For all the specific accusations and denunciations that Y—and Lapid—level at Israeli politics and culture, “Ahed’s Knee” is, above all, a work of cinematopoeia: it looks and sounds and feels like what it means.

Yost is a veteran of historical documentaries, and his experience handling information is apparent; the film tells an enormously complex story of financial fine points and political maneuvering, along with the underlying social and personal backstories, with a deft touch and a brisk sense of wonder.

Yet the great thing about White God is that the more you command it to sit and stay — to settle down as a plausible plot, or to cohere as a political fable — the more it slips its leash and runs amok.

The problem is not that the film debases the book but that movies themselves are too capacious a home for such comedy, with its tea-steeped English musings and its love of bitty, tangential gags.

Eastwood’s subject is wasted lives and wasted talent; Wilson’s charisma and Hollywood’s money prove irresistible, and their sheer power brings noteworthy results—but they emerge from a needless vortex of ruin.

It’s party time, and the movie is wild and crude without being mean--it’s a comedy of infantile regression, “Animal House” for grownups. [17 March 2003, p. 154]

The movie is not an argument for chaos; it's an argument for making one's way through life with a relaxed will and an open heart.

The fact that Mother keeps its balance is a tribute to the leading actress.

Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective.

So compact and controlled is this fine film.

The movie's horror-comics second half is cheesy, derivative, and ultimately a little wearying. But it's also unpretentious and insanely cheerful.

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

The movie is amiable enough: the young Australian actress Teresa Palmer is lovely and crisp, and the Canadian writer-director Michael Dowse manages the party traffic well. [14 March 2011, p.79]

Citing Chekhov at this early time in Swanberg's career may be unfair, but an amiable movie like Drinking Buddies cried out for the revelations that a great dramatist--or even a talented screenwriter and director working together--can give us. [9 Sept. 2013, p.90]

The movie is about preservation and restoration and the power of art. But with what gain in knowledge? It's as if Szpilman had no soul, and no will, apart from an endless desire to tickle the keys. [13 January 2003, p. 90]

Almodóvar - whose penchant for narrative complexity grows ever deeper - latches on to the idea of personal history as a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

They give excellent value for money, launching into song the way that normal folk go to the bathroom--regularly, politely, and because, if they didn't, well, darn it, they might just burst.

Only very rarely is it not fun.

The movie is successful -- harsh, serious, and both exhilarating and tragic, the right tonal combination for Homer. [17 May 2004, p. 107]

Entertaining, though overlong. The director, Tay Garnett, knew almost enough tricks to sustain this glossily bowdlerized version of the James M. Cain novel, and he used Lana Turner maybe better than any other director did.

A superb martial discipline has ended in a commercial movie genre--not the worst fate in the world, but the comic irony of it is of little interest to a director bent on glorification. [9 Sept. 2013, p.90]

In spite of his problem of sentiment, it's a happy, unpretentious farce.

Martin and Tomlin are both uninhibited physical comics. They tune in to each other's timing the way lovers do in life, only more so.

The film errs in many ways, and at times the editing seems glaringly poor, but Olivier's performance gives it venomous excitement.

In all, Steve McQueen is a master of fascination rather than of drama--he creates stunning shots rather than an intricate story.

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

The Good Thief is too spindly and unconfident for an actor of this bulk, yet without him it would curl up and die. [7 April 2003, p.96]

If you want family values, Marco Bellocchio is your man, though they may not be what you expect.

Hawke is on a roll right now, and Good Kill stirs him to another performance of cogency and zeal. Is it sufficient, however, to support an entire movie?

Cloverfield is a vastly old-fashioned piece of work, creaking with hilarious contrivance. I was thrilled, for instance, to hear someone actually speak the line “It’s alive!”

After a while, you stop counting the chases -- they just get longer and louder, and it's like watching the revival of a forgotten art form; the fact that it's done with a minimum of special effects makes it all the more stirring.

Too many dramatizations of the Holocaust have left us flinching and queasy, whereas Glazer, in choosing so precisely what to show and what not to show, gives us no chance (and no excuse) to look away.

Caught Stealing is a grand entertainment for a time of shame and guilt and corruption, of treacherous authority and brazen hypocrisy.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette has to be seen, and demands to be believed, because of Cate Blanchett. Like “Blue Jasmine” (2013), which earned her a second Oscar, this new film lies at her command.

Tears of the Sun may be a flattering myth, but it’s not a bad myth to be flattered by. [17 March 2003, p. 154]

The ultimate deflation of the movie into a pointed drama of norms and ethics doesn’t, however, dispel its glorious hour of theatrical spectacle and artistic mystery.

Sitting through Transit is like watching an anti-“Casablanca,” so diligent is Petzold in the draining of romantic hopes, and there were times when I dreamed that Claude Rains would stroll in and order a champagne cocktail. What sustains this highly unusual film, and lends it an ominous momentum, is the figure of Rogowski, as Georg.

As broad and obvious as Wanderlust is, it's often very funny. [5 March 2012, p. 87]

Ryder is devious and witchy, her eyes flashing, her crinkly voice developing knife edges. She gives an acidly brilliant performance as a desperate, lying woman. [24 Jan. 2011, p. 83]

Good Boys is worth catching for those rare and wrenching points at which emotional honesty breaks through.

Without Nancy and her demon lover, Polanski's Oliver Twist feels handsome, steady, and respectful; it has that touch of mummification which wins awards. But Dickens had murder in mind--women killed for their kindness, children for lack of food--and he wanted us to howl and hyperventilate. He asked for more.

Affleck the movie director makes you truly, badly want his bunch of ne'er-do-wells to pull off their heists without a scratch, and you can't ask for much more than that. [20 Sept. 2010, p. 120]

It's an idiosyncratic film, it's cuckoo--an old man's film (partly directed from a wheelchair)--but it's very likable.

Viewers will be split between those who wonder about this silly, trumped-up story and those who already know and love the silliness for what it was. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

Its characters are no different from the rest of us, in the cluster of their annoyances and kicks, yet utterly removed from us by a system that frowns upon ordinary desire. Jafar Panahi's movie, unsurprisingly, has been outlawed in Iran. Nobody likes a prophet. [19 January 2004, p. 93]

Southern idiom, delicious fish fries, and naive theology are fused with awe and wonder.

The film, which kicks off in a flurry of visual tricks and narrative switchbacks, grows plainer in the later stages, and its concluding mood is surprisingly sad; these kids, who yearned to be something special, turned out to be anything but.

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

Watching the antic inventions of Go for Zucker, I was moved by the thought that Jews have achieved a kind of Germanness again, and even more moved by the thought that Germans have achieved a kind of Jewishness again.

As the movie shows, the whole furtive business of ratings is indeed ridiculous and should be overhauled.

The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma.

As the film concludes with his upraised hand, conductor’s fingers unfurling against a blue sky, you do feel that you have witnessed a small victory of wisdom over indifference and ennui. When in doubt, strike up the band.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film. Yet the play of emotions on Macdonald’s face tells of worries and wounds much deeper than anything that can be accounted for in the script, and it will take more than a jigsaw, I reckon, even a thousand-piece whopper, to free this woman’s soul.

Eustache's method resembles the static randomness of the Warhol-Morrissey pictures, but the randomness here is not a matter of indifference; it's a conscious goal.

Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck, and out of time.

The pugnacity of Walsh’s comic direction infuses turbulently free enterprise with tragedy.

In all, these men and women don't seem to have the seething ambitions and the restlessness of so many Americans. They don't expect to get rich, somehow, next year. They may be happier than we are but they're also less colorful. [28 Jan. 2012, p.80]

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.

A competent director (Peter Yates), working with competent technicians, gives a fairly dense texture to a vacuous script about cops and gangsters and politicians. The stars are Steve McQueen with his low-key charisma, as the police-officer hero, and the witty, steep streets of San Francisco.

It’s a romantic, erotic drama that’s told with an unusual blend of rapture and coldness, of overwhelming yearning and clinical detachment — and, above all, the movie has images that go far beyond the recording of performances and the framing of action in order to make a melancholy and mysterious visual music.

The strength of the movie resides mainly in the work of its cameraman, Chris Menges, who delivers a barrage of images as rousing and changeable as the fortunes of Collins himself.

The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's vision.

Beast is at its best when Buckley is at her most undaunted, showing us Moll at her most extreme — when she lies down by moonlight, for instance, in the shallow hole where a murder victim was found, beside a potato field.

How can one not revere a movie director who causes the printers of travel brochures to cry out in distress? The Greece of sun, sand, and sea is not open for business here, Angelopoulos having decided that grandeur, grief, and grayness are more his line of work.

Frank Sinatra’s performance is pure gold, but the director, Otto Preminger, goes for sensationalism; the film is effective, but in a garish, hyperbolic, and dated way.

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

Schreiber moves with bearish stolidity, even when boxing, and nothing is more poignantly delayed than Chuck’s realization that most of his wounds were self-inflicted.

In brief, The Brown Bunny, however antagonistic and borderline tedious, is an art work of sorts, and Gallo himself, though an egomaniac of staggering solemnity-a priest of art longing for a cult-is not a fake.

It is one of those movies--Antonioni's "Red Desert" being the most flagrant example--that spend so much time brimming with moral and political suggestion that they almost forget to tell us what's actually going on.

One of M-G-M's powerhouse moralizing "family" entertainments, it's beefy and rousing, with almost guaranteed tears and laughter for children.

What’s most impressive about Top Gun: Maverick is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track.

This movie is a smooch-free zone, and the arc described by its leading lady, proud and nerveless, is an elegant one: she starts by taking a punch to the face, without malice, from another woman, and, at the climax, delivers one herself—unmanning her male opponent with a decisive thump to the groin. If Lara Croft weren’t already a role model, she is now.

The movie is, literally, a tough act to follow, thanks to the brusque, undemonstrative way in which Haneke chops from one subplot to the next. [3 Dec 2001, p.105]

What the play was supposed to be about -- which was dim enough in the original -- is even more obscure in the script that he and Richard Brooks (then a screenwriter) prepared, but the movie is so confidently and entertainingly directed that nobody is likely to complain.

The director, Gore Verbinski, would seem to be an odd man for this material, but he and Steven Conrad hold their ground, sticking to their conviction that Dave's story should play as a belated-coming-of-age movie.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson bring joyful energy to Song Sung Blue.

Watching A Christmas Tale, with its bursts of old movies, dregs of empty bottles, lines from books, and fragments of half-forgotten conversations, is like getting to know a family other than your own by leafing through its scrapbooks and laughing at its photograph albums, while it bickers in the next room over stuff you may never understand.

Cry Macho doesn’t resound with the hectic astonishment of The 15:17 to Paris or the tragic imagination of Sully, but it delivers whispers of both. Its breezy, easygoing fable of late-life adventure and connection is also a story of an over-the-hill athlete who may meet his match on any street corner.

That is an unusually gloomy proposition not just for a studio movie but for a society that, despite the acts and sites of official commemoration, must find good cause to forge ahead from catastrophe. Reign Over Me closes with, at best, a cautious hope, leaving us more anxious than when we went in, and throughout the film there is a stunned and bewildered air hanging over the city, like a heavy smog.

You think afresh of the film’s title and wonder, Who is more unknown here, the nameless victim or the inscrutable doctor?

The method is effective; “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is no radical advance in documentary form, but its emphasis on the auditory over the visual subtly suggests the disconnect between a private individual and her public image.

On the whole, Asante’s movie, though crammed with the white man’s treachery, has a dulled and inoffensive sheen, and cannot match the visual rigor that Ava DuVernay brought to “Selma.”

As Adrien, Pierre Niney is extraordinary to behold: pale, tapered, and flickering, like a candle made flesh.

Graduation, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is a mirthless farce. All that can go wrong does go wrong, and the process is both compelling and close to unwatchable.

The director, James Wan, sends cars repeatedly airborne and seems himself to marvel at the results; the movie’s real subject is the stunt work, but its stars’ authentic chemistry lends melody to its relentless beat.

Whitaker, in the performance of a lifetime, makes him (Idi Amin) a charismatic madman.

The Armstrong Lie goes on forever, perhaps because Gibney can’t believe that, like everyone else, he’s been had. Again and again, he looks for elements of moral clarity (never mind remorse) in Armstrong, and the cyclist looks back at Gibney (and at us) as if he were a fool.

Chronicle becomes a cautionary tale: power corrupts. Yes, and digital power corrupts absolutely. Andrew's sense of decency disappears, and so does the filmmakers' sense of humor. [13 & 20 Feb. 2012, p. 120]

Losey’s strongest critique of the times emerges with a unique stylistic flourish in his wide-screen, black-and-white images, featuring slow glides, skewed angles, standoffish perspectives, and hectic striations. These images seem adorned with quotation marks, as if Losey placed his own movie in the mediatized madness that he was criticizing.

After Yang shows how easily the taste for beauty can be tainted, subverted, distorted, and abused by the powers that be.

This adaptation of one of the S.E. Hinton novels that became favorites of high-school kids in the 70s has an amiable, unforced good humor that takes the curse off the film's look and even off its everything-but-the-bloodhounds plot. The earnest naivete of this movie has its own kind of emotional fairy-tale magic.

Invention is a film about pollution—media pollution, the despoiling of the American mind along with the landscape.

Téchiné is unusually adroit at manipulating a complex set of relations within a very mixed group of people. This movie is easy to take--chatty and sociable, with a brightly lit, even sunshiny gloss and an open sensuality.

It was with both joy and mystification, therefore, that I found myself cackling at What We Do in the Shadows like a witch with a helium balloon.

A Prairie Home Companion has many lovely and funny moments, but there's not a lot going on. Dramatically, it's mellow to the point of inertia. There may not be any sweat, but there isn't any heat, either.

The result is itself a kind of diorama: exquisitely detailed, assembled with infinite care, but lacking the breath of life.

For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers, it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that’s been left on the drawing board.

The result is that Shall We Kiss? puts its viewers in a bind worthy of the lovers themselves: should we organize a Socratic symposium on the issues raised by the film, or hurl our popcorn violently at the screen?