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.

We long-term Kiefer nerds may not learn much, but so what? It’s more important that newcomers thrill to—or recoil from—this self-mythicizing figure who forges sculptures out of fighter planes and U-boats.

Nouvelle Vague isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.

Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift.

Bellocchio gets the opera-buffa and the carnival side of Italian Fascism, and parts of the movie are excruciatingly funny.

Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling.

No one has ever fully explained what gives this basically slight romantic comedy its particular - and enormous - charm.

Few movies give us such memorable, emotion-charged images.

His (Francois Ozon) theme could hardly be less original (think of "Bonjour Tristesse"), but the tautness is that of a horror film. [5 May 2014, p.85]

Observant and true. The pleasure of it lies not in its emotions, which are distinctly on the tepid side, but in the intimacy of its reporting. [28 July 2003, p.94]

A little poky but impressively well done, with witty special effects (by John P. Fulton) and traces of the Whale humor that enlivened his Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein.

The plot is trivial French farce (about mistaken identities), but the dances are among the wittiest and the most lyrical expressions of American romanticism on the screen.

This is a scary movie and a serious one, because it lures us into the minds, and the earthly domains, of those who are themselves scared, night and day, that they have forfeited the mercies of God. It takes an original movie to remind us of original sin.

“Furiosa,” in other words, is both an end-of-days thriller and an Edenic parable, Revelation and Genesis rolled into one.

Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

The film has a strong style that is very different from Lean's earlier work. He seems to have finally to have let go--to have pulled out all the stops. The film is emotional, exciting, full of action.

Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.

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.

As suspense craftsmanship, the picture is trim, brutal and exciting; it was directed in the sleekest style by the veteran urban-action director Don Siegel, and Lalo Schifrin's pulsating, jazzy electronic trickery drives the picture forward. It's also a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place - a kind of hardhat The Fountainhead.

Combines pulse-of-the-city drama and comedy with an elaborate revenge plot, but mostly the movie is about New Yorkers talking.

No one could seethe better than Mifune, but what gives the movie equal shares of exhilaration and heartbreak is the feeling that pours out of him when his son finds happiness in his own marriage.

Spend an eveing with some of Edward Gorey's writings and drawings, rub against the velvet of his lugubrious wit, and you will be ready for Royal and the clan. [17 Dec 2001, p. 97]

Though the director, Carol Reed, doesn't quite succeed in creating a masterpiece (the inflated ideas in the script don't allow him to), there are bravura visual passages, the sound is often startlingly effective, and the film provides an experience that can't be shrugged off.

In The Barefoot Contessa, [Mankiewicz] shows the sordidness of the money-driven, ego-fuelled, ruthless machinations that are both central to the business of Hollywood and constantly threaten to derail it.

A tender, indignant, but also very worldly movie.

It goes without saying that, like most of Abu-Assad’s films, especially Paradise Now(2005) and Omar(2014), Huda’s Salon is rubbed raw by the politics of the occupied territories; but somehow it doesn’t feel like an issue movie. When Huda is onscreen, played with sublime command by Awad, the story becomes unremittingly about her.

De Sica, working with a host of screenwriters, builds a teeming story—involving broken friendships, families, institutions, dreams, and lives—in which elements of observation and research are concentrated into intensely emotional moments that heighten the film’s moral and mnemonic power.

It started a new cycle in screen entertainment by demonstrating that a murder mystery could also be a sophisticated screwball comedy.