Coogler presents a provocatively Africanist view of Black American experience, and does so with exuberant inventiveness; the uncompromising political essence of his allegorical vision is expressed with aesthetic delight.

Chaplin's sentimental and high-minded view of theatre and himself.

Another case of a talent torched by its own incandescence — the first half of McQueen is an indubitable thrill, and the second half almost too sad for words.

[Leaf] reinvigorates one of the basic elements of movies, the closeup, and restores its centrality as the beating heart of the cinema.

As a form of wish fulfillment, it’s fascinating if unpersuasive; as a vision of its subject—high-school life—it’s as faux-sweet and faux-innocent as the films of the Frankie Avalon era.

The elements are all there, and Mitchum, looking appropriately square-headed, tries hard and has some good scenes. But you get the impression that the dialogue is moving faster than the action.

In the person of Alec Guinness, Fagin the Viper, the corrupter of youth, has a sly, depraved charm.

The movie begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair, and what unfolds in between is an experience of singularly turbulent and transfixing power; for sheer visceral excitement and sustained emotional force, I haven’t encountered its equal this year. It’s an extraordinarily propulsive piece of filmmaking, and every moment of it is suffused with feeling.

Beneath Rasoulof’s blistering rage erupts a wellspring of empathy: for young women, like Rezvan and Sana, fighting to be heard, and for wives and mothers, like Najmeh, participating in their own oppression.

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.

As a comic figure, Tati had a nice spare buoyancy in Jour de fete and Hulot's Holiday, but here his whimsical bumbling seems precious and fatuous.

Kurosawa seems to be saying that wisdom dictates caution, security, stasis, but that to be alive is to be subject to impulse, to chaos.

In short, Haynes is so smart, tolerant, and thoughtful that he has to be saved by his actors. Julianne Moore takes this picture further, perhaps, than anyone can have dreamed. [18 November 2002, p. 104]

The movie dramatizes the destruction of a society from within that society. Watching “Hell on Earth” is not an easy experience; I can’t recall another documentary with so many corpses. It’s a grief-struck history of cruelty, haplessness, and irresponsibility—a moral history as well as a history of events.

The movie’s panoramic cityscapes teem with the gritty details of emotional life: romance and chores, hope and despair and loss, bitter resentments and rowdy reckonings with mortality.

It's like "The Godfather" acted out by The Munsters...Everything in this picture works with everything else - which is to say that John Husto has it all in the palm of his big, bony hand.

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.

It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take himself too seriously. [Harper's]

As Cooley’s film quickens and deepens, we get a fabulous running joke about the “inner voice,” a staple of American self-will since the days of Emerson.

If Sauper is fired up by anti-globalist conviction, his instincts as an artist and as a man rule out any kind of rhetoric or cheapness. Darwin’s Nightmare is a fully realized poetic vision.

One of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film.

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

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.

It’s so derivative that it isn’t a thriller—it’s a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes. The director, Joel Coen, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Ethan, who was the producer, is inventive and amusing when it comes to highly composed camera setups or burying someone alive. But he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the actors; they give their words too much deliberation and weight, and they always look primed for the camera. So they come across as amateurs.

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.

This is a scary movie and a serious one, because it lures us into the minds, and the earthly domains, of those who are themselves scared, night and day, that they have forfeited the mercies of God. It takes an original movie to remind us of original sin.

For all its mayhem, runs like a mad and slightly sad machine, whirring with hints of folly and regret, and the ending, remarkably, makes elegant sense to a degree that eludes most science fictions. How to describe it, without giving anything away? Scrambled, but rare. [1 Oct. 2012, p.84]

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.

An inflated sci-fi action-horror film...[Cameron] does it in an energetic, systematic, relentless way, with an action dicretor's gusto, and a shortage of imagination. The imagery has a fair amount of graphic power, but there's too much claustrophobic blue-green darkness.

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

The Vast of Night is the most absorbing piece of small-scale science fiction — the best since “Monsters” (2010), for sure — into which it’s been my privilege to be sucked. As Everett says, “If there’s something in the sky, I wanna know.” Same here.

Some strains of this fearsome film, to be honest, feel overworked and arch. When Joe finds his white-haired mother sitting in front of the TV, for example, does it have to be showing “Psycho”?

The picture turns into a kind of stylized morality play about the right and the wrong ways for Irishmen to respond to distorted portraits of their character, and it's terrifically effective.

In its own terms, the movie--the eighth Garland and Rooney had made together--is just about irresistible.

The ghost, on the other hand, grows ever more imposing, and the movie’s most touching spectacle — it’s also the funniest — is that of C standing at the window and waving to another ghost, in the adjacent house.

Yet the film, against my wishes, left me unmoved.

Despite the deftness of the graft (thanks to a script that he co-wrote with Gillian Flynn), it remains, throughout, a graft—a conspicuous effort to rely on the simple emotional engagement of a crime drama to deliver didactic observations about political power relations.

Lapid’s sense of form is more modest than his impulses; his direction falls short of Mercier’s clenched intensity and unhinged energy.

Boys State will leave you alternately cheered and alarmed at the shape of things to come.

Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.

In short, The Descendants is the latest exhibit in Payne's careful dissection of the beached male, which runs from Matthew Broderick's character in "Election" to Jack Nicholson's in "About Schmidt" and Paul Giamatti's in "Sideways."

Skillful and compelling this film may be, but, if Neil Armstrong had been the sort of fellow who was likely to cry on the moon, he wouldn’t have been the first man chosen to go there. He would have been the last.

What is most winning about Distant is that it can peer past the grief and find a scrap of comedy. [15 March 2004, p. 154]

Taylor looks very desirable, and the cast is full of actors whooping it up with Southern Accents.

If you don't mind the gore, you can enjoy Snowpiercer as a brutal and imaginative piece of science-fiction filmmaking. [7 & 14 July 2014, p.94]

In presenting the game, Lund develops a passionately analytical aesthetic of baseball that offers a corrective to the way it’s usually depicted. His documentary-based method, in rejecting the patterned routines of television coverage, intensifies the drama of the sport itself.

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.

Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the passion of a woman who'd kill a man for trying to leave her. She is helped by an excellent script (by Howard Koch) and by two unusually charged performances--James Stephenson as her lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband.

Edwards pulls laughs, though. He does it with the crudest setups and the moldiest, most cynical dumb jokes.

I cannot remember a major movie, not even "The Godfather," that forced me to peer so intently into the gloom. [2 December 2002, p. 87]

The gallows humor is entertaining, despite some rather braod roughhouse effects.

As close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy (and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has come on the stage). The crime of child abuse becomes a curse that determines the pattern of events in the next generation. [13 October 2003, p. 112]

Hammers away at the plot so relentlessly that you can feel the nails entering the back of your skull.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi yokes Johnson’s formidable cinematic intelligence to an elaborate feat of fan service that feels, above all, like the rhetorical and dramatic gratification of a religious sect.

[Rankin’s] film, at its best when it expresses a sincere belief in the possibilities of human connection, can feel trapped in the margins of its conceit, short-circuited by movie love.

It has a gentle, unforced rhythm, and what’s there is good and true. But there’s not enough of it--the movie needs more plot, more complication, more conflict.

The picture has an almost Kafkaesque nightmare realism to it, but the story line wanders diffusely instead of tightening, and the developments become tedious (thought the final discovery of the right man is chillingly well done).

The film has an original, feathery charm.

If you are pressed for time this week, and can spare only fifteen minutes at the cinema, spend them at the opening of Custody. There’s a scene near the start that is like a mini-movie in itself, tense with foreboding — a tension that the rest of Xavier Legrand’s film does nothing to dispel.

Precisely thirty-six times more interesting than “The Girl on the Train.” Where the conceit of that movie feels timid, cooked up, and culturally thin, Anvari’s is nourished by a near-traumatic sense of history, and, in terms of feminist pluck, Rashidi’s presence, in the leading role, is both gutsier and more plausible than the combined efforts of all the main performers in Taylor’s film.

The trouble with experimental comedies is that it's often impossible to figure out how to end them. But at least this one is intricate fun before it blows itself up. [9 December 2002, p. 142]

Williams doesn't seem sure how to resolve the movie, but it's wonderfully entertaining.

He hardly bothers with the characters; the movie is a ventriloquial harrangue. He thrashes around in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.

This is a bizarre and surprisingly entertaining satirical comedy--the story of the search beyond theatre turned into theatre, or, at least, into a movie.

Kechiche digs a good story out of the flux, and, in the movie's final forty minutes, the suspense is terrific.

In its depiction of Guruji’s mastery, The Disciple conjures the wonders and the mysteries of a life that is itself a work of art.

The specifics of The Other Side of Everything far overleap the facts of regional politics; the movie is, in effect, a film of political philosophy, not only in Srbijanka’s trenchant, stirring, and tragic observations, but in its ever-relevant observation of the endemic reactionary counterweight to political progress: populist ethnocentrism and nationalism.

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?

Farsi hasn’t made a rhetorical film of persuasion—anyone who needs a name and a face to be moved by reports of killings is beyond persuading—but a personal memorial for a friend and a public archive of that friend’s work.

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.

By the end of the film, you just want to get away from these people.

The movie is an outright miracle. [8 March 2004, p. 92]

[Anthony] turns a concluding sequence of civic pride and good cheer into a brilliantly light-hearted fantasy of grave import, a radical political utopia conjured with a deft artistic flourish. It’s one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema.

The simple spectacle of children at play, it seems, is all it takes to transform a patch of American suburbia into a gaping, microcosmic wound of racism, paranoia, aggression, mental illness, and gun violence. But The Perfect Neighbor is not—or not entirely—a despairing work.

The insistent feel-good trajectory comes at the expense of thornier truths. The movie, for all its understanding of hard time, can’t keep from going a little soft.

Moonstruck isn't heartfelt; it's an honest contrivance – the mockery is a giddy homage to our desire for grand passion. With its special lushness, it's a rose-tinted black comedy. [25 Jan 1988, p.99]

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]

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

As the camera darts down alleyways, or prowls the housing projects where soldiers fear to tread, what really concerns Demange — and what lends such a kick to O’Connell’s performance, on the heels of “Starred Up” and “Unbroken” — is the bewilderment and the panic that await us, whoever we may be, in limbo.

The Guilty is smartly constructed and tautened with regular twists, but, if it were merely clever, it wouldn’t test your nerves as it does. Its view of human error is rarely less than abrasive, and most of the adult characters, visible and invisible, are enmeshed in a hell of good intentions.

An intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.

Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies.

As the title promises, Full Time is centered on work. It’s one of the best recent movies about work, and it approaches the subject with sharply analytical specificity.

It isn’t a dialogue comedy; it’s visceral and lower. It’s what used to be called a crazy comedy, and there hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years. It’s a film to go to when your rhythm is slowed down and you’re too tired to think. You can’t bring anything to it (Brooks’ timing is too obvious for that) ; you have to let it do everything for you, because that’s the only way it works.

One of the most likable movies of all time.

Dafoe and Pattinson have the stage pretty much to themselves, and the result is a beguiling crunch of styles.

Never has a blockbuster, I would guess, required so many soliloquies. What with the mournful Molina, the hazed-over Dunst, and the puffy uncertainties of Maguire, we in the audience are the only ones who still believe, without qualification, in thrill and spill.

Việt and Nam is a series of excavations, and, for all its gentle cadences—a shot of jungle leaves rustling in the wind about approximates the story’s rhythm—it seems to unearth new mysteries and paradoxes by the minute.

The movie's story may be a little trite, and the big battle at the end between ugly mechanical force and the gorgeous natural world goes on forever, but what a show Cameron puts on! The continuity of dynamized space that he has achieved with 3-D gloriously supports his trippy belief that all living things are one.

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

Though the end of the film seems rushed—its seventy-nine minutes could have gone on for hours—it is nonetheless a cause for rejoicing.

It's a beautifully made gothic-romantic classic, with many memorable scenes.

What is unambiguous is the campaign that Pina mounts, with joy and without fuss, against age discrimination; by law, the film should be screened, on a monthly basis, for Hollywood casting agents.

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

Hugo is superbly playful.

As a rule, movies about toys need to be approached with extreme caution; some of them have been bad enough to count as health hazards. This one is the exception.

At the end of the movie, when Gloria looks at herself appraisingly in a mirror, we seem to be seeing her for the first time. [20 Jan. 2014, p.79]

From the beginning, you can feel this restive, pulsing movie burn from discontent toward disaster. The whole thing should sap the spirit, and make you despair of a lost and wasted country, yet you are constantly shocked awake by the energy of Arbor, whether it is spent on insolence, initiative, or grief. The boy’s a bright wire.