Headhunters is admirably swift in style, and dangerously silly in what it begs us to swallow, but at its heart is a consummate depiction of a permanent type - the proud and prickly male, thrown back on his desperate wits. Small may not be beautiful, but it lives.

Solondz will never be meek and mild, and there are spasms of shame and awkwardness here that will make even devoted viewers wince as sharply as ever. But the movie, his best to date, and a sequel of sorts to "Happiness," feels drenched in an unfamiliar sadness.

Langella is superb, and Starting Out in the Evening is a classy film.

There are passages of gravity and grace here that few other directors could unfurl. [27 Jan. 2014, p. 78]

Coraline is a beautifully designed, rather scary answered-prayer story.

Jane Fonda in possibly her finest dramatic performance, as Bree, an intelligent, high-bracket call girl, in Alan J. Pakula's murder-melodrama.

Oddly, the funniest performer here is Gene Hackman, playing an aggressively straight, family-values-spouting politician. Hackman's deadpan inanity is sublimely comic.

What matters most about The Homesman, which Jones co-wrote and directed, is how willingly, and movingly, he cedes the stage to Hilary Swank, as Clint Eastwood did in “Million Dollar Baby.”

If Roll Red Roll feels raw and pressing, six and a half years after the event, that’s because it is set on one of the world’s most contested borders: the place where online justice meets, and chafes against, the due process of the law. Expect worse battles to come.

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]

James Stewart is charming and even a little bit sexy as the mild-mannered Destry.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants.

With this film, Wenders crystallized his style of existential sentimentality. His cool eye for urbanism and design blends a love of kitsch with a hatred for commercialism, historicism with a fear of history’s ghosts.

Where “Paterson” is tranquil to the point of inertia, Neruda, with its jumpy shifts of scene, its doses of casual surrealism, and its mashing of high politics against low farce, struck me as more of a poem. It reminds us that movies, by their very nature, owe far more to poetry than they ever will to the novel. The story is only the start.

For all its missteps, the movie powerfully suggests that Wal-Mart is capable of demoralizing a community so thoroughly that it doesn't have the spirit to carry on its life outside the big box.

It bears renewed witness to King’s eloquence, which is no less astounding in casual exchanges than on grand occasions.

Crowe astounds with his technical skill. [7 Jan 2002, p. 82]

The story and the acting make the film emotionally powerful. And Nicholson, looking punchy, tired, and baffled--and not on top of his character (as he is often is)--lets you see into him, rather than controlling what he lets you see.

Wonderful dumb fun.

This romantic comedy-fantasy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New Yorker (tom Hanks) has a friendly, tantalizing magic.

One of the year’s more luscious releases, offering not just the sleekest car chase but the most romantic of rainstorms.

The exemplary figure of Ropert’s film is Solange’s retreat into a sharply expressive silence, captured in poised and precisely composed images, that resounds as clearly as a cry of agony.

He [Bahrani] encloses his two characters in a motel room, but he doesn't make them buddies, as a Hollywood movie would. They are characterized in great detail as separate beings.

Here is the territory that "Twilight" never dared to enter. It was so busy with crushes, covens, werewolves, and all the other moth-eaten trappings of the genre that it forgot to ask, Why do vampires not die of boredom? Is time not the sharpest stake in the heart? [14 April 2014, p.86]

Yet Joe, directed by David Gordon Green, succeeds. Although Green's resume has been as up and down as that of his leading man, his eye for decay has rarely blurred; and now, you sense, he has come to the right place. [14 April 2014, p.87]

Best of all, we get to witness Fassbender at full tilt — to revel in that gaunt, El Greco mug of his, which, for all its handsomeness, betrays no sunny side, whether here or amid the shenanigans of “X-Men.”

The Worst Person in the World strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.

The scenes involving Gould and Cannon are small miracles of timing; Cannon (who looks a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits) is also remarkably funny in her scenes with an analyst (played by the analyst Donald F. Muhich). You can feel something new in the comic spirit of this film - in the way Mazursky gets laughs by the rhythm of cliches, defenses, and little verbal aggressions.

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]

In Rewind & Play, Gomis does more than reveal the discussion that didn’t see the light of day in 1970; he reveals the cinematic methods by which the fabricated and tailored view of Monk’s life and work were crafted.

Fury is literally visceral— a kind of war horror film, which is, of course, what good combat films should be.

The first time you see this film, you're likely to find it silly, autoerotic, static, absurd, and you may feel cheated after having heard so much about it. But though it may seem to have no depth, you're not likely to forget it -- it has a suggestiveness unlike any other film.

With its somersaulting trucks, drafts of quaffable blood, and skies full of digitized ravens, Bekmambetov's movie has every intention of whacking "The Matrix" at its own game.

The movie offers, amid its hectic and rowdy melodrama, a constant and underlying vision of the crucial power of government to serve the public good—and the ease with which that power can, almost invisibly, be shifted to the unfair advantage of the rich and the connected.

The principal suspense in this fascinating movie is generated by the polite, and then not so polite, ferocity of the arguments between the two men.

Running gags about oddball twists in the restaurant business serve little purpose but don’t detract from the movie’s essential quasi-documentary power.

Dumont turns the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant responses, which reduce her captors’ pride to ridicule.

This drama, by the director Jessie Maple, from 1981—one of the first features directed by a black American female filmmaker—is a blunt cinematic instrument of immense power.

Love Is Strange, however, is not about gay marriage. It is about a marriage that happens to be gay. If the film grows slightly boring, even that can be construed as an advance.

Zootopia, like its heroine, is zesty, bright, and breakneck, with chase scenes and well-tuned gags where you half expect songs to be.

Reichardt is trying, as she was in her previous film, "Wendy and Lucy," for a mood of existential objectivty. She takes us from the florid grandiosity of Western myth to the bone-wearying stress of mere life. [11 April, 2011 p.89]

This documentary film, about the deconstruction of a great American city, is surprisingly lyrical and often very moving.

Source Code is a formally disciplined work -- a triumph of movie syntax -- made with rhythm and pace. Jones, unlike most commercial directors, accelerates the tempo without producing visual gibberish. [11 April, 2011 p. 88]

For his first thriller set in America, from 1942, Alfred Hitchcock runs loopily through a gamut of genres, filming in a range of settings, from California to New York, to depict a country that lives in the image of its movies. His set pieces take on the blue-collar drama, the Western, the high-society mystery, the urban police story, and the circus melodrama, while capturing the paranoia of a country newly at war.

Magnificent romantic-gothic corn, full of Alfred Hitchcock's humor and inventiveness.

John Crowley’s film is high on its own briskness, and its glances at Irish backstreet life land it securely in the terrain that was mapped out by Stephen Frears’s “The Snapper” and “The Van.” [5 April 2004, p. 89]

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.

The Green Knight wields a peculiar magic, the reason being that Lowery—as he showed in A Ghost Story (2017), which ranged with ease over centuries—is consumed by cinema’s capacity to measure and manipulate time.

Inspiring though Marley is, however, it tends to deploy his music purely as an illustration of his life. Not once, as far as I could tell, do we watch a song being played straight through from beginning to end. [23 April 2012, p.82]

Seimetz films this coldly ghoulish and derisive fable with quiet intensity and rage at the way of the world.

What fleshes out the movie, and lends it such an extraordinary pulse of life, is the want of words.

They also try to one-up each other as men, vying for professional success and for the attention of the invariably lovely women they meet. Sharks have duller teeth than Coogan and Brydon. Both movies, in fact, are about the impossibility — and the necessity — of male friendship.

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

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.

The unholy clash of pageantry and squalor is finely framed; warriors in silvery helmets, shot from high above, and gleaming in the murk, resemble a nest of wood lice.

Carla, in “Between the Temples,” is given a terse but powerful backstory, and Kane conveys the character’s historically infused idealism, fierce purpose, and caustic humor with tremulous vulnerability and life-rich lucidity. She and Schwartzman expand Silver’s intimate cinematic universe beyond its frames and map it onto the world at large.

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

Part thriller, part character study, Arbitrage is Nicholas Jarecki's first feature, and it moves swiftly and confidently, with many details that feel exactly right. [24 Sept. 2012, p.98]

The whole enterprise goes far beyond pastiche, wreathing its characters in a film-intoxicated world.

The movie belongs wholeheartedly to Bening, and to the age, come and gone, that she enshrines.

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.

Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one.

It's Leary who's the real surprise here; his sincere, tough-guy performance is mesmerizing. He lifts the film above its familiar, claustrophobic environment into the gritty realism of very good urban drama.

Ayer should have dropped the movie-within-a-movie, which is confusing in an unproductive way -- we share the men's point of view without it. [24 Sept. 2012, p. 98]

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

Watergate has never really gone away for those of us who lived through it, and, in Penny Lane's Our Nixon, a shrewdly edited collection of news footage and "home movies" taken by members of the Nixon White House staff, there they are again, our familiars. [9 Sept.2013, p.91]

She (Cotillard) is the center of attention throughout, yet what matters is her willingness to conspire in the Dardennes’ plea for justice.

Tashlin transforms the mystery into a giddy parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s films: borrowing his highly inflected, riotously inventive visual styles, Tashlin creates a sort of live-action cartoon, with distorting angles yielding disorienting juxtapositions, whether from the explosive results of a dish of kidneys flambé or during balletic capers at a bowling alley.

The director, John Dahl, has no intention to baffle or obscure; his objective is to scare the living daylights out of you, or, more pertinently, the dying headlights.

The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.

This thriller doesn't offer the pleasures of style, but it does its job. It catches you in a vise - it's scary, and when it's over you feel a little shaken.

It's a strange, elating movie with the Iceman at its emotional center; his mystical fervor takes hold. The director, Fred Schepisi, is working with a weak script, yet he and his two longtime collaborators, the composer Bruce Smeaton and the cinematographer Ian Baker, achieve that special and overwhelming fusion of the arts which great visual moviemaking can give us.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.

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

In one respect, though not a major one, it is a masterpiece: seldom will you find a better class of fadeout.

After we’ve heard three or four versions of the joke, the words no longer shock. They describe not acts but fantasies, and the movie becomes a celebration of the infinite varieties of comic style.

Though “Marty Supreme” is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize—hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically—the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality.

The 40-Year-Old-Virgin is a hit, I would warrant, because it’s truly dirty and truly romantic at the same time, a combination that's very hard to pull off.

Rapturous fun.

The movie is simultaneously a police procedural, an analysis of language and imagery, a philosophical debate about law and justice, and a very, very dry Romanian Martini--so dry that, at first, one doesn't quite taste much of anything.

Antal has concocted a phantasmagoria-outlandish and jumpy-but, at the same time, the movie is three-dimensional and weighted, with a melancholy soulfulness that becomes surprisingly touching.

Never, though, has the evolution of an automaton been depicted with the extensive grace and wit that Dan Stevens, speaking good German with a slight British accent, brings to I’m Your Man.

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.

Leviathan is a tale for vertiginous times, with the ruble in free fall. There must be thousands of stories like Kolya’s right now, lives folding and collapsing, upon which Zvyagintsev could cast his unfoolable eye. Despite that, he is not primarily a satirist, or even a social commentator; he is the calm surveyor of a fallen world, and Leviathan, for all its venom, never writhes out of control.

Vibrantly intelligent and tough-minded bio-pic.

The director is John Maclean, making his début, and, if he demonstrates how hard it is to handle whimsy, he more than atones for it with two tremendous set pieces — one in a store, and the other in an isolated homestead, girded with cornfields where a shooter can nestle and hide.

This is less of a courtroom drama, I reckon, and more of a discordant, highly strung character clash with legal bells and whistles tacked on.

[Farhadi's] gift for pulling us deep into the story, and for conveying the major burdens of these supposedly minor lives, is unimpaired.

It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.

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.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

We long-term Kiefer nerds may not learn much, but so what? It’s more important that newcomers thrill to—or recoil from—this self-mythicizing figure who forges sculptures out of fighter planes and U-boats.

Nouvelle Vague isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.

Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift.

Bellocchio gets the opera-buffa and the carnival side of Italian Fascism, and parts of the movie are excruciatingly funny.

Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling.

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

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