With the screenwriters Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, Hunt adapted the story from a 1990 novel by Elinor Lipman, and has turned the material into a fine, tense, unpredictable comedy of mixed-up emotions and sudden illuminations.

The actors provide the nuances, with stirring grace: just as Taylor-Johnson tempers Jamie’s own alpha machismo with a gentle, unfeigned paternal tenderness, so the extraordinary Comer gives Isla, even at her most despairing, an astonishing toughness of body, mind, and spirit.

We get tired of watching Whip fail, and we're caught between dismayed pity and a longing to see him punished. Only a great actor could have pulled off this balancing act. [12 Nov. 2012, p.94]

Susan Sarandon does inspired double-takes - just letting her beautiful dark eyes pop.

It's an expertly made, intentionally minor movie, though when Monroe, doping herself with everything available, lies in bed, confused and hapless, there are depressing intimations of the end to come.

Noah may not make much sense, but only an artist could have made it. [7 April 2014, p.74]

The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment, involving long needles, tight wraps, and a full-body cast, with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

Jude Law, saying farewell once again to his youthful good looks (Dom has scars and a little too much weight), makes this hyper-articulate ruffian the most intricately soulful character in current movies. [7 April 2014, p.75]

It runs roughly two and a half hours, and the intensity spikes with every fight; without Russell Crowe and Paul Giamatti, however, it would be flat on the canvas. They make it seem a better and more bristling film than it actually is.

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.

It’s a freestanding, freewheeling work that relies on familiar characters to tell a story closer in substance and tone to the sexual fury, social outrage, wild humor, and outlaw freedom of John Waters’s films, and it has a vociferously didactic streak that’s playful yet focussed.

The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm.

The new film is definitely suaver and busier, glinting with wit and concluding in, of all cities, Singapore.

Midler gives a paroxysm of a performance - it's scabrous yet delicate, and altogether amazing. The movie is hyper and lurid, yet it's also a very strong emotional experience, with an exciting visual and musical flow, and there are sharply written, beautifully played dialogue scenes.

This piece of Pop Art Americana is a clever, generally engaging screwball comedy.

The film, directed by Perry Henzell, is feverish and haphazard, but the music redeems much of it, and the rhythmic swing of the Jamaican speech is hypnotic.

Aronofsky's delirious, Kafkaesque writing and imaginatively distorted camerawork don't quite add up, but it's fascinating, hallucinogenic film work.

The symptoms may be far from covid-like, and the mortality rate, as far as we can gather, is blessedly low, but what Nikou evokes, with a haunting prescience, is the air of a stunned world.

The invective energy of Four Lions and its Swiftian vision of a confederacy of dunces are never in doubt. The problem is one of form. [15 Nov. 2010, p.99]

What animates The Banshees of Inisherin and saves it from stiffness is the clout of the performances. Within the oxlike Colm, thanks to Gleeson, we glimpse a ruminative despair, and Farrell adds Pádraic to his gallery of heroes so hapless that they forfeit all claim to the heroic. The movie, however, belongs to Condon.

The extraordinarily imaginative new feature by Christopher Munch, The 11th Green, stakes out a genre unto itself: poli-sci-fi, a fusion of science fiction and the history-rooted political thriller.

The script (John Farris's adaptation of his novel) is cheap gothic espionage occultism involving two superior beings--spiritual twins (Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving) who have met only telepathically. But the film is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world; no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many "classic" sequences.

Anybody hoping that The End of the Tour would mirror the formal dazzle of Wallace’s fiction, doubling back on itself like the frantically probing encounters in his 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” will be disappointed. Yet the film, despite its flatness, is worth exploring.

Harlow is intensely liable, delivering her zingy wisecracks with a wonderful dirty good humor, and Gable is at that early peak in his career when he is so sizzlingly sexual that it seems both funny and natural for the two women to be fighting over him.

Lee is nimble-witted, and he’s always on the offensive; he stays in your face until you’re too exhausted to resist. You have to watch your reactions closely or he’ll speed right past you, get you to nod assent to an argument you haven’t fully realized he was making. Most American movies just want to knock you senseless immediately and get it over with; Do the Right Thing tries to wear you down, and its strategies are fascinating.

Allen's new movie, Match Point, devoted to lust, adultery, and murder, is the most vigorous thing he's done in years.

The result, like many of Winterbottom's films, lies an inch short of disarray; we CAN keep pace with the investigation, but only just, and that sense of splintering honors the unpredictability of the setting.

Black holes, relativity, singularity, the fifth dimension! The talk is grand. There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Hans Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.

Far more valuable is the urgency with which the movie stares ahead, as it were, at any future legislation that would incite women to take such dire measures once again.

The trouble is that, for all the comedy and the poignancy of this central concept, the movie requires a plot.

For all the movie’s kinetic thrills, “The Fall Guy” is a romantic comedy, and it succeeds in delivering that genre’s patterned gratifications in a fashion that does more than reheat them.

Most of Lindon’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fascination of their performances—and of the world of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas.

The first twenty minutes of Wedding Crashers are rabid with simple pleasure.

Jerry Schatzberg directs the film with a sleek yet relaxed precision that mirrors Joe’s own breezy confidence.

Above all, there is Tom Cruise, whose career was in the ascendant, with “Risky Business” (1983) and “Legend” (1985), in the frantic years covered by the second half of American Made. Because he has changed so little in the interim, and mounted so uncanny a resistance to the onslaught of time, we feel, with a jolt, that we are gazing up at a star as he both was and still is. Astronomers may flee the cinema in confusion.

Michael Ritchie's direction is highly variable in quality, but he's a whiz at catching details of frazzled behaviour.

The impasse implied in “The Novelist’s Film” gets a strenuous and sardonic dramatic workout in "Walk Up," which is both a work of art and a theory of art—or, rather, several theories, which emerge in the course of the discussions between characters who are themselves artists or former artists.

Stranger by the Lake, it must be said, flirts with monotony. There is something both fascinating and numbing in the rituals on display, and in the matching rhythm of the film's approach. [27 Jan.2014, p.79]

Where the eyes of a Disney princess grow wide as her pumpkin becomes a coach, the folk in Tale of Tales accept that miracles happen, being not an irruption into life but part of its natural flow.

This slapstick adventure comedy is in the commercial genre of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's a simpler, more likable entertainment than Raiders; it doesn't leave you feeling exhausted.

Lo and Behold is, by virtue of its scope, one of Herzog’s more scattershot endeavors.

So skilled are both Carell and Tatum that the movie itself falls prey to the characters’ repression. Though never less than careful and clever, it’s also a stunted and fiercely unhappy piece of work, straining hard to deliver home truths about a commonweal that has beaten itself out of shape.

The performance that lingers, once the tale is told, is that of Jay Pharoah as Nate, a fellow-patient on Sawyer’s ward, who has furtively kept hold of his cell phone (she was deprived of hers), and who lends the film an understated calm.

Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film has a few shocking fast cuts, but it also has scabrous elegance and a surprising amount of humor.

Performs the unlikely trick of being both taut and plotless.

For all the beauty and power of Road to Perdition, there's not much spontaneity in it, and the movie's flawless surface puts a stranglehold on meaning. [15 July 2002. p. 90]

This mixture of poverty and fantasy will not be for everyone. Compare the angry reaction to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” when it came out, in 1950; not content with revealing the plight of destitute children, in Mexico City, Buñuel had the temerity to swerve into nightmare.

Linklater’s direction keeps “Hit Man” brisk and jazzy, as does the jovial force of Powell’s performance.

This movie has almost no bite but plenty of moseying charm, and what it does get right is the idea of poets as perpetual magpies.

The whole thing became amorphous and confused. Paramount did rather better by the romance than the politics; Ingrid Bergman is lovely and affecting as Maria.

Amanda Rose Wilder’s nuanced and passionate documentary, about the first year of a “free” elementary school in New Jersey, reveals the glories and the limitations of unstructured classrooms and observational filmmaking alike.

You don't feel bamboozled, fooled, or patronized by District 9, as you did by most of the summer blockbusters. You feel winded, and shaken, and shamed. [September 14, 2009, pg.115]

Nobody, not even a hard-core Schrader fan, could claim that First Reformed makes for easy listening, or viewing. If anything, it outstrips its predecessors in severity.

A rowdy burlesque of the Dracula movies, set in Manhattan, with dilapidated stuffed bats and a large assortment of gags; some of them are funny in a low-grade, moldy way, and some are even stupidly racist, but many are weirdly hip, with a true flaky wit.

In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.

The revelation here is Chevallier—or, to quote the end credits, “Martine Chevallier of the Comédie Française”—as Mado. Watch her watching the people around her, after the languid strength of her body has failed. Some of them discuss her as if she were absent, or dead, but her sharp blue eyes, following the action, and almost filling the movie screen, show that her wits are intact. So is her force of will. She’s all there.

One may be horrified by these two, or laugh at them, but both horror and laughter give way to amazement at the human talent for survival.

Betzer’s view of the family’s pathologies goes far beyond troubled nature and lack of nurture to probe haunted American landscapes. Violence and tenderness, piety and crime unite in a terrifying tangle of stunted emotions.

Midnight has one big problem: Allen hardly gives Gil a perceptive moment. He's awestruck and fumbling - he doesn't possess, to our eyes, the conviction of a writer. But who knows? He's young.

It seems fitting, then, that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. Confidently led by Weir, they swarm the screen.

You feel both moved and exhausted by the distance that Wilson has to travel, musically and emotionally, before reaching the shore. That makes it, I guess, a happy ending. But then, as one of the Beach Boys remarks, on listening to “Pet Sounds,” even the happy songs are sad.

What sets this film apart is its fusing of the impassioned and the grimly palpable.

These small-scale, intelligent movies can fall into a trap: it’s hard to achieve a satisfactory dramatic climax when observation is your principal dramatic mode.

It's only at the end of Blue Ruin that my pleasure drained away. [28 April 2014, p.86]

A dramatic failure, but, at its best, it offers a frightening suggestion of the way terror can alter reality so thoroughly that, step by step, the fantastic becomes accepted as the mere commonplace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]

The movie is memorable and draining, but “Full Metal Jacket” it is not.

The director, Irving Rapper, is just barely competent, and the action plods along, yet this picture is all of a piece, and if it were better it might not work at all. This way, it's a schlock classic.

Meanders pleasantly, like a road movie, with a seventies-style, anything-goes offhandedness that whisks the audience through the rough spots.

No one could claim that the film is a distinguished contribution to cinema, but it would be churlish to resist its geniality and speed.

It seems not just against the odds but against the laws of nature that a film as bookish, as suburban, and as self-consciously clever as In the House should also be such fun.

The best parts of “Moonfall” feel like a sharp and cogent reproach to the corporate stolidity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero-franchise movies. The ridiculous proves occasionally sublime.

It's about Scorcese and DeNiro's trying to top what they've done and what everybody else has done. Scorcese puts his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative.

No more than a shallow, style-mad entertainment, but it never flags or loses its balance, and, despite the theatricality of the staging and the acting, it’s precisely the materiality of the cinema--that makes us devour it with pleasure. [29 March 2004, p. 103]

The screenplay is by Troy Kennedy Martin, who died in 2009. It features the trusty components of a Mann movie: the smooth mechanics of professional labor, plus—or, more often, versus—the exhaust manifold of men’s emotional lives.

The movie is one of those pointed and prickly farces, like “8 Women” (2002) and “Potiche” (2011), that Ozon tends to scatter among his more solemn projects, as if to keep his comic hand in. The dramatis personae are boldly drawn and, let us say, broadly performed.

The insistent feel-good trajectory comes at the expense of thornier truths. The movie, for all its understanding of hard time, can’t keep from going a little soft.

If Cars is something of a letdown, that is not because of the moral messages that it delivers but because of the heavy hand with which it cranks them out.

The story of Fernandez and Beck may be grotesque comedy, but Todd Robinson tells it straight, without flinching from its piteousness, horror, or banality.

Indeed, there is barely a frame of Branagh’s film that would cause Uncle Walt to finger his mustache with disquiet.

Jones is as formidable as ever, and Vincent D’Onofrio gives a sombre and riveting portrayal of Jerry Falwell, the Baptist Savonarola, who doesn’t hesitate to scythe down the Bakkers for their sins. But this is Chastain’s movie, through and through.

There is certainly a trill of suspense to be had from these ideological heists, but Weingartner’s movie is never quite as keen-edged as it hopes or needs to be.

At its best when the characters sit around, dither, and ruminate. Moviemaking seems to have become almost magically easy for this independent writer-director. He builds a detailed atmosphere, brings his good people and his bad together, and lets them jabber at one another; the virtuosity is rhetorical rather than visual.

The Good Boss pulls more weight than you’d expect, and Bardem is in charge of the pulling. Here is one of his most packed performances—often funny, yet never engineered for laughs alone, and persuasive in its portrait of an essentially weak soul who persists in dreaming of strength.

I happen to prefer the extreme unslackness of “Halloween,” and the resourceful pluck of Curtis, to the dreamier dread of Maika Monroe. Nonetheless, like her pursuers, It Follows won’t leave you alone.

In all, Appaloosa is good as far as it goes--everything in it feels true--but I wish that Harris had pushed his ideas further.

You're entertained continuously, though you don't feel the queasy, childish dread that is part of the dirty kick of the horror genre.

For all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to Candyman that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling.

Milos Forman trudges through the movie as if every step were a major contribution to art, and he keeps the audience hooked.

Think about it a day later, though, and its hectic swoop from romance to thriller to campaign manifesto leaves oddly little afterglow. The gardener is the only constant here; so much else burns up and blows away.

Finely framed by the cinematographer Kate McCullough, The Quiet Girl is an idyll, yet its placid surface is puckered by anxiety.

There's no denying that for many people sequences such as Bambi's birth have an enduring primal power.

Now and then, Lelio departs into reverie and daydream, and it’s here, loosening the bonds of his naturalistic style, that he draws us closer to the mystery of Marina.

Challenged by Downey’s energy, Jude Law, who often seems aimless in his movies, comes fully up to speed. He’s virile and quick-witted, and his Watson, if not Holmes’s equal in brainpower, comes close to him in daring. Their repartee evokes the banter of lovers in a screwball comedy; they flirt outrageously but chastely.

A Bigger Splash is fiercely unrelaxing, and impossible to ignore. You emerge from it restive and itchy, as though a movie screen could give you sunburn, and the story defies resolution.

The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.

Russian Dolls offers touristic views of London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, where Wendy and Xavier both go for the wedding of another former roommate, and many pretty faces and bodies; it's froth with a sprinkling of earnest reflection.

Toward the end, Deep Water grows less ambiguous and more conventional, but the rest of it is actually well suited to Lyne’s fetishistic style, with its succulent closeups, and the bitter memory of Glenn Close’s character—depicted as a vengeful virago—in Fatal Attraction is somewhat eased by de Armas’s willful and cheerful Melinda.

What IS surprising is the unembarrassed energy that Boyle devotes to his pursuit of the obvious; there’s nothing wrong with the formulaic, it would appear, so long as you bring the formula to the boil.