The movie is full of inspired touches as well as excessive ones: its appeal lies in the way its humor always treads the line between sendup and campy overkill.

It is the greatest biblio-climax of any film since "Fahrenheit 451," although Truffaut's prayer was that reading might yet survive calamity and carry the torch of the civilized. Detachment snufffs out that faith; books it warns us, are the first thing to go. [19 March 2012, p.91]

A true nightmare.

Richardson is able to encompass so much in the widescreen frame that he shows how the whole corrupt mess works.

Park has conjured up not only his smartest but also his most stirring film to date. And the least icky.

Invisible Life is a heady blend of the casual, the sorrowful, the near-mythical, and the carnally explicit — never more so, be warned, than on Eurídice’s wedding night.

A high-spirited, elegantly deadpan comedy, with a mellow, light touch.

No weirder than Kaurismäki's previous efforts. Indeed, compared with “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” this venture tells an alarmingly straight tale. [7 April 2003, p.96]

Along with “No End in Sight,” this movie is one of the essential documentaries of the ongoing war.

How far the story of Christine Chubbuck ripples outward, registering the cultural stresses of its time (and ours), I’m not sure. As an eyewitness report of a lonely soul on the rack, however, the movie is hard to beat.

Still, however obvious the emotional setup, Heller, Hanks, and Rhys manage, Lord knows how, to skirt the pitfalls of mush, and to forge something unexpectedly strong.

Centering on a racetrack robbery, it has fast, incisive cutting; a nervous, edgy style; and furtive little touches of characterization.

Sinatra’s vocal swagger is as exhilarating as ever, on a stage that gives him room to strut. And the overall effect is to heighten the effect and the presence of Frank Loesser’s brash yet subtle and bluff yet intricate songs. It’s not filmed theatre, but the cinematic transfiguration of the theatrical experience.

It's clever and has some really chilling moments.

Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche on Broadway only a few years ago, gives the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. The actress, like her character, is out on a limb much of the time, but there’s humor in Blanchett’s work, and a touch of self-mockery as well as an eloquent sadness.

Amid its tightly plotted action, it seethes with a rage that seems pressurized by the sealed-off grimness of the pandemic years.

It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it's like a well-cared for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good, until the last half hour or so.

A dazzling romantic melodrama.

John Cusack and Mahoney have to carry the unconvincing melodramatic portion of the plot, but they carry it stunningly. [15 May 1989]

A raffishly ironic and insinuating movie--and probably the most sheerly enjoyable film of the year so far.

Fish tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as "The 400 Blows." [18 Jan. 2010, p. 83]

The movie’s story is conventional in shape, but it has passages of crazy exhilaration and brilliant invention.

The movie is constructed like a comic essay, with random frivolous touches, and much of it is shot in hot, bright color that suggests a neon fusion of urban night life and movie madness. The subtexts connect with viewers' funnybones at different times, and part of the fun of the movie is listening to the sudden eruptions of giggles--it's as if some kids were running around in the theatre tickling people.

This is a bizarre and surprisingly entertaining satirical comedy--the story of the search beyond theatre turned into theatre, or, at least, into a movie.

When the movie was over, a young boy sitting behind me said, "That was great!" He was satisfied, and rightly so.

While Woody Allen’s recent films have grown ever more hermetic in their perplexity, Baumbach is becoming as prolific, and as quick on the comic draw, as the Allen of yore. Will historians of humor look back on this movie, perhaps, and mark it as the point at which the torch was passed?

Reginald Hudlin directs this historical drama, set in 1941, with an apt blend of vigor and empathy.

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

It may be a hectic, giddy, absurd movie—but, in its evocation of a conspiracy so logical that it is beyond belief, the film dramatizes the power of such an idea to attract true believers.

You might suggest that Bridge of Spies plays everything a touch safe, and that its encomium to American decency need not be quite so persistent. But when a film is as enjoyable as this one, its timing so sweet, and its atmosphere conjured with such skill, do you really wish to register a complaint? Would it help?

Revved by the stage performances, the cast courses through the material with disciplined exuberance--especially the eight young actors at the center of the drama, many of whom have never appeared in a film before.

The required resolution is a long time in coming, but there's plenty to keep you diverted, including the light backchat among the semi-weirdos who make up the brothers' family, and Bullock's ridiculously watchable performance.

Knightley and West leap without a qualm into these excesses, not least the Feydeau-like saga of a flame-haired Louisiana heiress (Eleanor Tomlinson), who sleeps with both Willy and his wife, unbeknownst to her, though he beknew everything.

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

The movie is rife with confusions of every type, and Hooper handles them with clarity, grace, and a surprising urgency, far more at ease in this intimate drama than he was with the super-sized galumphings of “Les Misérables.”

If you don't mind the gore, you can enjoy Snowpiercer as a brutal and imaginative piece of science-fiction filmmaking. [7 & 14 July 2014, p.94]

You feel wiped and blinded by such ravishment, yet a voice within you asks: Come on, guys, can't you just stop for the holidays?

The three actresses put so much faith in their roles that they carry the movie, triumphantly. They take the play's borderline pathos about heartbreakingly screwed-up lives--it's a mixture of looniness and lyricism--and give it real vitality.

Azor is Fontana’s first feature, and what’s impressive is how coolly he avoids the temptation to put on a big show, preferring more delicate tactics.

Lady Bird, daring, distinctive, and personal in text and theme, is recognizably conventional in texture and style.

However moody, though, Two Lovers didn't strike me as a downer, for the simple reason that it wells with sights and sounds that are guaranteed to lift, not sink, the spirits.

As a performer, Morales is laughably smart, sympathetic, and engaging, and what’s so clever about Language Lessons is the deployment of that allure.

World War Z is the most gratifying action spectacle in years, and one reason for its success if the Pitt doesn't play a superhero. [1 July 2013, p.76]

Skillful and compelling this film may be, but, if Neil Armstrong had been the sort of fellow who was likely to cry on the moon, he wouldn’t have been the first man chosen to go there. He would have been the last.

The movie is a moralized historical fantasy, mixing love and politics in Old Hollywood style. Yet I can’t bring myself to be indignant about its inventions. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was born in Oxford and has acted since she was a child, speaks her lines with tremulous emotion and, finally, radiant authority. Austen, I think, would have been thrilled.

Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama; she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity.

William Wellman's direction is more leisurely than usual; he has such good material here that he takes his time.

Misericordia is, fundamentally, a snappy and satisfying entertainment, a thriller that thrills.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

Even as the film abounds in behavioral details, rendering its four protagonists’ personalities in sharp outlines, it never presumes to know too much about them; the movie shows what Sasquatches are like without assuming what it’s like to be a Sasquatch.

Miraculously, he (Polanski) brightens the faded material, and conjures his most graceful work in years.

One of the best of the lighthearted rah-rah collegiate musicals.

Orson Welles' portrait of the friend, Harry Lime, is a study of corruption - evil, witty, unreachable.

A big, enjoyable musical biography, well directed by Michael Curtiz.

A low-budget winner--a romantic fable about a Philadelphia palooka who gains his manhood, written by and starring muscle-bound Sylvester Stallone, who is repulsive one moment, noble the next. He's amazing to watch.

For all the film’s roiling action, its inner life is in little grace notes that open enormous vistas of time.

Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time.

Scott may always have had an eye on the box office, but from "Alien" and "Thelma & Louise" on, he has made women into heroines. In that regard, he's still ahead of the curve. Rapace's scene is a classic of its kind; it tops John Hurt's notorious misfortunes in "Alien."

Along with the wild psychology of “Suburban Fury,” Devor evokes the era’s wild politics, which, for all its ideological phantasmagoria, create unimpeachable realities.

Farsi hasn’t made a rhetorical film of persuasion—anyone who needs a name and a face to be moved by reports of killings is beyond persuading—but a personal memorial for a friend and a public archive of that friend’s work.

Vincente Minnelli directed, in a confident, confectionery styles that carries all--or almost all--before it.

Most fruitful of all is the husbandry of the gags, some of which are planted early in the film and must wait for more than an hour before they bloom.

Fast and enjoyable, with Poitier's color used for comedy.

Strangest of all, we go along with it in a sort of dream, scarcely pausing to complain, so expert is Mungiu at drawing us into the fold of these passionate souls. [8 March 2013, p.80]

Nothing out of the ordinary happens in Blue Valentine, and that, together with the vital, untrammelled performances of the two leading actors, is the root of its power.

The ghost, on the other hand, grows ever more imposing, and the movie’s most touching spectacle — it’s also the funniest — is that of C standing at the window and waving to another ghost, in the adjacent house.

Stroker slips down the gullet with less fuss, but there are enough blood sprays and snapped vertebrae to pacify the director's clamorous fan club -- and, for the rest of us, plenty of chances to reconsider his style. It is, unquestionably, something to behold. [8 March 2013, p.80]

Okja is a fairy tale of sorts, though too foulmouthed for children; it nips from pastoral bliss to a terrorist pig-napping by the Animal Liberation Front; and it takes the eco-menace from Bong’s sublime “The Host” (2006) and replays the fright as farce, with a spirited turn from Tilda Swinton, as the company boss, and, I’m afraid, a barely watchable one from Jake Gyllenhaal, as a drunk TV presenter.

It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.

Sex is the subtext of everything that happens, yet this may be one of the least erotic movies ever made. It's stern and noble, very much in the Rattigan spirit. [26 March 2012, p.108]

The movie is haunted by death and loss, focussing on men who live in stifled grief and reconcile themselves to solitude—a personal desolation that is doubled by Japan’s collective mourning for those who were lost to the country’s catastrophic war.

Abe is blustery and self-pitying, but, with Solondz's new tender mercies fully engaged, Gelber makes you feel close to a guy for whom nothing was ever meant to go right.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

The Farrelly brothers, who directed, take physical comedy to levels of intricacy not seen since silent movies.

The movie seems lived-in; its virtually tactile details and its trenchantly analytical dialogue feel like intimate aspects of the filmmaker's audiovisual, emotional, and intellectual experience.

In short, The Descendants is the latest exhibit in Payne's careful dissection of the beached male, which runs from Matthew Broderick's character in "Election" to Jack Nicholson's in "About Schmidt" and Paul Giamatti's in "Sideways."

This unapologetically grown-up movie about separating is perhaps the most revealing American movie of its era. Though the director, Alan Parker, doesn't do anything innovative in technique, it's a modern movie in terms of its consciousness.

It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.

Graceful and all-embracing.

If Sicario does not collapse under its own grimness, that is because of the pulse: the care with which Villeneuve keeps the story beating, like a drum, as he steadies himself for the next set piece.

Those who worship Joy Division may bridle at Corbijn’s film for its reluctance to mythologize their hero. Speaking as someone so irretrievably square that I not only never listened to the band but didn’t even know anyone who liked it, I can’t imagine a tribute more fitting than this.

Apatow’s richest, most complicated movie yet--a summing up of his feelings about comedy and its relation to the rest of existence.

Looking back at the film, I don't buy all this, but no matter; Channing is so stormy, so keen to unleash her resentments, that for an hour or so you do believe in Julie. [17 Dec 2001, p.98]

The picture has a lovely, understated autobiographical lilt.

Friends with Benefits is fast, allusive, urban, glamorous - clearly the Zeitgeist winner of the summer.

The Artist is not just about black-and-white silent pictures. It is a black-and-white silent picture. And it's French.

Bean, a lovely guy with a touch of Mickey Rooney, is one of the stars of Sington’s rousing show. There was something unearthly, in every sense, about the astronauts in their prime.

Vignettish and offhand, but it’s extremely pleasant, and it suggests what can be done with lightweight equipment and a loose-limbed approach to the right subject. [19 May 2003, p. 94]

Flags of Our Fathers is an accomplished, stirring, but, all in all, rather strange movie

Unimaginable as anything but a movie. It’s largely wordless, sombrely spectacular, vast and intimate at the same time, with a commitment to detailed physical reality that commands amazed attention for a tight hundred minutes.

Mungiu’s pacing is so sure, however, in its switching from loose to taut, and the concentration of his leading lady so unwavering, that the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels more like a thriller than a moody wallow.

Overall, it's a terrific movie, even though the pacing doesn't always seem quite right.

Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination.

It’s not just a blast but, at moments, a thing of beauty, alive to the comic awesomeness of being lost in space.

As the title promises, Full Time is centered on work. It’s one of the best recent movies about work, and it approaches the subject with sharply analytical specificity.

I prefer to think of Akin, however, not as a forger of patterns but as an ironist who understands that bad luck is a crucible, in the heat of which we are tested, burned away, or occasionally transformed. The Edge of Heaven is about something more exasperating than crossed paths; it is about paths that almost cross but don't, and the tragedy of the near-miss.