Ari Folman, the director of Waltz with Bashir, has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it. Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there.

Jacky is not merely beefed up. He is a Minotaur in the making, and that, surely, is why his story becomes such a labyrinth. [27 Feb. 2012, p.87]

In presenting the game, Lund develops a passionately analytical aesthetic of baseball that offers a corrective to the way it’s usually depicted. His documentary-based method, in rejecting the patterned routines of television coverage, intensifies the drama of the sport itself.

The movie is packed with lovely jokes, some of them funny in inexplicable ways.

Byrne the actor turns out to be stretchable in the best sense; her performance is a marvel of tragicomic elasticity. Whatever she’s doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily mumbling instructions into her phone, dragging herself down a hallway in a haze, or releasing her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped down and physically invigorated by the unyielding scrutiny of the camera.

The Old Man & the Gun is as much of a fantasy as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Yet you buy into the geniality of Lowery’s movie, nourished as it is by the entire cast.

The story of Gloria Bell, to be honest, is stretched a little thin. For the millionth time, the female of the species is let down by the male, and that’s that. The genius of Moore, though, is how plausibly, and how patiently, she fills the spaces of ordinary living.

Sisto picks up the spell that is cast by Lowery’s tale, verdant with danger, and continues to weave.

Challengers, in other words, comes at you like an amped-up, Adidas-sponsored “Jules and Jim”—a funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style.

By a pleasing irony, the parts of the film that stay with you are concerned not with the dark arts but with something far more unstoppable: teen-agers.

The many characters’ distinct perspectives on the action are multiplied by chilling views from surveillance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—including romantic ones—in which tipped-off targets fool those who are watching.

Some of the episodes are ripely satirical, others almost heartbreaking. Allison Janney appears as a coarse drunk who taunts her kids; Maggie Gyllenhaal is a pushy New Age mom whose aggressive virtue saps the strength of everyone around her.

Buzzes with the long-term historical power of the occasion, and notes the divisions that the organizers struggled to overcome.

Is it conceivable that Holland’s bleak, murky, and instructive film could prompt a change of heart in the current Russian establishment, or even a confession of crimes past? Not a chance.

It’s a well-crafted, handsome period piece, and pleasant to watch, but the intensity of an obsessional style--something that matches Florentino’s crazy single-mindedness--is beyond Newell’s range. The director of “Donnie Brasco” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” doesn’t paint with the camera; he doesn’t seize on certain visual motifs, as he should, and turn them into the equivalent of a lover’s devotion to fetishes.

For novices, the film will serve as a lively, if annoying, introduction to the Hammarskjöld mystery, yet there’s a sadness here. The more we are encouraged to puzzle over the darkness of his death, the less heed will be paid to his illuminating life.

May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.

It takes Malle a little while to set up the crisscrossing of the 10 or 12 major characters, but once he does, the film operates by its own laws in its own world, and it has a lovely fizziness.

What is inescapably moving about Megalopolis, and what throws even its strangest excesses into meaningful relief, is the degree to which it has evolved into an allegory of its own making. Coppola has made a defense of the beautiful and the impractical, not just as principles of urban design or meaningful living but as art-sustaining forces in the cinema itself.

The actor Tony Goldwyn, directing his first movie, and working from a fine screenplay by Pamela Gray, beautifully captures a moment in which the straitened moral world of the lower-middle-class Jewish characters is beginning to open up -- with necessarily painful results.

Truffaut's The Wild Child is a more beautifully conceived picture on the same theme, but even with its imperfections and staginess this early Penn film is extraordinary.

What happens at the dam, filmed at night, with only shimmering light, is the most nerve-racking sequence in recent movies. Reichardt, despite the film’s absences, has achieved an impressive control over the medium.

It's a beautifully made gothic-romantic classic, with many memorable scenes.

For all its political determination, RRR is also a musical, and an electrifying one.

If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord.

The movie is a methodical and entirely absorbing thriller, featuring a complicated plot (Brian Helgeland adapted the Michael Connelly novel) in which clues are carefully planted, and understanding slowly gathers in the mind of the hero. [19 & 26 August 2002, p. 174]

One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.

This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving.