The dramatic fusion of physical and administrative power captures nothing less than the bloody forging of modernity.

The story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism. [29 Nov 1993, p.148]

The story, about the friendship between two lonely, vagrant ranch hands--the small, bedraggled, intelligent George and the simpleminded giant Lennie--is gimmicky and highly susceptible to parody, but it is emotionally effective just the same.

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.

[A] generation-gap soap opera of the 50s, which had more emotional resonance for the teenagers of the time than many much better movies.

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

The project lacks the variety of sensuous pleasures that a great movie has to provide.

The scenes are often unshaped, and so rudderless that the meanings don't emerge. Rowlands externalizes schizophrenic dissolution; she fragments before our eyes. But her prodigious performance is enough for half a dozen tours de force--it's exhausting.

Seldom, it is fair to say, does Kaufman just want to have fun, but as he lifts the spell of his gloom a surprising beauty breaks through.

The director, Rouben Mamoulian, rather overdoes the pseudo-science at the beginning, but at some levels this story seems to work in every version, and this one, set in a starched mid-Victorian environment, suggests the lust that has to come out--and the attraction of the gutter.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

It's a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it's genuinely sparkling.

This classic musical-melodrama with the Jerome Kern songs and the novelistic Edna Ferber plot, full of heartbreaks and miscegenation and coincidences, is hard to resist in any of its versions.

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]

As director and star, Olivier succeeds with the soliloquies as neither he nor anyone else ever did on film before; they're intimate, yet brazen.

Few movies give us such memorable, emotion-charged images.

A magically powerful film.

Moving and impressive in a big-Hollywood-picture-way.

Azor is Fontana’s first feature, and what’s impressive is how coolly he avoids the temptation to put on a big show, preferring more delicate tactics.

Most fruitful of all is the husbandry of the gags, some of which are planted early in the film and must wait for more than an hour before they bloom.

Disney-style kitsch. It's technologically sophisticated, but with just about all the simpering old Disney values in place.

A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through.

Small-scaled and limited, Capote is nevertheless the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer's working method and character--in this case, a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.

Every gag is girded with fear. The humor is so black that it might have been pumped out of the ground.

It's intensely enjoyable--in some ways the best of Hitchcock's American films.

About Dry Grasses may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise.

Let no one, in their understandable eagerness to praise Leigh as an anatomist of the human condition, downplay just how entertaining Hard Truths is. Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force.

Not since "Fargo" (1996) has [McDormand] found a character of such fibre. She doesn't pitch it to us, still less try to make it palatable; she seems to state Mildred, presenting her as a given fact, like someone unrolling a map.

The film (especially the first half) seems padded, formal, discreet. It's like watching a faded French classic.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is no more than mildly funny. It produces murmuring titters rather than laughter -- the sound of viewers affirming their own acumen in so reliably getting the joke. [10 March 2014, p.78]

The result invites obvious yet not inapt comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick, but Bentley’s film—for all its crystalline imagery, its vision of Grainier’s home as a fallen Eden, and its air of metaphysical wonderment—unfolds in a more dramatically direct, compacted register.

The result is pure Saturday-night moviegoing: it gives you one hell of a wallop, then you wake up on Sunday morning without a scratch. (By contrast, the emotional nakedness of the Judy Garland version, poised within formal compositions, can still reduce me to rubble.)

This movie makes one grateful that a serious European art cinema still exists. [15 April 2002, p. 88]

The movie, Polley's feature début, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career.

Filmed in a hot and bleached black-and-white, it manages to swerve from culture-clashing farce to alarming suspense without losing control.

Let’s be honest: the mainspring of The Father, onscreen, is the presence of Hopkins—an actor at the frightening summit of his powers, portraying a man brought pitifully low. The irony is too rare to resist.

Foxtrot leads us a sorry dance, with irreproachable skill, but sometimes you long for it to break step, to quicken, and to breathe.

A handsome and intelligent piece of work: a faithful, well-paced, and carefully crafted dramatization of a very good story.

One of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made.

Many documentaries are good at drawing attention to an outrage and stirring up our feelings. Ferguson's film certainly does this, but his exposition of complex information is also masterly. Indignation is often the most self-deluding of emotions; this movie has the rare gifts of lucid passion

Only after the movie ends do you understand what Debra Granik, with a consummate sleight of hand, has done. Here, among the peaceful trees, without a shot fired in anger, she’s made a war film.

The barbs of wit, delivered throughout, are like the retractable daggers used in stage productions of "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar": they gleam enticingly, they plunge home to the hilt, but they leave no trace of a wound.

Almodóvar pursues the politics of memory with uninhibited vigor, with a relentlessly physical immediacy that endows his tale of startling coincidences with the power of documentary.

The movie is packed with lovely jokes, some of them funny in inexplicable ways.

Miss Crawford's heavy breathing was certified as acting when she won an Academy Award for her performance here.

Only very rarely is it not fun.

Marvellous fun.

The movie is part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.

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

While Boseman does what he can with the ever-noble hero, Jordan is so relaxed and so unstiff that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll wind up rooting for the baddie when the two of them battle it out. Jordan has swagger to spare, with those rolling shoulders, but there’s a breath of charm, too, all the more seductive in the overblown atmosphere of Marvel. He’s twice as pantherish as the Panther.

The film is rather misshapen, particularly in the sections featuring William Holden, and the action that detonates the explosive finish isn't quite clear. However, Alec Guinness is compelling as the English Colonel Nicholson.

The simplifications and sanitizations of Brooklyn would be only dreary if they merely served the purpose of a streamlined and simplified story-telling mechanism. What renders them odious is the ethos that they embody, the worldview that they package.

I certainly came out of Nobody Knows feeling numb; only later, reflecting on the fact that the movie was inspired by a true story, did it occur to me that the numbness could have been deliberate, and that what suffused this picture was a mist of anger.

With extraordinary material, a merely ordinary approach is worse than a bore; it’s a betrayal.

Working out of themselves (as his actors do), they can't create characters. Their performances don't have enough range, so we tend to tire of them before the movie is finished. Still, a lot of people found this psychodrama agonizingly true and beautiful.

The virtues of Jackson's trilogy, thus far, have been pace and astonishment, which is almost the same thing. [6 January 2003, p. 90]

There is something willed and implausible at the heart of L’Enfant, beginning with the child himself--the first non-crying, non-hungry infant in human history, let alone in cinema.

Ozu makes silence his very subject. In warm and humorous scenes, it emerges as the abyss of the generation gap; but here, Ozu stands his own ironic inversions on their head.

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.

Birdman trades on facile, casual dichotomies of theatre versus cinema and art versus commerce. It’s a white elephant of a movie that conceals a mouse of timid wisdom, a mighty and churning machine of virtuosity that delivers a work of utterly familiar and unoriginal drama.

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

Irene Dunne's way with a quip is to smile brightly and wring it dry, but she's at her best here.

It is a fiercely composed, historically informed, and richly textured film, as insightful regarding the particularities of the protagonist as it is on the artistic life — and on the life of its times.

No one has ever fully explained what gives this basically slight romantic comedy its particular - and enormous - charm.

Happy Hour, a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.

A little poky but impressively well done, with witty special effects (by John P. Fulton) and traces of the Whale humor that enlivened his Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein.

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

Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance.

[Chahine]'s richly textured, good-humored, visually forceful storytelling portrays the surging, ribald vitality of Egyptian society that squirms beneath the unjust authority of dictators and dogmatists.

Like Ford's other large-scale, elegiac Westerns of this period, it's not a plain action movie but a pictorial film with slow spots and great set pieces.

Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.

The film’s pleasures and its frustrations, its energies and its enervations, are inseparable.

By the time of the closing shot -- twists of fog rising like spectres from a leaden sea -- even the most stubborn viewer will be lying back in a state of happy hypnosis. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

The result demands a patient viewing, and maybe more than one; only after a second dose did I get the measure of Garrone's mastery, and realize how far he has surpassed, not merely honored, the author's courageous toil.

Familiar Touch, its title perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.

A deeply satisfying aesthetic and pedagogic experience--though Americans may find themselves wondering how such terrific children can grow into such irritating adults.

The slow, strange rhythm is very unsettling and takes some getting used to, but it's an altogether amazing, sunsuous film; it even has an element of science fiction and some creepy musical numbers, and the soundtrack is as original and peculiar as the imagery.

The movie, at two and a half hours, retains much of the unhurried suspense -- the careful cultivating of our patience, of our narrative loyalty -- that is bred by the best TV.

To be fair, you can scoff at the antics and still be swept away. The final quarter of Mission: Impossible—Fallout takes place in Kashmir, with a helicopter chase through deep gullies and past snowy peaks. McQuarrie keeps the action crisp and clear, to match the icy air.

A masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop.

Throughout, the writer-director, Agnes Varda, sustains an unsentimental yet subjective tone that is almost unique in the history of movies.

A brilliant documentary about an American saint and fool--a man who understands everything about nature except death.

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.

This may be the best-paced and most slyly entertaining of all the decadent-ancient-Rome spectacular films. It's a great big cartoon drama, directed by Stanley Kubrick, with Kirk Douglas at his most muscular.

You could argue that a little of this goes a long way, but that’s the point. An Andersson movie is a gallery of littles, each of them going a very long way.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

The two elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.

It would be a shame if the film were to be seen only by those already interested in French cinema. Anyone with an eye for grace, industry, resilience, rich shadows, and strong cigarettes should go along. Like the kid on that terrace in Lyon, you see the light.

What Park has done is resurrect not just the spirit but, as it were, the bodily science of early comedy. Like Chuck Jones, and, further back, like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Park is unafraid of the formulaic--—of bops on the head, of the unattainable beloved, of gadgetry gone awry--because he sees what beauty there can be in minor, elaborate variations on a basic theme.

About Elly both clutches us tight and shuts us out, adding wave upon wave of secrets and lies.

Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner, directed by Steven Spielberg, and derived in part from Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," is a curious beast. The title suggests a monolith, as if going to this movie were tantamount to visiting Mt. Rushmore, and the running time, of two and a half hours, prepares you for an epic. Yet the film is a cramped and ornery affair, with Spielberg going into lockdown mode even more thoroughly than he did in "The Terminal."

Unimaginable as anything but a movie. It’s largely wordless, sombrely spectacular, vast and intimate at the same time, with a commitment to detailed physical reality that commands amazed attention for a tight hundred minutes.

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.

For the most part, though, Love & Friendship is a frolic: crisp and closeted rather than expansive, with curt exchanges in drawing rooms, carriages, and gardens.

Here’s the thing, though. Hereditary is far more upsetting than it is frightening, and I would hesitate to recommend it to the readily traumatized.

It's a pleasure to find a thriller fulfilling its duties with such gusto: the emotions ring solid, the script finds time to relax into backchat, and for once the stunts look like acts of desperation rather than shows of prowess.

It is taut, absorbing, and, at ninety-nine minutes, ruthlessly concise. But what it bears witness to, over several days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering endurance test, in which Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, for all its terrible matter-of-factness, produces tumultuous feelings of amazement and revolt.