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

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.

Jones gets everything--the gestures, the generosity, the mean streak, the bending of the ear to recitals of woe, whether across a lunch table or a prison cell. He even nails the voice, like that of a chorister caught running a racket with the incense.

The quiet joke of the film is that you could scarcely meet two less revolutionary souls.

The film’s styles, tones, and moods are as distinctive as its approach to jazz.

A magnificent horse opera.

The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity.

A lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

A Little Prayer is spare yet brisk, and it unfolds with a graceful, almost musical sense of modulation: Camp and Weston, both veterans of MacLachlan’s work, strike bracing high notes of acerbic wit, which Strathairn and Levy answer with an understated bass line of emotion.

Schlesinger, working from a script by Malcolm Bradbury, maintains a steady rhythm and a light, cheerful mood that seem to reflect the brisk sanity of the heroine.

The movie’s rage is righteous, its symbols profound. It is hard to imagine a fiction film that could rise to the severe aesthetic demands of its enormous subjects, but “Yes” is the rare film that challenges the cinema at large to try.

He stages the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal details of which that life is made—how to make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally intimate connections that result.

Happy Valley is a devastating portrait of a community — and, by extension, a nation — put under a spell, even reduced to grateful infantilism, by the game of football.

An enormously enjoyable hybrid, a romantic comedy set at the center of a caper movie. But the froth arrives with steel bubbles--the tone is amused and mordantly satirical.

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.

Shiny and unfelt and smart-aleck-commercial as the movie is, it's almost irresistibly entertaining - one of the high spots of M-G-M professionalism.

That is the quiet triumph of American Splendor: behind the playfulness, it cleaves to an oddly old-fashioned belief that a life, even a life as mangy as Mr. Pekar’s, gains in depth and darkness when it is crosshatched with the imaginary. The nerd needs no revenge. [18 & 25 August 2003, p. 150]

Pennebaker films Stritch’s first rendition, among the most celebrated outtakes in history, with a rapt devotion that’s as revealing of the limits of recording as it is of the thrills of live performance—and of the camera’s mediating creative power.

In short, Lee’s new movie — like the great “BlacKkKlansman” (2018) — is a history lesson wrapped in an adventure, the caveat being that history is never done with us, and that we struggle to shrug it off our backs.

What it really has to do with is love of the film medium, and if Welles can't resist the candy of shadows and angels and baroque decor, he turns it into stronger fare than most directors' solemn meat and potatoes. It's terrific entertainment.

[Park] brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.

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.

Mustang is the début feature of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and it’s quite something: a coming-of-age fable mapped onto a prison break, at once dream-hazed and sharp-edged with suspense.

The Comden-Green script isn't as consistently fresh as the one they did for Singin' in the Rain, but there have been few screen musicals as good as this one, starring those two great song-and-dance men Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan.

Quiety sumptuous movie. [15 April 2002, p. 98]

Filmed in a hot and bleached black-and-white, it manages to swerve from culture-clashing farce to alarming suspense without losing control.

Easily the best American movie so far this year.

In Kiarostami’s furiously clear view, religious dogma suppresses the eye’s observations through the dictate of the word; his calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy, have the force of a steadfast resistance.