If audiences enjoy the movie, it's largely because of the elderly actors and the affection that the young director, Ron Howard, shows for them.

The picture's real strength is its witty, vigorous evocation of the fifties media world.

What revs up the movie and keeps it humming is the driving energy of early rock, with its innocent/rebellious spirit, and its theme that teens must find their own ways to love and fight.

The title is accurate: this is a crudely powerful prison picture.

Only at the end do we sense Shelton forcing her hand, and arranging, rather too neatly, for the rebalancing and desaddening of all concerned. [25 June 2012, p.85]

Sean Connery manages to rise above the material; most of the rest of the cast plays in broad style, and there have rarely been so many small, sleazy performances in one movie.

I was surprised at how not-bad it is. It may fall into the category of youth-exploitation movies, but it isn't assaultive, and it's certainly likable. [1 Nov 1982, p.146]

Garrone’s forte, as ever, is to layer the brutish with the beautiful, and to find grace in dereliction.

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.

To be at once earthy and ethereal is an uncommon gift. I noticed it, in Browning, when she starred in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," as the calmly eccentric Violet Baudelaire. Already, as a teen-ager, she seemed older and wiser than the events unfolding around her, and, likewise, in Sleeping Beauty, she impugns the drooling antics of the elderly.

This being an Eisenberg project—he also wrote the screenplay—the laughter comes with a wince attached as standard, and there is barely a scene, in a film constructed from social awkwardness, when your nails aren’t digging into your palms.

Finding Nemo is, as it happens, the most dangerously sugared of the Pixar productions to date--how could any father-finding-son saga be otherwise?--but the threat is now one of oversophistication. [9 June 2003, p. 108]

To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, “Do you want to continue?” Yes, if we can. Forever.

There's a sweet, naive feeling to the movie even when it's violent and melodramatic and atrocious, and when it's good it's good in an unorthodox, improvisatory style.

You leave the film like one of Giovanni's patients rising from the couch -- far from healed, but amused and pacified by the sympathy that has washed over you. [4 Feb 2002, p. 82]

Eastwood is a more forceful actor than he was twenty years ago--less opaque, less stylized, and altogether more idiosyncratic. He's too old and unsuited by temperament to play the tough city newspaper reporter in this film, but he still has an authority that few younger actors could match.

If there's one movie this spring that you shouldn't see with a date, it's Everyone Else, unless you are looking for a quick, low-budget way to break up. Not that Maren Ade's film is especially gloomy or cynical; merely that it functions as a fearsome seismograph, charting not just the major quakes in a relationship but also the barest tremors.

Tomlin confirms herself as a star whenever she gets the material, and Dolly Parton's dolliness is very winning, but it's easy to forget that Jane Fonda is around - she seems to get lost in the woodwork. The director, Colin Higgins, is a young fossil who sets up flaccid, hand-me-down gags as if they were hilarious, and damned if the audience doesn't laugh.

In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in Transformers, his first truly honest work of art.

Redacted is hell to sit through, but I think De Palma is bravely trying to imagine his way inside an atrocity, and that he’s onto something powerful with his multisided approach.

The film is far from being a seamless work of art, but it probably comes closer to the confused attitudes that Americans had toward the Vietnam war than any other film has come, and so its messiness seems honorable.

Finally, a voice-over from Jimmy Carter, lauding the efforts of those involved. All this is, frankly, uncool - a pity, because the rest of Argo feels clever, taut, and restrained.

An amiable family comedy one step above a TV sitcom (and several steps below “Moonstruck.”

Nobody does shrewishness better than McEwan. [8 August 2003, p. 84]

This interfamily clash, fizzing with one-upmanship, is the highlight of the film, and that’s the problem. The planets of the plot, as it were, are more exciting than the sun around which they revolve.

An Education is perceptive and entertaining, but it doesn’t have the jolting vitality of, say, “Notes on a Scandal,” which dramatized an even more unconventional liaison--older woman, fifteen-year-old boy.

The good news is that, although Baby Driver is not much of a movie, it is an excellent music video — a club sandwich for the senses, lavishly layered with more than thirty songs.

If this film has a secret, it dwells in the cinematography — by Vittorio Storaro, no less, who shot “The Conformist,” “Last Tango in Paris,” and “Apocalypse Now.” He worked with Allen on a segment of “New York Stories” (1989), but Café Society marks their first full-length collaboration, and the result is ravishing to behold.

The Marx Brothers in one of their niftiest corny-surreal comedies; it isn't in the class of their Duck Soup but then what else is?

Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which is done with a cell phone. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.

This is cinema, more rhetorical, spectacular, and stirring than cable-TV drama: again and again, DuVernay’s camera (Bradford Young did the cinematography) tracks behind characters as they march, or gentles toward them as they approach, receiving them with a friendly hand.

There’s a different, far more substantial movie lurking within, yet the virtues of efficiency, clarity, surprise, and wit that enliven the one that’s actually onscreen leave its merely implied substance tantalizingly unformed.

22 Jump Street is hardly fresh, but the picture has enough energy to get by.

The movie, photographed by Laura Valladao, is in black-and-white; add the deadpan dialogue and you may be reminded of, say, early Jim Jarmusch. But there’s not a smack of hipness here, and Jalali is not on a quest for cool. Rather, the story is suffused with an uncommon blend of radiance and resignation, nowhere more rapturously than in the final shot.

Like “Get Out” and “Us,” it is another resourceful meditation on fear and wonder—errant at times, yet strewn with frights and ever alert to the threat of racial hostility.

For all its oddities, this movie does carry weight, and, with more than eight per cent of Americans out of work, the timing of its release here could not be more acute.

It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.

Hackman works with a joyous authority that seems to come out of the experience of the character he's playing. He liberates David Mamet from David Mamet. [12 Nov 2001, p. 139]

Even though the movie retreats into its narrow story line, you come out with a sense of epic horror and the perception that this white master race is retarded.

Brilliant melodramatic flourishes adorn the blank center of this passionate fable.

Above all, what makes the movie work -- what renders it not merely exhausting but fulfilling -- are the boys. Bier summons fine performances all around, but Nielsen, in particular, turns the role of christian into a drama all its own. [4 April, 2011, p. 82]

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.

It would be churlish to deny that The French Dispatch is a box of delights; Wright, in particular, is a joy as the sauntering hedonist. Equally, though, it would be negligent not to ask of Anderson, now more than ever: What would incite him to think outside the box?

The movie has a gentle, bemused intelligence, the tone of British liberalism at its most open-minded.

Beyond question a return to the dark, simmering days of their best work, in “Blood Simple” and “Miller’s Crossing.”

To dramatize such binding ideals, for almost two and a half hours, and to conjure precipitous revels from next to nothing, as Miranda and Chu have done, is no small feat.

In his new film, Casanova, Last Love... Jacquot, who is seventy-four, stands his artistic practice on its head in order to consider it retrospectively. It’s a classic “late film,” one that, with the contemplative distance of experience, approaches his deepest concerns with apparent simplicity.

Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to the truckers on the road--a sunny, enjoyable picture.

Shadow Recruit is fun in a minor, winter-season way. If the producers stick with Chris Pine as he ages, they may end up with something worth caring about. [20 Jan.2014, p.78]

Fairly consistently funny.

Sometimes too ominous for its own good.

The pathos of About Schmidt -- of the careful, Chekhovian work that it could have been --gradually slides away. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

This is classic Petzold territory, where you can dwell in a place, or a relationship, without ever quite belonging there.

And here's the strangest thing of all: it works. [September 14, 2009, pg.ll4]

It has some silly, yet irresistibly wonderful examples of Busby Berkeley's pinwheel choreography.

In the end, Ex Machina lives and dies by Alicia Vikander. The film clicks on when she first appears, and it dims every time she goes away.

Given the earnest mayhem that prevails at your local multiplex, there is surely a place for a lightly mocking modernist with a growing distaste for the modern. [9 April 2012, p.84]

Animated and bouncing, the movie is more Dickens than Austen; once one adjusts to this, it's a happy and carefree viewing experience.

What really grips the new movie, for all its amused glances at Swiss Guards and ceremonial pomp, is the prospect of a single soul in crisis. [9 April 2012, p.85]

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.

An efficient, politically inert fantasy.

Red Penguins, is here to serve your bedlam-loving needs. Communism, capitalism, corruption: the gang’s all here.

It is worth seeing Happy End for the long scene between him (Trintignant) and the remarkable Fantine Harduin — between the pitiless patriarch and his granddaughter. Together, they compare notes on the harm that they have done. From generation to generation, the blood runs cold.

First-time feature director Gil Junger gets a lot of laughs in the long setup, but the story eventually reverts to an almost typical high-school romance. Not quite "Clueless."

The work of both Babluani brothers is weirdly stilled and mature, already devoid of the need to show off--serves only to thicken the horror.

The result is a lively bout between bio-pic and fairy tale.

In the end, Lower City is never quite as energetic as it wants to be, touched by the strange, milky lethargy that steeps every waterfront film.

Bullock shades what she normally does into something more interesting -- the angriest and sexiest work she's done. [6 May 2002, p. 138]

This Ingmar Bergman film isn't a masterwork, or even a very good movie, but it is clearly a film made by a master.

The gist of the critical response has been that The Tender Bar follows a well-worn path. Fair enough, but is that such a sin? (You should try the new Matrix movie. Now, that’s worn.) What counts is the firmness of the tread, and Clooney sets a careful but unloitering pace.

Changeling is beautifully wrought, but it has the abiding fault of righteously indignant filmmaking: it congratulates us for feeling what we already feel.

No one who was not laughably self-involved would agree to a project like 20,000 Days on Earth, and yet Cave, to his credit, comes most alive in his hymns to other selves.

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

What distinguishes the latest Cage freak-out is the care with which it’s paced; not until halfway through does he start to lose his hinge, and, even when his face is sprayed with blood, he keeps his glasses on, as if hoping to settle down with a book. Oh, and, if you’ve always wanted to watch him milk an alpaca, your time has come.

Peckinpah's poetic, corkscrew vision of the modern world, claustrophobically exciting.

Where its predecessor kept a foot planted in reality, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” barrels through the underworld with an ever-looser, crazier Looney Tunes energy.

Rich in settling and unsettling, Past Lives, for all its coolness, provokes us with difficult questions.

In the middle of this confident retread, the director, Peter Hewitt, and the writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, sandwich something far more free and funny--a slapstick version of "The Seventh Seal" in which Bill and Ted play games with Death.

Eugene O'Neill's great, heavy, simplistic, mechanical, beautiful play has been given a straightforward, faithful production in handsome, dark-toned color.

Corbijn has an obsessive eye, and it suits the detail-crazy methods of Powell and Thorgerson.

It's enjoyably trivial – a piece of charming foolishness. [24 Mar 1986, p.112]

The whole work drips with a camp savagery (hence the presence of Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, a rival barber and faux-Italianate fop), which in turn relies on the conviction that death itself, like sexual desire, exists to be sniffed at and chuckled over.

Yet Nichols’s movie, though smudged by its dénouement, is not wrecked, and already I am desperate — with a Roy-like yearning — to return to it, and to revel anew in its group portrait of those who are haunted by the will to believe.

Prepare to be surprised by joy, at the outset, and to wind up baffled and sad. Not that the saga is complete; many of the relevant files, at Yale, will not be unsealed until 2066. Less than fifty years to go. I can’t wait.

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

In all, the movie is a cunning and peppy surprise, dulled only by the news that no less than four sequels await. Will the spell not wear off before then?

Turing will survive this film with his enigma intact, but the movie itself is the opposite of enigmatic, and Cumberbatch merits more.

The implied film is better than the actual one, and the implied one is the movie I found myself imagining with fascination as Saltburn unspooled.

Barnard's film, as if nervous of being felled by the straightforward, sinewy thump of Dunbar's writing, ducks and weaves in a series of sly approaches. [2 May 2011, p. 89]

But, like Jerry Lewis, and, to a degree, Steve Martin, Carrey can make the idiotic seem inspired, and his manic mugging creates some big laughs.

Nothing very important happens, but, moment by moment, the movie is alive with the play of gesture and glances, aggression and withdrawal. [31 March 2003, p.106]

Although The Big Sick breaks new ground as it delves into cultural conflicts, there are patches of the drama that give you pause.

The director is Debra Granik, who made “Winter’s Bone” (2010), in which Ron had a minor role; the melodramatic strain in that film was less convincing than its observational acuities, which return to the fore here. With no narrator, it is up to the camera to shepherd us through Ron’s days.

You could argue that the film is too wrenching a departure for an actress as earthy as Farmiga, but that, I suspect, is why she took the risk - daring herself, in the person of Corinne, to slip the surly bonds of beauty and desire.

This rabble-rousing movie appeals to a deep-seated belief in simple, swift, Biblical justice; the visceral impact of the film makes one know how crowds must feel when they're being swayed by demagogues.

This movie, however incomplete and frustrating, is also fully alive and extraordinarily intelligent.

The movie, which Miranda July wrote and directed, is pretty sharp, not to say acidic, on the silliness of good intentions, but she also takes care to slant the best lines toward the subject of time, and its terrible crawl.

Wiseman’s very subject is the difference between neighborhood and community—between the happenstance of urban geography and the commitment of self-identification.