So what kind of movie is this? A conservative one, I would say, not in politics (a topic that never arises at the table) but in its devotion to long-ripened skills and to the sheer hard work that goes into the giving of pleasure.

One might call Neil Young: Heart of Gold soothing, even becalmed, but mellowness and ripeness, when they exist at this high level of craft, should have their season, too.

Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.

Rees uses voice-overs to bring the many characters to life, but the text is thin; the movie’s exposition is needlessly slow and stepwise, and the drama, though affecting, is literal and oversimplified.

Passing is a drama of vision and of inner vision, of appearances and images and self-images, and Hall’s spare and reserved cinematic style serves to emphasize the inward aspect of the action, its crises of consciousness.

Honeyland swarms with difficult, ancient truths about parents, children, greed, respect, and the need for husbandry.

Holy Motors is full of larks and jolts, but the movie is so self-referential that it's mainly aroused by itself. The audience, though eager to be pleased, is left unsatisfied. [22 Oct. 2012, p.88]

Under its leathery hide is a genuine compulsion to de-romanticize Western gunfighting. Every bullet in this movie matters, and by the end Munny's alcohol-fuelled, satanic purposefulness is shocking: in the climax, even his choice of victims has a crazy excess. [10 Aug 1992, p.70]

An existential thriller--the most original and shocking French melodrama of the 50s.

The Dark Knight is hardly routine--it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder.

Linklater barely puts a foot wrong, and he shows that a movie about happiness can be cogent and robust, rather than sappy or wispy; and yet, for all its gambolling mischief, Everybody Wants Some!! leaves us with plenty to rue.

[Farhadi's] gift for pulling us deep into the story, and for conveying the major burdens of these supposedly minor lives, is unimpaired.

Soderbergh and Koepp, for their part, express their own fervent belief: in the seductive glamour of espionage and the magnetism of Blanchett’s and Fassbender’s interlocking gazes—which is to say, in the enveloping artifice and power of movies. Great is their faithfulness indeed.

This boldly confrontational and journalistically probing documentary, by the director Nanfu Wang, goes beyond the slogan of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to reveal the system of violence, corruption, propaganda, and silence on which it depended.

The emotion got to many viewers, even though the manipulated suspense and the sentimental softening prevent the film from doing anything like justice to its subject.

The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own.

You have to admire it, when so much of the competition seems inane and slack, but you can’t help wondering, with some impatience, what happened to its heart.

Tucked away inside the grandeur, though, and enlivened by jump cuts, is a sharp, not unharrowing story of a father and son, and, amid one's exasperation, there is no mistaking Malick's unfailing ability to grab at glories on the fly.

Having been twisted into bewildered bits by the convolutions of Park’s narrative, I was astonished, toward the end, to find it brushing against the tragic.

For all its tenderness, empathy, warmth, and verve, The Fabelmans has the feel of mythmaking—a feature-length promotional video for an authorized biography of a filmmaker who, if far from self-made, is in any case self-propelled. What’s missing is a sense of history.

Tavernier seems to be enshrining his own idolatry. The music itself has none of the mysterious teeming vitality of great bebop--it's lifeless.

I have seen The Host twice and have every intention of watching it again.

Tarkovsky realizes the allegorical tale with an overwhelming density of visual detail; the riot and clash of textures—between black-and-white and color, agonized contrasts of light and murk, shimmery reflections on vast pools of water, and abrading striations of grass and stone—form a frenzied vocabulary and lend the film the torrential inner force of Dostoyevskian rhetoric.

The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.

Reichardt is trying, as she was in her previous film, "Wendy and Lucy," for a mood of existential objectivty. She takes us from the florid grandiosity of Western myth to the bone-wearying stress of mere life. [11 April, 2011 p.89]

Fruitvale Station is a confident, touching, and, finally, shattering directorial début.

It was shrewd of the screenwriters, Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, to stick so closely to Eunice’s perspective, trusting the audience to identify with her uncertainty, her vulnerability, and her instinctive urge to protect her children. But I’m Still Here has its own share of tactical evasions, and its dramatic caginess winds up blunting its own emotional force.

A minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away.