Love Is Strange, however, is not about gay marriage. It is about a marriage that happens to be gay. If the film grows slightly boring, even that can be construed as an advance.

When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality.

Roman Polanski’s version, from 1980, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame.

At its most persuasive, it conjures live-action versions of Chinese paintings, as if Hou were more at ease with the settings and stakes than with the personalities.

Wiseman’s very subject is the difference between neighborhood and community—between the happenstance of urban geography and the commitment of self-identification.

The most fruitful twist in Late Marriage is that at its core lies not a snippy domestic farce but a prolonged, dirty, and wholly credible sex scene, which starts and stops and starts again, and in which argument and arousal are entwined like limbs. [27 May 2002, p.124]

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]

Decker pushes the action to the breaking point of fury, which the cast—and especially Howard, in one of the most accomplished teen performances ever—embodies with a flaying and self-scourging vulnerability.

Why, then, do we not feel bullied by the result? Partly because the camera, as I say, tells a subtler tale than the dialogue does, and lures us into a grudging respect for the bravado of Muse and his men; but mainly because of Tom Hanks. This most likable of actors deliberately presents us with a character who makes no effort to be liked.

By a useful coincidence, A Hero arrives in cinemas (for viewers hardy enough to visit them) in the wake of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Watch one after the other and you may decide, as I did, that A Hero is the more Shakespearean of the two. Coen’s film is powerful but hermetic, sealed off within its stylized designs, whereas Farhadi reaches back to The Merchant of Venice and pulls the play’s impassioned arguments into the melee of the here and now.

Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, The Northman merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.

Where “Paterson” is tranquil to the point of inertia, Neruda, with its jumpy shifts of scene, its doses of casual surrealism, and its mashing of high politics against low farce, struck me as more of a poem. It reminds us that movies, by their very nature, owe far more to poetry than they ever will to the novel. The story is only the start.

Blancanieves is a feast for the film-crazy. [8 April 2013, p.89]

What lingers, when this movie is done, are not the regular rallies, during which we survey the whole court, but those moments when we focus on McEnroe alone — on the dancing shuffle of his feet as he bobs and races for a return. Swap the sneakers for tap shoes and the dusty clay for a mirrored floor, and we could be watching Fred without Ginger, lost in the delirium of his art.

Stranger by the Lake, it must be said, flirts with monotony. There is something both fascinating and numbing in the rituals on display, and in the matching rhythm of the film's approach. [27 Jan.2014, p.79]

A dazzling romantic melodrama.

If Sicario does not collapse under its own grimness, that is because of the pulse: the care with which Villeneuve keeps the story beating, like a drum, as he steadies himself for the next set piece.

Whatever the omissions, the mutilations, the mistakes, this is very likely the most exciting and most alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on the screen.

After the almost incredible lack of depth of the first half-hour, the film begins to acquire a fascination because of its total superficiality--it becomes something resembling Minimal art.

I know that we are meant to be drawn into the undergrowth of these ordinary lives, and the long tale is neatly split into four symbolic seasons;...But do they and their fellow-Brits honestly swell the heart, or do they grate, exasperate, and finally grind us down?

I can’t think of another film portrait of higher education that matches this one for comprehensiveness, intellectual depth, and hope.

Despite all the overlaps, this is not a simulacrum of a Ridley Scott film. It is unmistakably a Denis Villeneuve film, inviting us to tumble, tense with anticipation, into his doomy clutches.

The correspondences he wants us to see from up there start to look contrived, illusory. [27 Sept 1993, p.98]

A new kind of affectionate satire which is all but indistinguishable from an embrace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]

Even great and prolific directors have high points, and this film is one of Hong’s best; its form relies on disturbing ironies to approach one of the mightiest of subjects—the nature of happiness and, in particular, a happy marriage, from the perspective of a married woman.

Al Mansour is too smart to overdo the symbolic spin, but the thrust of her film, toward the end, could hardly be more urgent. [16 Sept. 2013, p. 72]

[A] brilliantly analytical and morally passionate documentary .

It may be weaker in the resolution than in the setup, but that is an inbuilt hazard of science fiction, and what lingers, days after you leave the cinema, is neither the wizardry nor the climax but the zephyr of emotional intensity that blows through the film.