The faults of the movie, semi-excusable as self-vindicating ploys, are nothing compared with its strengths.

Audiard's work is tense, vivid, and alert, and he's got the right actor as Tom, an irresistibly attractive guy who's pushing thirty yet has no more control over his impulses than a chaotic boy.

But finally the film is no more than a flamboyant curiosity, replacing the spooky obsessiveness of "La Jetée" with a much tamer kind of weirdness. Also with Brad Pitt, in a showy role as a voluble lunatic; he's dreadful.

The movie is fairly entertaining; it's too bad the guest of honor is such a drag.

The practiced calmness of Kore-eda’s approach is such that you barely notice the speed at which he tugs the plot along and flips from one setting to the next.

There's something to be said for this kind of professionalism: the moviemakers know how to provide excitement and they work us over.

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 director, Claude Berri, who did the adaptation with Gerard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he said it was his task to give the material "a cinematic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks.

What happens at the dam, filmed at night, with only shimmering light, is the most nerve-racking sequence in recent movies. Reichardt, despite the film’s absences, has achieved an impressive control over the medium.

A great, intense movie about war and rape...Directed by Brian De Palma, the movie is the culmination of his best work. Sean Penn gives a daring performance as the squad's 20-year-old leader; Michael J. Fox is impressive as the solider who can't keep quiet.

What Branagh has made is a kind of home movie writ large. It is a private stash of memories and imaginings, which touches only glancingly on the wide and troubled world beyond, and which feels most alive when it turns to face the consolations of home and the thrills that lie in wait on the big screen.

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.

For all the film’s quietism regarding the particulars of secession and rebellion, “Civil War” is a piece of propaganda, a veritable recruiting video for its own rebels.

In Side Effects, the working out of the thriller plot is accomplished with too much verbal explanation. [11 & 18 Feb. 2013, p.114]

A virtuoso piece of kinetic moviemaking. Working with material that could, with a few false steps, have turned into a tony reality-and-illusion puzzle, the director, Richard Rush, has kept it all rowdy and funny -- it's slapstick metaphysics.

It's marred by a holiday family-picture heartiness--the M-G-M back-lot Americana gets rather thick.

Much of the film glides past with a slightly purposeless elegance. Astounding landscapes rise and fall away; enticing women glance and dance and disappear.

Porumboiu cinematically constructs—both through the patient, subtly but decisively shaped interviews and the cannily gradual editing—a life story that engages, at crucial points of contact, with the political history of his times and that reflects aspirations and inspirations that are themselves of a historic power.

A sharply intelligent and affecting view of suburban blues.

I gradually grew more interested in Curtis, who has his own solitude to cope with. This represents the first non-comic leading role for Robinson (moviegoers will know him from “Pineapple Express” and “Hot Tub Time Machine,” among other films), and he commands it with a gruff and amiable ease.

The picture has a lovely, understated autobiographical lilt.

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.

As the feigning wears off, and Captain America: Civil War crawls to a close, you sense that the possibilities of nature have been not just exceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue seems like a special effect: “You’re being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,” Black Widow remarks to Iron Man. Translation: “Say something.”

Even as this fine documentary unveils the "mystery woman," as she once described herself, it remains intent on the molding of her myth. [31 March 2014, p.80]

It's not a great movie, or even a very good one (it's rather mechanical), but it touches one's experience in a way that makes it hard to forget.

There are times when the movie's entertainment value verges on the scandalous. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

You keep wanting it to turn into wonderful romantic fluff, but it's only spottily successful.

Spielberg must have sensed that he owed us some fun, and the movie has a sleek and carefree look -- the lightness of a sixties comedy, made with the extraordinary speed and panache of our most fluent director. This is a true holiday film, a gift from some genuine pros who know how to entertain without sweat. [23 & 30 December 2002, p. 166]

Again and again, its stark and suspenseful compositions strike the eye — figures in dark clothing, prone on a pale beach, with lines of wire, black warning flags, and the chill gray waves beyond.

Coppola's efforts to bring depth to this material that has no depth make the picture seem groggy. It's as if he were trying to direct the actors to bring something out of themselves when neither he nor anyone else knows what's wanted.

Ousmane Sembène, in his first feature film, from 1966—which is also widely considered the first feature made by an African—distills a vast range of historical crises and frustrated ambitions into an intimate, straightforwardly realistic drama.

The new movie by Robert Greene is a tour de force in the blending and bending of genres.

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.

Mario Van Peebles creates what can only be called a lucid fantasia; the movie quickly reaches a pitch of manic activity and stays there. It’s an exhausting, and exhaustingly pleasurable, entertainment. [31 May 2004, p. 88]

Is it robust and plain-speaking, proud of its comic swagger, or is there something tight-mouthed in its imperative, with a hint of “or else” hanging off the end? Either way, the life of Amy is dished up for our inspection.

The other Grant, the irresistible but slippery Cary, was called to account by such strenuous and willful mates as Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman. But Hugh Grant has never been matched with a woman who directly challenged his oddly recessive charm. [3 June 2002, p. 100]

British director Michael Winterbottom has made his best and most driven picture to date. [22 September 2003, p. 202]

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

Often seems on the verge of being funny, but the humor is too clumsily forced.

DuVernay embraces Wilkerson’s work wholeheartedly and rises to the artistic challenge with one of the most unusual and ingenious of recent screenplays.

The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford.

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.

Despite its physical horrors, the movie is also a celebration of the body, of the bond between pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy—and that fusion proves to hold for family bonds as well. But the psychology and the practicalities of the story are ultimately thinly sketched, the abrupt transitions calculated to elide reflection in repose. The movie is too specific and detailed to be starkly and abstractly symbolic, yet too vague and general to convey the complexity and density of a relationship.

No one could say this wasn't a rousing movie. It's also romantic, big, commercial, and slick, in the M-G-M grand manner.

It's a graceful picture, but it dawdles, and Stephens doesn't seem to have the star presence that Holmes requires.

Of the many heists and grabs that litter the movie, none is as blatant as the deft, irrepressible manner in which Ferguson, displaying a light smile and a brisk way with a knife, steals the show. Poor Tom Cruise. He can’t even steal a kiss.

Extravagant care is taken with minutiae, and the directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, whistle through the first twenty minutes of the plot with a controlled giddiness that would leave many live-action adventures staggering in their tracks. Yet what a curious plot it is.

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]

Seen now, the picture is ludicrous, pointless, and stirring all at once.

Owen has made immense progress, to which Life, Animated is a stirring tribute, yet it leaves a trail of questions unanswered or unasked.

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

Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, Sicko.

If the notoriously squeamish and slumberous members of the Academy can pull themselves together and face Monster, they should know whom to vote for as the best actress of the year. [26 January 2004, p. 84]

The line between the dispassionate and the dull can be ominously faint, and when Rohmer kicks off his film with ten or fifteen minutes of solid anecdotal chat, you fear for the stamina of the audience. [13 May 2002, p. 96]

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 joke buried in Tabloid is that this sexual obsessive is very likely not a sexual person at all.

Heavenly, corny nonsense.

What Maisie Knew sees things that most of us manage to hide. James might have been shocked by the movie's profane taunts, but he would have recognized the system of betrayals, large and small, that he dramatized so well. [27 May 2013, p.87]

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 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]

I've rarely seen so selfless a collection of performances and, in a war movie, so general an absence of rhetoric or guff. [25 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 127]

At its best and quietest, Divine Intervention suggests -- that levity and threat are eternally clasped together, like the lovers' twining hands. [20 January 2003, p. 94]

It's pure nostalgia--the past sweetened and trivialized. The mood is soft regret: he treats the old songs as a value that we've lost.

The no-holds-barred, extravagantly playful methods by which Audley and Birney conjure the audacious yet coherent tale of supernatural menaces and splendors are the movie’s prime achievement.

The chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

Despite its heroic energy and impulsive youth, it’s a bleak philosophical work of its time, a bitterly terrifying vision of no exit.

Southside with You, running a brisk hour and twenty minutes, is a fully realized, intricately imagined, warmhearted, sharp-witted, and perceptive drama, one that sticks close to its protagonists while resonating quietly but grandly with the sweep of a historical epic.

The experience of watching Bottoms is weighed down by the movie’s thin drama, hit-or-miss comedy, and merely functional direction—pictures of actors acting.

The scenery, of course, could stop the heart of a mountain goat, and Wild has an admirable heroine, but the movie itself often feels literal-minded rather than poetic, busy rather than sublime, eager to communicate rather than easily splendid.

The Ground Truth is an emotionally potent work, but the great study of an Iraq vet, in either documentary or fictional form, has yet to be made.

A pedagogical tone, reminiscent of the 30s, is maintained throughout much of the movie: these strikers are always teaching each other little constructive lessons, and their dialogue is blown up to the rank of folk wisdom.

[May] has a knack for defusing the pain without killing the joke.

It's not only a musical entertainment but an imaginative version of the novel as a lyrical, macabre fable.

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.

Inception, is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.

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

In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.

The movie is stunningly intelligent; the concluding passages, in which the game abruptly ends for both men, are frightening and, finally, very moving.

You exit the cinema in a fever of melancholia, wondering how long it will take you to shed the sensation of alarm. The film is less of a shocker than an adventure in anxiety, testing and twisting some of the classic studies in infantile curiosity.

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.

Because the pieces of the movie are calculated to fit together in unambiguous arrangements, the performances are reduced to ciphers.

The most confidently professional work Soderbergh has ever done, but it's also the least adventuresome and emotionally vital. It vanishes faster than a shot of bourbon. [Dec 10 2001, p. 110]

Still, it is a writer's privilege to trim and tailor at will, and everybody loves a duel. It would take the dullest of curmudgeons not to enjoy the surge of this saga, accurate or not, and the excesses of what already feels like a distant age. [30 Sept. 2013, p.84]

This is typical Suleiman, as anyone who saw his no less wondrous work "Divine Intervention" (2002), can testify.

Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen, the filmmakers who made the moving documentary Bully, don't try to answer any questions. They avoid charts and graphs, talking heads and sociology. Their approach is more direct and, perhaps, more effective.

Ragged when it tries for philosophical importance, but it's fun to see so many stars at an early stage in their careers.