Through Glassman’s diligent and empathetic investigations, it becomes a film of documents, in which the aura of the letters—the worlds that they contain in their text and evoke in their sheer physical presence—generates overwhelming emotional power.

The film’s real charge lies elsewhere—in Preminger’s view of a jolting, disoriented age of rock and roll.

For some viewers, the acidity level of Perry’s movie will be too high to stomach. For others — anyone who thinks that there are too many warm hugs in Strindberg, for example — Queen of Earth awaits.

The writer and director, Paul King, scatters the tale with handfuls of eccentric charm, first in the forest and then in the home of the Browns. At one point, borrowing freely from Wes Anderson, he frames it as a living doll’s house, with each member of the family hard at work or play in a different room.

The exceptional, often overwhelming power of the script that Polley wrote, based on Miriam Toews’s novel, is, if not undercut, not amplified by the filming.

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

M-G-M's wartime salute to gallant England, engineered to make the audience choke up.

Whenever the movie strays from its hero, you feel oddly impatient to get back to him, to watch his cravings do battle with his conscience, and to wonder anew what’s burning in his blue-green gaze.

For a better reckoning of 1968, you need a better writer — Norman Mailer, unloved by Buckley and Vidal alike, whose “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” covered the same events. Next to his fervid look at the sinews of power, as they sweat and flex, Best of Enemies is barely more than a skit.

For all its scruffiness, the lurching strike-rate of its gags, and the unmistakable smell of amateur dramatics given off by its repertory of rotating players with their stick-on Ted Nugent beards, Life of Brian jitters with good will. [3 May 2004, p. 110]

Above all, the movie offers the mournful thrill of new methods that Kiarostami didn’t live to develop further.

An exhausting, morbidly fascinating, and finally thrilling experience.

Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.

The over-all effect is as taut with tangible evidence as a detective story.

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]

An extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller--the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.”

Of the two attempts, I still prefer the one from my childhood.

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.

That is what I admire in While We’re Young; it shows a director not so much mooning over the past, with regret for faded powers, as probing his own obsessions and the limits of his style.

In its own sombre, inflated terms, the picture is effective, but it's dragged out so many self-importantly that you have time to recognize what a hopelessly naive, incompetent, and untrustworthy lawyer the hero is.

As the real-life Ronald Woodroof, he (Mcconaughey) does work that is pretty much astounding. [4 Nov. 2013, p.116]

With a teeming cast of vibrantly unglamorous Chicago characters who hold Eddie in a tight social web, Swanberg—aided greatly by Johnson’s vigorous performance—makes the gambler’s panic-stricken silence all the more agonizing, balancing the warm veneer of intimate normalcy with the inner chill of secrets and lies.

Arnow’s poignant and original performance—refined in its awkwardness, exalted in its degradation, touched with grace in its rude self-presentation—is a double masterwork of acting and directing.

The film is slowed by its own beauty, but it is salvaged by two majestic scenes.

This Australia film - the pictorial re-creation of a late-Victorian novel - shows considerable charm and craft, though it's essentially taxidermy.

The picture might have been a pop classic if it had stayed near the level of impudence that it reaches at its best. But about midway as Eddie has a crisis of confidence, and when Eddie locks his jaw and sets forth to become a purified man of integrity, the joy goes out of Newman's performance, which (despite the efforts of a lot of good actors) is the only life in the movie, except for a brief, startling performance by the 25-year-old black actor Forest Whitaker as a pool shark called Amos.

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.

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.

This is a fully felt, morally alert, marvellously acted piece of work. Despite the grim subject, it's a sweet-tempered movie, with moments of explosive humor-an entertainment.

The movie simmers with a longing for revenge, frequently boiling over, and the foe is not just Hawkins but the colonialist order for which he stands: barbarism, thinly disguised as civilization. Many scenes feel punishingly hard to watch.

The best scenes--especially an assassination attempt at Royal Albert Hall--are stunning, but Hitchcock seems sloppily unconcerned about the unconvincing material in between the tricks and jokes.

Soderbergh’s premise is no mere gimmick. Working with a script by David Koepp, he infuses his dramatic mechanism with substantial themes.

The film is one continuous spurt of energy...But the picture is abstract in an adolescent way. Miller's attempt to tap into the universal concept of the hero (as enunciated by Jung and explicated by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces") makes the film joyless.

Gillespie stages his empathy for Tonya at arm’s length; he fails to respond to her experience in a direct, personal way. The result is a film that’s as derisive and dismissive toward Tonya Harding as it shows the world at large to have been.

The movie won't do much for anyone who doesn't have an academic or fanboy absorption in junk.

The result feels, like Shakespeare's play, at once ancient and dangerously new.

For all its turbulent action and extravagant expressiveness, Maestro is hollow; even its strongest moments play like false fronts, like veneer far fuller, stranger, more struggle-riddled lives.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.

It’s a hell of a performance by Robyn Nevin, who’s had a long and commanding career on the Australian stage.

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

The topic is so grave, and the corralling of ancient Greek comedy so audacious, that you long for Chi-Raq to succeed. Sad to report, it’s an awkward affair, stringing out its tearful scenes of mourning, and going wildly astray with its lurches into farce.

The film is pretty fair Hitchcock, though not as sexy or as witty as the 39 Steps.

With bold and canny camera work that yields an uproarious parody of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” White dynamites the formalist restraint of art films and the bonds of narrative logic to unleash the primal ecstasy of the cinema.

It was a Broadway musical comedy, slightly adapted, and filmed in Astoria--and it looks stagey. But the film is too joyous for cavilling.

Tyson's performance and Korty's tact are more than enough to compensate for the flaws.

Ultimately, the true genre of “Love Lies Bleeding” is a Kristen Stewart movie. That genre, too, is one that the director neither expands nor reinvents.

The tension of Calvary is fitful at best, and much of the movie trips into silliness, but in Brendan Gleeson -- in his proud bearing and his lamenting gaze -- we see the plight of the lonely believer in a world beyond belief. [4 Aug.2014, p.74]

Tony Richardson whizzes through the Henry Fielding novel, but he pauses long enough for a great lewd eating scene.

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.

There is barely a graceless frame in the whole affair.

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.

The film is peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.

It's clever and has some really chilling moments.

As Mike Nichols has directed the material, the effects are almost all achieved through the line readings, and the cleverness is unpleasant -- it's all surface and whacking emphasis.

It’s among the great American films of the sixties—including Juleen Compton’s Stranded and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary—that display the global reach of that Paris-centered movement.

What could be a plain tale -- and is in danger of becoming a sappy one -- grows surprisingly inward and dense. [25 Nov. 2013, p.135]

Get Low is deftly played, and it rarely mislays its ambling charm, but what a forbidding fable it could have been if the truth about Felix Bush, rather than emerging into sunlight, had slunk back into the woods.

The pictures seems dogged and methodical, though it is graced with a beautiful performance by Kotto.

In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.

The film's plea for old-fashioned pride and racial tolerance is muffled by a plain, unanticipated fact: Pete Perkins is out of his mind.

The film’s view of a mind thrown back on itself, and the profound vulnerability, mental derangement, and physical degradation that result, is, true to form, a political horror.

The problem for Detroit is that, when contrivance is required, it tends to jut out... Where the movie scores, by contrast, is in those casual deeds that reveal the shape into which lives have been bent.

Only Hailee Steinfeld’s committed performance as Nadine, a troubled high-school junior in Oregon, and Woody Harrelson’s deft turn, as a teacher who helps her, make this thin and cliché-riddled comic drama worth watching.

When Logan and Laura unleash their furious scythes nothing feels settled or satisfied. The world grinds on, fruitlessly weary and wild.

Buzzes with the long-term historical power of the occasion, and notes the divisions that the organizers struggled to overcome.

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.

A scruffy, thick-grained piece of work, shot in thirty days and scrawled not with luscious coloring but with the tense and inky markings of a society that is fighting to keep its reputation for togetherness, and wondering what that reputation is still worth. [18 & 25 Feb 2002. p. 199]

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

Filmed in 1969 but unreleased until 1989, Michael Roemer’s dyspeptic comedy, about a small-time gangster newly freed from prison, bares unhealed and unspoken wounds of New York Jewish life.

The movie is no more than a novelty, but it may surprise you by making you laugh out loud a few times.

The voice work, by Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, and America Ferrera, among others, is also lively and fun. This sequel also adds a major new character, Valka (voiced exquisitely by Cate Blanchett), a protective den mother who runs a dragon sanctuary. She gives the film a surprising emotional resonance.

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

Seems a touch too long, too airless, and too content with its own contrivances to stir the heart.

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

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.

Between its melancholy view of disconnection and incomprehension, it offers a hint of ironic optimism about what a family’s future depends on—namely, its past.

Infinitely charming new romantic comedy.

Few movies this year will be more likely to molest your sleep.

The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion.

The film, directed and co-written by James Gunn, is joyfully irreverent. Gunn lends his underachiever superheroes a geeky, comic camaraderie, and he brings a spry touch to the wacky intergalactic adventure.

We don't get enough understanding of Stroud to become involved in how he is transformed over the years.

The whole film, in fact, which Pitts wrote and directed, lurks on the borders of the unspecified. That is the source of its cool, but also of its sullen capacity to annoy.

In short, the Sheridan of In America wants us to pity his characters for the rough ride that they endure, yet at the same time he traps them inside a bubble of the picturesque and the outlandish. Even if you like this movie, you have to ask: What has it done to deserve its title? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

What Kreutzer aims to impress upon us is the effect of smothering and constraint—not only upon her heroine but also upon the female sex, at every social stratum, under Habsburg rule.

Singleton's plot is disappointingly conventional; it obeys screenwriting-class rules. The experience he's dealing with here deserves something more than the tidy dramatic structure that he has imposed on it.

It's giddy in a magical, pseudo-sultry way -- it seems to be set in a poet's dream of a red-light district.

Red Rocket is over-plotted, over-aestheticized, under-characterized, and under-observed.

In this movie, Fonda really is iconic. 3:10 to Yuma may be familiar, but, at its best, it has a rapt quality, even an aura of wonder.

This austere production has fire enough; it captures the elemental Bronte passions. [14 March 2011, p. 79]

Pegg co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Edgar Wright, and together they have fashioned a smart, cultish, semi-disgusting homage to the fine British art of not bothering.

A major film without being a great film. It's a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one, and the strangeness and pessimism connect it to other recent American films in ways that suggest that something unhappy in the national mood has crept into the movies.

Rob Reiner's film, taken from Stephen King's autobiographical novella "The Body," overdoses on sincerity and nostalgia. Seeing it is like watching an extended Christmas special of "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie" - it makes you feel virtuous. All that stays with you is the tale that Gordie, the central character, tells his friends around the campfire.

The subject - the romantic life of an American Communist - may be daring, but the moviemaking is extremely traditional, with Beatty playing a man who dies for an ideal. It's rather a sad movie, because it isn't really very good.

I have seen The Baader Meinhof Complex three or four times now, and, despite exasperation with its fissile form, I find it impossible not to be plunged afresh into this engulfing age of European anxiety.

The sigh you will hear across the country in the next few weeks is the sound of a gratified audience: a great movie musical has been made at last.

A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie directed by Cecil B. De Mille in a neo-Biblical style.

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]

It takes a female director, I think, to catch children, young and old, at these fragile hours, and also to trace a residue of something childlike in their elders.