This is a bleak but mesmerizing piece of filmmaking; it offers a glancing, chilled view of a world in which brief moments of loyalty flicker between repeated acts of betrayal.

Avowals of literary ambitions and familial devotion, stories of death and faith, and a bold dramatic structure—based on flashbacks and leaps forward in time—set the vagaries of work and love on the firm footing of destiny.

Lynch’s powerful depiction of Merrick (played by John Hurt) moves a viewer from revulsion and fear to empathy and tenderness.

Moreau's nocturnal wanderings are made unbearably poignant by an exquisite Miles Davis jazz score that became famous in its own right.

Within the vigorous entertainment of Straight Outta Compton is a sharp-minded realism about the machines within the machines, the amplifiers of money and media that, behind the scenes and offscreen, play crucial roles in the flow of power.

Intermittently first-rate.

This is McQueen’s method: a passage of lyrical beauty, a chaser of righteous struggle. You cannot survive a war, he suggests, without both.

This is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style -- a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures.

No one could mistake the movie for a documentary, but the picture has some of the rectitude of a good documentary--a tone of plainness without flatness.

The filmmakers’ probing analysis reveals the basic principles of freedom and dignity within the political essence of labor issues.

The Iron Claw is as exuberant as it is mournful, and the high spirits of performance and achievement are inseparable from the price that they exact.

It’s a revealing view of an industry of enormous personalities—and the indulgences that feed them.

This is not just pliable filmmaking; it is an exercise in worldliness, in a feel for the cracks and warps of circumstance, which is all the more startling when you learn that the director is thirty-one.

The whole enterprise is designed to skirt the traditional traps of the music movie; instead of a laborious bio-pic, we get a sly, quick-witted meditation on a character always likely to elude our grasp.

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]

In truth, I’ve never seen so much lovemaking in an aboveground film, but the revelation, and great triumph, of Lou’s work is that these scenes are never pornographic--that is, never separated from emotion.

The film swings from farce to soap opera and back again—but it's got enough girl-power moments to make a Spice Girls fan happy.

Under the guise of a conventional bio-pic, with all of the dilution and sweetening that the commercial format entails, Fogel offers a wide-ranging and deep-rooted critique of American officialdom, of the political underpinnings of American society.

Cold Souls has its flaws, and it threatens to sag into a Paul-like morbidity, but Giamatti’s anxious mien and unspectacular shamblings have never been better deployed.

What follows, in the final half hour of the movie, is an astounding chamber piece, worthy of Strindberg, with the husband, the wife, and her aggressor stuck in a dance of doubt and death. With every shot, our sympathies flicker and tilt.

This mania is what Marvel followers have hungered for, and it would be fruitless to deny their delight. As Loki says to a crowd of earthlings, "It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation." We do, Master, we do.

The voice work, by Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, and America Ferrera, among others, is also lively and fun. This sequel also adds a major new character, Valka (voiced exquisitely by Cate Blanchett), a protective den mother who runs a dragon sanctuary. She gives the film a surprising emotional resonance.

Still, it is a writer's privilege to trim and tailor at will, and everybody loves a duel. It would take the dullest of curmudgeons not to enjoy the surge of this saga, accurate or not, and the excesses of what already feels like a distant age. [30 Sept. 2013, p.84]

A crucial episode of the nineteen-sixties, centered on both the space race and the civil-rights struggle, comes to light in this energetic and impassioned drama.