Jarmusch keeps the picture formal and cool, and it has an odd, nonchalant charm; it's fun. But it's softhearted fun--shaggy-dog minimalism--and it doesn't have enough ideas (or laughs) for its 90-minute length.

Bonnie and Clyde could look like a celebration of gangster glamour only to a man with a head full of wood shavings. These two visibly have the life expectancy of dragonflies; their sense of power and of unending gang fun is a delusion, and to see them duping themselves is as harrowing as the spectacle of most other hoaxes.

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert.

Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit.

There’s something in Schoenbrun’s sense of style that captures the alluring yet alienating essence of screen-centered lives: the feeling of not being where one is, the feeling that what’s happening elsewhere, on those screens, is more important, even more real, than one’s own life.

The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished.

John Cusack and Mahoney have to carry the unconvincing melodramatic portion of the plot, but they carry it stunningly. [15 May 1989]

Henry James, who loved the place, accused himself of "making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality." Sorrentino has made a Rome of images, and taken the same risk. But it was worth it. [25 Nov. 2013, p.134]

Manfred Kirchheimer’s 2006 documentary, only now being released, is an exemplary work of urban romanticism, intellectual history, and visual analysis.

Kulumbegashvili’s gaze is by turns coolly diagnostic and furiously exploratory, a dichotomy that manifests itself in the compositional extremes of Khachaturan’s cinematography.

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.

This is one of Preston Sturges's surreal-slapstick-satire-conniption-fit comedies, and part of our great crude heritage.

Far more valuable is the urgency with which the movie stares ahead, as it were, at any future legislation that would incite women to take such dire measures once again.

This movie is both a satirical epic and a square celebration, yet the satire backfires.

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.

Although The Big Sick breaks new ground as it delves into cultural conflicts, there are patches of the drama that give you pause.

Finally, a voice-over from Jimmy Carter, lauding the efforts of those involved. All this is, frankly, uncool - a pity, because the rest of Argo feels clever, taut, and restrained.

Huston's power as Lilly is astounding... She bites right through the film-noir pulp; the [climactic] scene is paralyzing, and it won't go away.

Almodóvar has brought an extraordinary calm to the surface of his work. The imagery is smooth and beautiful, the colors are soft-hued and blended. Past and present flow together; everything seems touched with a subdued and melancholy magic. [25 November 2002, p. 108]

In the end, Assayas, shooting the film with relaxed, flowing camera movements, gives his love not to beautiful objects but to the disorderly life out of which art is made.

On reflection, and despite these cavils, we should bow to The Master, because it gives us so much to revere, starting with the image that opens the film and recurs right up to the end-the turbid, blue-white wake of a ship. There goes the past, receding and not always redeemable, and here comes the future, waiting to churn us up.

You find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that The Wild Pear Tree lasts for more than three hours.

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.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adventure, from 1984, is a magnificent anomaly—a rousing vision of scorched earth.

Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm.

With breathtaking assurance, the movie veers from psychological-thriller suspense to goofball comedy to icy satire: it's Patricia Highsmith meets Monty Python meets Nathaniel West. [20 Apr 1992, p.81]

The film is distinguished by the fine performances of Nicholson and Quaid, and by remarkably well-orchestrated profane dialogue. It's often very funny. It's programmed to wrench your heart, though-it's about the blasted lives of people who discover their humanity too late.

Ford is more than a witness—he is a crucial participant in the events of the film, and its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in his grief-stricken, self-interrogating aesthetic.