accompaniment to Mr. Hopper's sometimes stunning imagery. The best moments of "Out of the Blue" have both the beauty and the banality of found art.

Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, Head-On is a hopeful film.

The Witches resembles a brilliantly told bedtime story, though the teller of this children's tale may well be the slightly cracked relative who can't judge when scary stories become nightmares.

At a time when throwaway gags seem like a luxury in any film, Airplane! has jokes—hilarious jokes—to spare. It's also clever and confident and furiously energetic, and it has the two most sadly neglected selling points any movie could want right now: it's brief (only eighty-eight minutes), and it looks inexpensive (it cost about three million dollars) without looking cheap. Airplane! is more than a pleasant surprise, in the midst of this dim movie season. As a remedy for the bloated self-importance of too many other current efforts, it's just what the doctor ordered.

A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.

Remarkable concert documentary.