Kevin Macdonald has a terrific tale on his hands, and his telling of it, very British in its matter-of-factness, can barely be faulted; yet the facts drop away, and it becomes impossible not to read the movie symbolically--as a journey to the center of the earth, or farther still.

The calculated silences and cagey revelations result in a movie of truncated characters, with truncated subjectivity, trimmed to fit the Procrustean confines of the script.

Though the story builds slowly (and the first half may seem a little pokey), the characters are more red-blooded and vigorous and eccentric than in most other Zinnemann films.

The teeming profusion of events that Lee dramatizes is inseparable from the historiography that he foregrounds throughout. Both are brought to life with an intricately varied texture of dialogue and gesture, purpose and spirit—a crucial aspect of Lee’s career-long artistry that, here, reaches new heights, thanks to an extraordinary cast of actors who blend fervor and nuance, and whom Lee directs with manifest inspiration.

That is a beautiful riff, worthy of Chaplin, on the inverted values of a world gone to rot, whereas the gags in Anderson’s film are more about themselves, delighting in the literal and the overparticular.

The movie turns into a serious and rather audacious study in the sexiness of a nonsexual relationship, though by the end the audience may be rooting for the two to quit risking life and limb and just go to bed together. [15 July 2002. p. 90]

It is the first film to be directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, and what it shares with other coruscating débuts, from “The Four Hundred Blows” to “Badlands,” is a sense that it HAD to be made. There is a controlled wildness at the heart of such movies, whose narratives ask to be handled as delicately as explosives. [15 March 2004, p. 154]

Amanda Rose Wilder’s nuanced and passionate documentary, about the first year of a “free” elementary school in New Jersey, reveals the glories and the limitations of unstructured classrooms and observational filmmaking alike.

When Sydney Pollack made They Shoot Horses, Don't They? in 1969, the desperation of its dance-marathon contestants was palpable, but the film's Depression-era setting allowed the audience some distance. Hands on a Hard Body hits closer to home.

Superman doesn’t have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us—but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone.

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.

When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality.

Roman Polanski’s version, from 1980, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame.

At its most persuasive, it conjures live-action versions of Chinese paintings, as if Hou were more at ease with the settings and stakes than with the personalities.

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

The most fruitful twist in Late Marriage is that at its core lies not a snippy domestic farce but a prolonged, dirty, and wholly credible sex scene, which starts and stops and starts again, and in which argument and arousal are entwined like limbs. [27 May 2002, p.124]

What could have been a narrow, cultish little picture, a mere retro-trip, fans out into a broader study of longing and belonging. [4 Oct 1993, p.214]

Decker pushes the action to the breaking point of fury, which the cast—and especially Howard, in one of the most accomplished teen performances ever—embodies with a flaying and self-scourging vulnerability.

Why, then, do we not feel bullied by the result? Partly because the camera, as I say, tells a subtler tale than the dialogue does, and lures us into a grudging respect for the bravado of Muse and his men; but mainly because of Tom Hanks. This most likable of actors deliberately presents us with a character who makes no effort to be liked.

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.

Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, The Northman merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.

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.

Blancanieves is a feast for the film-crazy. [8 April 2013, p.89]

What lingers, when this movie is done, are not the regular rallies, during which we survey the whole court, but those moments when we focus on McEnroe alone — on the dancing shuffle of his feet as he bobs and races for a return. Swap the sneakers for tap shoes and the dusty clay for a mirrored floor, and we could be watching Fred without Ginger, lost in the delirium of his art.

Stranger by the Lake, it must be said, flirts with monotony. There is something both fascinating and numbing in the rituals on display, and in the matching rhythm of the film's approach. [27 Jan.2014, p.79]

A dazzling romantic melodrama.

If Sicario does not collapse under its own grimness, that is because of the pulse: the care with which Villeneuve keeps the story beating, like a drum, as he steadies himself for the next set piece.

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.

After the almost incredible lack of depth of the first half-hour, the film begins to acquire a fascination because of its total superficiality--it becomes something resembling Minimal art.

I know that we are meant to be drawn into the undergrowth of these ordinary lives, and the long tale is neatly split into four symbolic seasons;...But do they and their fellow-Brits honestly swell the heart, or do they grate, exasperate, and finally grind us down?

I can’t think of another film portrait of higher education that matches this one for comprehensiveness, intellectual depth, and hope.

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.

The correspondences he wants us to see from up there start to look contrived, illusory. [27 Sept 1993, p.98]

A new kind of affectionate satire which is all but indistinguishable from an embrace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]

Even great and prolific directors have high points, and this film is one of Hong’s best; its form relies on disturbing ironies to approach one of the mightiest of subjects—the nature of happiness and, in particular, a happy marriage, from the perspective of a married woman.

Al Mansour is too smart to overdo the symbolic spin, but the thrust of her film, toward the end, could hardly be more urgent. [16 Sept. 2013, p. 72]

[A] brilliantly analytical and morally passionate documentary .

It may be weaker in the resolution than in the setup, but that is an inbuilt hazard of science fiction, and what lingers, days after you leave the cinema, is neither the wizardry nor the climax but the zephyr of emotional intensity that blows through the film.

Juno is a coming-of-age movie made with idiosyncratic charm and not a single false note.

Weapons is essentially a mystery, and a good one, if conventional...yet Cregger’s storytelling is slick and textureless, featuring characters whose personalities are reduced to their plot functions and a town that has no characteristics beyond its response to calamity.

With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.

Nothing out of the ordinary happens in Blue Valentine, and that, together with the vital, untrammelled performances of the two leading actors, is the root of its power.

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.

With a blend of local lore and partisan fury, theatrical artifice and journalistic inquiry, Gomes single-handedly reinvents the political cinema.

What the novels leave us with, and what emerges more fitfully from this film, as if in shafts of sunlight, is the growing realization that, although our existence is indisputably safer, softer, cleaner, and more dependable than the lives led by Captain Aubrey and his men, theirs were in some immeasurable way better. [17 November 2003, p. 172]

Foote can't make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to by a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace.

The strange thing is that, as the film unfolds, the beauty of the place grows ever more unforgiving. It resembles another planet, fresh from the act of creation, but it feels like a prison.

This tenacious artist has now given his father a proper memorial and has reasserted, with power and grace, the history and identity of his nearly effaced country.

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

You might suggest that Bridge of Spies plays everything a touch safe, and that its encomium to American decency need not be quite so persistent. But when a film is as enjoyable as this one, its timing so sweet, and its atmosphere conjured with such skill, do you really wish to register a complaint? Would it help?

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.

Invisible Life is a heady blend of the casual, the sorrowful, the near-mythical, and the carnally explicit — never more so, be warned, than on Eurídice’s wedding night.

The brilliance of Fin is that he reins in a lifetime of rage, and there is a determination in his eye, and in the line of his chin, that practiced moviegoers will, possibly to their surprise, identify as halfway to sexy--the world-weary smolder of the leading man. [6 October 2003, p. 138]

So skilled are both Carell and Tatum that the movie itself falls prey to the characters’ repression. Though never less than careful and clever, it’s also a stunted and fiercely unhappy piece of work, straining hard to deliver home truths about a commonweal that has beaten itself out of shape.

One of M-G-M's powerhouse moralizing "family" entertainments, it's beefy and rousing, with almost guaranteed tears and laughter for children.

What makes the movie extraordinary, however, is not so much the portrait of a poet as the accuracy and the detail of the period re-creation.

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

I happen to find the result intrusive, presumptuous, and often absurd, but, for anyone who thinks that all formality is a front, and that the only point of a façade is that it should crack, Jackie delivers a gratifying thrill.

The audience for Turn Every Page, I’d guess, will be a medley of Freudians, students of political muscle, and New Yorkers—each bearing a copy of “The Power Broker,” Caro’s 1974 book on Robert Moses, whittled down by Gottlieb to the size of a mere warehouse.

The curious thing is that, as with many big-budget horror flicks, this small French-Belgian movie feels too pleased with its own outrage; the grosser it grows, the less interesting it becomes. When the carnage was over, I went out and had a steak.

An echo of an echo, a convergence of social-scientific cinema and stifled screams of pain that appears designed, urgently and precisely, to break the silence.

Inherent Vice is not only the first Pynchon movie; it could also, I suspect, turn out to be the last. Either way, it is the best and the most exasperating that we’ll ever have. It reaches out to his ineffable sadness, and almost gets there.

The vision of such severe regimentation is shocking; Zin-mi’s tears of shame and her sharply limited range of knowledge and inhibited behavior embody an outrage.

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.

Consume with great caution, and with joy.

Fish tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as "The 400 Blows." [18 Jan. 2010, p. 83]

It's a very simple and, in some ways, tawdry film, but Fellini shows his extraordinary talent for the dejected setting, the shabby performer, the fat old chorine, the singer who will never hit the high note.

The best movie ever made about Chilean plebiscites, NO thoroughly deserves its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.

To judge by the fashions, In Fabric is set in the nineteen-seventies. And, to judge by its visual and aural manners, it might as well have been made then, so reverent is Strickland’s thirst for the period, with its soft-core-porno tropes and its throbbing horror flicks. If anything, this antiquated air makes the film a little too arch and over-concocted for its own good.

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

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.

By the time Tarantino shows up as a redneck with an unexplained Australian accent, Django Unchained has mislaid its melancholy, and its bitter wit, and become a raucous romp. It is a tribute to the spaghetti Western, cooked al dente, then cooked a while more, and finally sauced to death.

Us is political filmmaking of the most spirited sort, and it sets up quite a fight: the Hydes come to visit the Jekylls, and the Jekylls hit back. Whom you cheer for, in the long run, is up to you.

So expert are the performers that you wind up rooting for Burry, Baum, and the others despite yourself, knowing full well that they are fuelled by cynicism -- by an ardent faith that the system will and must fail.

Despite all this desolation and depression, however, Still Life is an extremely beautiful movie.

Less than the sum of its outrageous gags and inventive bits of business. The story is impressively bloody, but the blood is thin, and it keeps leaking out; Tarantino has all he can do to maintain the movie's pulse. Mostly, he tries to get by on film-school cleverness – a homemade pharmaceutical cocktail of allusions, pop music, and visual jolts. [19 Oct 1992]

It would be lovely to announce that the new Bond movie is scintillating, or at least rambunctiously exciting, but Skyfall, in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films, is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place. [12 Nov. 2012, p.94]

Now and then, Lelio departs into reverie and daydream, and it’s here, loosening the bonds of his naturalistic style, that he draws us closer to the mystery of Marina.

Von Trier's latest fable is nothing without its blaze of majesty - or, as his detractors would say, its bombast.

The film’s precise juxtapositions of sight and sound produce brilliant flashes of insight, cascading specifics of texture and emotional coloration, and a cumulatively seductive, almost musical flow.

By a pleasing irony, the parts of the film that stay with you are concerned not with the dark arts but with something far more unstoppable: teen-agers.

May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.

The brilliant Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon--a masterly example of Japanese anime, intended for adults--is partly hand drawn, and features multiple areas of visual activity layered at different distances from the picture plane.

The movie version of the hit Broadway musical Hairspray is perfectly pleasant--I smiled to myself all the way through it--but it’s not as exhilarating as the show.

My First Film, which looks back at a young filmmaker’s crises and conflicts, is both a masterwork of an artistic coming of age and a virtuosic reconception of the art of cinema itself.

The only player to conquer Chicago is Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is no Charisse in her motions but who gets by on a full tank of unleaded oomph. [6 January 2003, p. 90]

This Kong is high-powered entertainment, but Jackson pushes too hard and loses momentum over the more than three hours of the movie. The story was always a goofy fable--that was its charm--and a well-told fable knows when to stop.

There’s nothing derivative about Dash’s work; every image, every moment is a full creation.

An extraordinary new film, “The Fishing Place,” by the veteran American independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza, confronts the Nazi onslaught during the Second World War by means of a daring aesthetic and a refined narrative sensibility that are utterly distinctive—and with a bold twist that overtly wrenches the subject into the present tense.