The movie is expert piffle for grownups, directed with great energy by John McTiernan and written with verve by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer.

Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky notions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C. Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it.

Imagine my relief when Bob, Helen, and the kids, for all the nicety of their emotions, turned out to be--if I can risk a word that may be taboo in Pixar land--cartoons. Long may it stay that way.

It has charm and a lot of entertaining kinkiness, too.

Michael Mann is a fluent, evocative filmmaker, and the movie is well written, expertly staged, and beautifully edited. [24 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 126]

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

Eastwood has become tauntingly tough-minded: “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he seems to be saying. And, with the remorselessness of age, he follows Chris Kyle’s rehabilitation and redemption back home, all the way to their heartbreaking and inexplicable end.

Offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it; the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can't escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn't warranted by the events.

At last, a good big film. The legacy of the summer, thus far, has been jetsam: moribund movies that lie there, bloated and beached, gasping to break even. But here is something angry and alive: Elysium.

Though Lee still can't resist a fancy visual trick from time to time, Clockers is, at its best—in its compound of the jaunty and the depressing—his ripest work to date.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lighting-fast choreography.

Whether pushing the camera close to the performers or zooming in from afar to survey them intimately, Simon captures the lavish life of theatrical imagination that inspires them and makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.

To a remarkable extent, the new movie is full of cheer. It feels boisterous, bustling, and, at times, perilously close to a romp.

The compositions evoke a kind of open-air claustrophobia, whether in overhead shots that pin the characters in the landscape or in tableaux of men, women, and children staving off the chaos of the wide-open spaces with their weary fences and weathered towns.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

What is unambiguous is the campaign that Pina mounts, with joy and without fuss, against age discrimination; by law, the film should be screened, on a monthly basis, for Hollywood casting agents.

Great fun in the uninhibited early-30s style, made at M-G-M before fear of church pressure groups turned the studio respectable and pompous.

There is no whodunit here — the horror is plain in the opening shots — and the how is presented with great restraint, but the why remains veiled and mysterious long after the film has ended.

At first, you may think, Oh, it’s that damn prison movie again, but Starred Up has a much more intimate texture of affection and disdain than most genre films. You’re held by every exchange, every fight.

At the end of the movie, when Gloria looks at herself appraisingly in a mirror, we seem to be seeing her for the first time. [20 Jan. 2014, p.79]

For many of this movie's likely viewers, the sting built into Food, Inc. is the realization that, without unending effort, they are not all that much freer in their choices than that hard-pressed family.

By means of suggestive editing, plus a potent score by Patrick Gowers, Hazan makes us feel that we are watching a mystery. Naturally, no solution is provided.

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

Consume with great caution, and with joy.

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.