Truffaut's The Wild Child is a more beautifully conceived picture on the same theme, but even with its imperfections and staginess this early Penn film is extraordinary.

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.

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

For all its political determination, RRR is also a musical, and an electrifying one.

If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord.

The movie is a methodical and entirely absorbing thriller, featuring a complicated plot (Brian Helgeland adapted the Michael Connelly novel) in which clues are carefully planted, and understanding slowly gathers in the mind of the hero. [19 & 26 August 2002, p. 174]

One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.

This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving.

Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition.

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.

This square movie, at its best, is very powerful.

The film was infused with an elegiac sense of American failure, and it had a psychedelic pull to it.

[Losier] revels in Cassandro’s offstage charisma and in his acrobatic artistry while also revealing the authentic violence of the sport’s blatant artifice.

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.

Whatever the omissions, the mutilations, the mistakes, this is very likely the most exciting and most alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on the screen.

A glitter sci-fi adventure fantasy that balances the indestructible James Bond with an indestructible cartoon adversary, Jaws (Richard Kiel), who is a great evil windup toy. This is the best of the Bonds starring the self-effacing Roger Moore.

The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent look at private and public abuses of power is a glance askance at Hollywood mythologies, too.

Dumont doesn’t stint on the Lucas-like dialectics, and he works wonders with wryly blunt yet nonetheless spectacular effects-driven action scenes. But, most exquisitely, he delights in visions of earthly, natural majesty.

This final film -- after so many dazzling studies of adultery, such as "La Femme Infidele (1969) -- is a touching and unfashionable hymn to married love. [1 Nov. 2010, p.121]

A seriously scandalous work, beautifully made, and it deserves a sizable audience that might argue over it, appreciate it -- even hate it. [1 April 2002, p. 98]

That is why, of the two tales, A Quiet Place is not just more enjoyable but, alien invaders notwithstanding, more coherently plausible, revelling in the logic of well-grounded terror.

The failure of innocence here is touchingly absurd; the film is stylized poetry, and it is like nothing else that De Sica ever did.

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.

I have seen The Baader Meinhof Complex three or four times now, and, despite exasperation with its fissile form, I find it impossible not to be plunged afresh into this engulfing age of European anxiety.

The movie re-creates Sam's miserable days with enough sympathy to come within hailing distance of such emblematic works of American disillusion as Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day."

When the Dostoyevskian drama kicks in, Allen’s venomous speculations take over, and bring to the fore a tangle of ghostly conundrums and ferocious ironies, as if the director, nearing eighty, already had one foot in the next world and were looking back at this one with derision and rue.

If The Painter and the Thief is occasionally annoying, it’s because Ree gives away so little. He tracks to and fro in time, springing items of evidence upon us without warning, and withholding others.

The film puts his work convincingly and revealingly into the context of his turbulent life and the passionate politics of the times. Above all, however, the movie puts on display Winogrand’s singular way of working—and proves that, as with many of the artistic luminaries of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, his process is as original a creation as his art, and is inseparable from it.

Spacious, leisurely, and with elaborate period re-creations of Louisiana in the 30s, this first feature directed by the young screenwriter Walter Hill is unusually effective pulp, perhaps even great pulp.

Intermittently dazzling, the film has more energy and invention that Boorman seems to know what to do with. He appears to take the title literally; one comes out exhilarated but bewildered.

Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.

Despite all the overlaps, this is not a simulacrum of a Ridley Scott film. It is unmistakably a Denis Villeneuve film, inviting us to tumble, tense with anticipation, into his doomy clutches.

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.

On the surface, Apatow's films are about sex--obsessively, exclusively, and exhaustively. (This one lasts more than two hours.) But that is a clever feint, for their true subject is age.

What Dhont understands, in short, is how kinetic the rites of passage are—how growing pains are expressed not in words, however therapeutic, but in rushes of activity.

The sinews in Holly Hunter's neck and arms tighten like cables hauled in by a winch; she's all wired up, and in Richard LaGravenese's lovely comedy about loneliness in New York she uses the tension as a source of comedy.

Shot by shot, scene by scene, Mann, whose recent work includes “Heat” and "The Insider," may be the best director in Hollywood. Methodical and precise, he analyzes a scene into minute components.

Although the script is a conventional melodrama, the director, Edward Zwick, has made something more thoughtful than that.

Marvellous, though it is smaller in emotional range than such earlier Mike Leigh films as the goofy bourgeois satire "High Hopes" (1988), the candid and piercing "Secrets & Lies" (1996), and the splendid theatrical spectacle "Topsy-Turvy" (1999).

Exciting, handsomely staged, and campy.

The movie is expert piffle for grownups, directed with great energy by John McTiernan and written with verve by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer.

Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky notions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C. Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it.

Imagine my relief when Bob, Helen, and the kids, for all the nicety of their emotions, turned out to be--if I can risk a word that may be taboo in Pixar land--cartoons. Long may it stay that way.

It has charm and a lot of entertaining kinkiness, too.

Michael Mann is a fluent, evocative filmmaker, and the movie is well written, expertly staged, and beautifully edited. [24 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 126]

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

Eastwood has become tauntingly tough-minded: “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he seems to be saying. And, with the remorselessness of age, he follows Chris Kyle’s rehabilitation and redemption back home, all the way to their heartbreaking and inexplicable end.

Offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it; the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can't escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn't warranted by the events.

At last, a good big film. The legacy of the summer, thus far, has been jetsam: moribund movies that lie there, bloated and beached, gasping to break even. But here is something angry and alive: Elysium.

Though Lee still can't resist a fancy visual trick from time to time, Clockers is, at its best—in its compound of the jaunty and the depressing—his ripest work to date.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lighting-fast choreography.

Whether pushing the camera close to the performers or zooming in from afar to survey them intimately, Simon captures the lavish life of theatrical imagination that inspires them and makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.

To a remarkable extent, the new movie is full of cheer. It feels boisterous, bustling, and, at times, perilously close to a romp.

The compositions evoke a kind of open-air claustrophobia, whether in overhead shots that pin the characters in the landscape or in tableaux of men, women, and children staving off the chaos of the wide-open spaces with their weary fences and weathered towns.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

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.

Great fun in the uninhibited early-30s style, made at M-G-M before fear of church pressure groups turned the studio respectable and pompous.

There is no whodunit here — the horror is plain in the opening shots — and the how is presented with great restraint, but the why remains veiled and mysterious long after the film has ended.

At first, you may think, Oh, it’s that damn prison movie again, but Starred Up has a much more intimate texture of affection and disdain than most genre films. You’re held by every exchange, every fight.

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]

For many of this movie's likely viewers, the sting built into Food, Inc. is the realization that, without unending effort, they are not all that much freer in their choices than that hard-pressed family.

By means of suggestive editing, plus a potent score by Patrick Gowers, Hazan makes us feel that we are watching a mystery. Naturally, no solution is provided.

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

Consume with great caution, and with joy.

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time.

Peter Jackson has not really made a movie of The Lord of the Rings; he has sprung clear of it to forge something new. He has drawn a deep breath, and taken the plunge. [5 January 2004, p. 89]

Russell does more than fill the film with its high-wattage parade of stars, who energize the proceedings from beginning to end. He creates vivid and forceful characters—slightly heightened caricatures whose unnaturally emphatic presences befit the air of serendipity that gives history the oddball heroes it needs, and that gives them the happy ending they deserve.

The monologue that Goldblum delivers there, grand with illusion and larded with mouthfuls of canapes, is entirely delicious -- roguish and absurd, but lending the film a zest that it was in danger of losing. [17 March 2014, p.79]

Like a finely wrought short story, and it's all but perfect.

The abruptness, the willfulness, the ferocity of Passages reflect, more than any other film by an American director that I’ve seen in a while, the influence of Pialat.

The film, directed and co-written by James Gunn, is joyfully irreverent. Gunn lends his underachiever superheroes a geeky, comic camaraderie, and he brings a spry touch to the wacky intergalactic adventure.

Enemy may crawl and infuriate, and, boy, does Villeneuve get rid of the grin. But the film sticks with you, like a dreadful dream or a spider in the bedclothes. Shake it off, and it's still there. [17 March 2014, p.78]

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

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

The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.

For all its loose ends and unanswered practicalities, its wild urgency is thrilling. It defies the expectations fostered by Lee’s prior films; it steps back even as it moves inward. It is, in the modern-classic sense, a late film.

An exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence.

The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a stirring and infuriating story of brazen corporate indifference to employees, neighbors, and the world at large—and the obstacles faced by those who challenge it.

What does make this movie stand out is the presence of Cristin Milioti, a paragon of goofiness and grace.

As Rose-Lynn, stomping along in white cowboy boots, she is ballsy and fiery, at once wised up and dangerously immature.

It’s all fascinating. Gilroy is an entertainer.

The updating of the story is thin; some dramatizations, though short, are distracting, but the over-all impression, of a time of constant meetings and conversations that gave voice to stifled frustrations and united untapped energies, remains visionary and heroic.

A smashing kitsch entertainment.

Structurally, the film is all chop and change, with Hare and Fiennes tacking back and forth across Nureyev’s early years. Some viewers will find the result too fussy by half; I liked its restlessness, and the sense of a chafed and driven spirit that refuses to be boxed in.

By a useful coincidence, A Hero arrives in cinemas (for viewers hardy enough to visit them) in the wake of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Watch one after the other and you may decide, as I did, that A Hero is the more Shakespearean of the two. Coen’s film is powerful but hermetic, sealed off within its stylized designs, whereas Farhadi reaches back to The Merchant of Venice and pulls the play’s impassioned arguments into the melee of the here and now.

The film’s view of a mind thrown back on itself, and the profound vulnerability, mental derangement, and physical degradation that result, is, true to form, a political horror.

There aren't many performers who can deliver the fullness of heart that such a plot demands, but Winslet is one of them. [22 March 2004, p. 102]

The beautiful joke of Factotum is that Dillon is nobility itself.

Contagion is serious, precise, frightening, emotionally enveloping.

Two classic themes, the eternal triangle and a provincial’s big-city struggles, get distinctive twists in Philippe Garrel’s brisk yet pain-filled new drama of youth’s illusions.