Although there isn't anything startlingly original in this tale of three Catholic girls falling in love in late-fifties Ireland, it gets a sweet telling in Pat O'Connor's pretty film.

Burnett used many kinds of African-American music on the soundtrack, and the movie itself has the bedraggled eloquence of an old blues record. The amateur actors, who occasionally burst into fury, combined with the black-and-white cinematography, bring the poverty of Watts closer to us emotionally.

Beba is an intimate film with a grand scope; Huntt recognizes herself and her family as characters in a mighty drama. She conceives the complex course of intertwined personal experiences and public events as a kind of destiny.

What we glean from Belvaux’s trilogy is the reassurance (rare on film, with its terror of inattention) that people are both important and unimportant, and that heroes and leading ladies, in life as in art, can fade into extras before our eyes. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] [2 February 2004, p. 94]

Doris Day is at her friendliest and most likable as the tomboy heroine of this big, bouncy Western musical about Jane's romance with Wild Bill Hickok.

You can see the jokes coming well in advance, but you still laugh uncontrollably.

It’s among the most visually extravagant films ever made.

Moving and impressive in a big-Hollywood-picture-way.

Dafoe and Pattinson have the stage pretty much to themselves, and the result is a beguiling crunch of styles.

The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies.

The movie is also about a man without fear. It is often funny and stirring, but as you are watching you know what the game will lead to; dictatorships are not known for their sense of humor. [5 March 2012, p. 86]

Though “Afternoons of Solitude” shows only the present tense of bullfighting, it looks deep into history and spotlights the tragic contradictions of modern life itself.

Its core of information is largely a footnote to Aaron Sorkin’s drama “Being the Ricardos,” but, with access to previously unreleased audio tapes recorded by Ball and Arnaz, Poehler vividly and poignantly evokes their offscreen personalities.

With its charming performances, bubble-gum colors, and intentionally funny product placements, the movie is like a kiss in a candy store—silly and sweet.

Along with the documentation of material destruction and displacement, the movie is a record of psychological warfare, of the effort to demolish morale, suppress energy, break will. This, as much as the physical violence that it documents, gives the movie immense moral authority.

Claudel turns out to be very good at the psychology of intimacy. An observant man, he has assembled a large (and, to us, unknown) cast of actors around his star, and he dramatizes her slow reawakening with an infinite number of small, sharply etched details.

Serge Bozon’s sharply political comedy—a giddily imaginative reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale—stars Isabelle Huppert, who revels in its sly blend of dissonant humor, intellectual fervor, and macabre violence.

Lodkina borrows one of the most familiar of young filmmakers’ tropes—the drama of a film student struggling to complete a thesis film—and transforms it into something as original as it is personal.

Eminem does not come off as a megalomaniac in 8 Mile, but he expects people to be very, very impressed. I doubt he could lend himself to a fiction that said anything else: his eyes couldn't tell any story but his own. [11 November 2002, p. 195]

For the most part, Pieces of a Woman is a model of concentration and clout, fired up by actors of unstinting ardor.

Ozu makes silence his very subject. In warm and humorous scenes, it emerges as the abyss of the generation gap; but here, Ozu stands his own ironic inversions on their head.

The director Anthony Mann fleshes out the intricate story with vigorous and subtle attention to its disparate elements—political, psychological, and brutal.

With Old, facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic—on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it—Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity.

What the writer and director, Sean Durkin, delivers here is not a cult film at all but something more troubled and insidious - a film about a cult.

In short, Haynes is so smart, tolerant, and thoughtful that he has to be saved by his actors. Julianne Moore takes this picture further, perhaps, than anyone can have dreamed. [18 November 2002, p. 104]

A genuine love story might be difficult for a young audience to handle, but this fantasy is blissful madness--an abstinence fable sexier than sex.

Blancanieves is a feast for the film-crazy. [8 April 2013, p.89]

All in all, however, this is one of the director’s most absorbing works. It soaks you up, and its melancholy (a shot of Martin, say, eating cereal on his own, in the semi-dark) is somehow less disturbing than its sprees.

The director Chris McKim incisively intertwines a generous batch of audio interviews with Wojnarowicz’s friends, family, and associates; a rich set of archival footage to conjure his time and place; and vigorous effects to evoke his inner world.

Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the passion of a woman who'd kill a man for trying to leave her. She is helped by an excellent script (by Howard Koch) and by two unusually charged performances--James Stephenson as her lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband.

Its clarity and simplicity—and the outrageous, nearly humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complex, and turbulent stories—makes it among Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable films.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff is an entertaining and instructive jaunt, and it bristles with small shocks.

Abrupt and fragmentary, but powerful. [Dec 10 2001, p. 111]

In short, this film is not quite the frozen and brittle comedy that it appears to be, and, if you can stomach it the first time, you may experience a baffling wish to see it again -- to inspect this crystalline curiosity from another angle. [16 September 2002, p. 106]

As the poor man of refinement, the overlooked wanderer despairing of romance, the survivalist imp of defiant pride, Chaplin is the apotheosis of the world’s despised and downtrodden, and also their hope.

Hoppers is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same.

Good-natured, full of verbal-visual jokes, and surprisingly entertaining, though the love is less impressive than the music.

This is tricky, ambiguous material, seemingly better fitted to a short literary novel than to a movie, and it could have gone wrong in a hundred ways, yet Baumbach handles it with great assurance.

A wonderfully entertaining movie.

For Wiseman, the “small pleasures” of the title are highly concentrated distillations of mighty exertions, from the grand and carefully catalogued tradition of French cooking to the immediate tradition of the Troisgros family restaurants (now in its fourth generation).

No Ordinary Man challenges the very basis of cultural production, eschewing the familiar accumulation of biographical and historical information and instead questioning the process by which such information is gathered.

May be the most exquisitely crafted movie ever made about a bunch of nitwits. [10 & 17 June 2013, p. 110]

It is not that Pattinson has ceased to make our hearts throb but that he has learned to claw at our nerves, too, and even to turn our stomachs, all without sinking his teeth into a single neck. The vampire is laid to rest.

In peeling away the myths of pop culture and its lovable celebrities, Sorkin reveals the source of its mighty and lasting power.

The movie has pace and lustre to spare, and the actors are richly invested in their characters, not hesitating to make them crabby and selfish, when need be, as well as sympathetic.

Deep Red evinces the full extent of Argento’s seductive artistry. The film’s glamorous collection of psychics, dandies, and artists suggestively discuss murder as if they’re speaking of sex. And aren’t they, really?

The Spectacular Now goes a little soft at the end, but most of it has the melancholy sense of life just passing by — until, that is, someone has the courage to grab it and make it take some meaning and form.

Fargeat’s movie can be called many things: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles where it unfolds. It’s also a movie of process, deliberately paced, exactingly observed, and no less gripping for its sometimes gruelling repetitions.

Nothing is more promisingly solid, to the moviegoer, than a major Spielberg production. You can foretell everything from the calibration of the craftsmanship to the heft of the cast, and The Post inarguably delivers.

Not to warm to this movie would be churlish, and foodies will drool on demand.

What we glean from Belvaux’s trilogy is the reassurance (rare on film, with its terror of inattention) that people are both important and unimportant, and that heroes and leading ladies, in life as in art, can fade into extras before our eyes. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] [2 February 2004, p. 94]

As the camera darts down alleyways, or prowls the housing projects where soldiers fear to tread, what really concerns Demange — and what lends such a kick to O’Connell’s performance, on the heels of “Starred Up” and “Unbroken” — is the bewilderment and the panic that await us, whoever we may be, in limbo.

There is more to ponder, in this uncommon movie, than there is to plumb. Broad rather than deep, and layering the vintage with the modern, it’s a collage of shifting surfaces — an appropriate form for a pilgrim soul like Martin, whose gifts, though plentiful, do not include a talent for staying still.

While displaying the erratic workings of the law and the crucial importance of journalism, the movie’s legal focus narrows its imaginative scope; the drama, though infuriating and moving, sticks to its characters’ surfaces.

Writer-director Tamara Jenkins hits on a visual style that perfectly reflects her script's endearing juxtaposition of wackiness, sweetness, and sorrow.

One of the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New Orleans.

Sydney Pollack's directing is efficient and the film is moderately entertaining, but it leaves no residue. Except for the intensity of Newman's sly, compact performance...and the marvelously inventive acting of Melinda Dillon.

Still, it's le Carre's material; it was shot in dark, lurid, vital Hamburg; Hoffman is the star; and I was completely held. [28 July 2014, p.79]

Al Mansour is too smart to overdo the symbolic spin, but the thrust of her film, toward the end, could hardly be more urgent. [16 Sept. 2013, p. 72]

It isn’t a dialogue comedy; it’s visceral and lower. It’s what used to be called a crazy comedy, and there hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years. It’s a film to go to when your rhythm is slowed down and you’re too tired to think. You can’t bring anything to it (Brooks’ timing is too obvious for that) ; you have to let it do everything for you, because that’s the only way it works.

Bright and crisp and funny, the movie turns dish into art--or, if not quite into art, then at least into the kind of dazzling commercial entertainment that Hollywood, in the days of George Cukor or Stanley Donen, used to turn out.

I confess that I was held so spellbound by Fastvold’s musical flights of fancy—and by the attendant sweep and muscularity of her filmmaking—that I felt let down by the more prosaic moments, when everyone doesn’t erupt into song and dance.

Seldom, it is fair to say, does Kaufman just want to have fun, but as he lifts the spell of his gloom a surprising beauty breaks through.

A celebrated, craftsmanlike tearjerker, and incredibly neat.

The Fabelmans may look nice ’n’ easy as it swings along, with a pile of laughs to cushion the ride, and a nifty visual gag in the closing seconds, but take care. Here is a film that is touched with the madness of love.

A hugely successful slam-bang thriller that zaps the audience with noise, speed, and brutality. It's certainly exciting, bu that excitement isn't necessarily a pleasure. The ominous music keeps tightening the screws and heating things up; the movie is like an aggravated case of New York.

The horror is genuinely visceral, yet the story, aided by impassioned work from Chalamet and Russell, pushes onward with a rough and desperate grace. Bones and All proves difficult to watch, but looking away is harder still.

With Experiment in Terror, Edwards, working in the familiar genre of criminal depravity, does something that may well be, for Hollywood, unprecedented: he makes a virtual piece of film criticism in movie form.

An echo of an echo, a convergence of social-scientific cinema and stifled screams of pain that appears designed, urgently and precisely, to break the silence.

A film that cannot, in the normal sense of the word, be enjoyed, but it can be endured in a spirit of tempered anticipation -- The movie becomes an anguished demand that the dream be fulfilled. [26 Nov 2001, p. 122]

It has a distinctive and surprising spirit. It's funny, delicate, and intense -- all at the same time.

Historians of the period will learn nothing new from the movie, yet it remains a stirring enterprise, especially when it peers back, beyond the bright public record of Gorbachev’s heyday, into the mist of what feels like a distant past.

Waters gets uniformly bright performances from the large cast -- especially Christina Ricci as Pecker's girlfriend and Mary Kay Place as his mother -- and he succeeds in composing yet another twisted love letter to his home town.

Though the story builds slowly (and the first half may seem a little pokey), the characters are more red-blooded and vigorous and eccentric than in most other Zinnemann films.

Ford is more than a witness—he is a crucial participant in the events of the film, and its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in his grief-stricken, self-interrogating aesthetic.

Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it,than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, is a declaration of that love.

Classic, compulsively watchable rags-to-riches-and-heartbreak weeper, from a novel by Fannie Hurst.

Why put yourself through Passages, then, if it’s so painful a trip? Largely because of Rogowski. Tomas is a beast, and were he played by an actor of less vehemence he’d be a pain in the neck and nothing more. As it is, he pulls us into the jungle.

Not every rarity is a revelation, but Lady Killer strikes me as the real deal.

In “Oh, Canada,” Schrader realizes a tale of immense complexity with bold ease. He is helped by the sharp-eyed editing of Benjamin Rodriguez, Jr., and the variety of Andrew Wonder’s cinematography.

The movie is also sparing with metaphors and symbols—though the few that Rasoulof builds into the texture of the drama, such as a view of Javad’s wet military uniform hanging from a tree and an image of a fox prowling around a farm, are piercingly effective.

With one foot in the French New Wave and the other in the Ballets Russes, Cocteau fits a raging confession into a serene, sensuous neoclassical vessel.

The emotional wallop grows more zealous with almost every sequence, and Loach’s refusal to go easy on us is as stubborn as it was when he made “Cathy Come Home.”

[Anthony] turns a concluding sequence of civic pride and good cheer into a brilliantly light-hearted fantasy of grave import, a radical political utopia conjured with a deft artistic flourish. It’s one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema.

What Landes has done is to revise, and to render yet starker, the premise of “Lord of the Flies.”

Their amateur restaging of the deportation is at the core of Greene’s movie, which grows into an adventurous exercise in drama-documentary; what could have seemed arch or awkward is handled with grace and tact, and there is even a song. Not that all hurts are healed. The rifts and scars, like those in the landscape, are here to stay.

Statistics and their alleged true meaning are at the heart of Moneyball, but it's also one of the most soulful of baseball movies - it confronts the anguish of a tough game.

The over-all tone of the drama—concerning foxhole friends who end up as partners in crime but rivals in love—evokes the flailings of unformed men whom a heedless society tossed in harm’s way and then cast aside.

Even if DNA and memories could be duplicated at will, Bong suggests, individual morality would remain a glorious uncertainty principle, too human and singular to be nailed down. There’s a strange comfort in that idea, and in the movie’s sweetly hopeful finale.

Consistently entertaining and eerily beautiful.

The movie’s panoramic cityscapes teem with the gritty details of emotional life: romance and chores, hope and despair and loss, bitter resentments and rowdy reckonings with mortality.

Here’s the thing, though. Hereditary is far more upsetting than it is frightening, and I would hesitate to recommend it to the readily traumatized.

That is the thing about Gibson, fool that he is in other ways: he has learned how to tell a tale, and to raise a pulse in the telling. You have to admire that basic gift, uncommon as it is in Hollywood these days.

Probably the most consistently entertaining of the Bond packages up to the time - not as startling as parts of "Goldfinger" but much superior to "Thunderball."

I prefer Wildlife when it gets messier, as Mulligan casts aside her natural sweetness to bring us a soured soul, driven only by the courage of her confusion. So rank is the unhappiness that you can almost smell the bitter smoke of the fires, drifting from far away.

Allen can be literal-minded about his thematic polarities, but, in this movie, he has put actors with first-class temperament on the screen, and his writing is both crisp and ambivalent: he works everything out with a stringent thoroughness that still allows room for surprise.

It's an enormous pleasure to see a movie that's really about something, and that doesn't lay on any syrupy coating to make the subject go down easily.