It’s a hell of a performance from Küppenheim as the heroine, precisely because she demonstrates how hard it is to be heroic.

Victor Hugo would watch this film and weep.

In Insomnia, the crunch comes as the hero and his opposite number hook up on a ferry, to discuss what each of them knows about the other. This should be Nolan's big moment, his answer to that quiet, magnificent interlude in Michael Mann's "Heat," when Pacino met De Niro in a coffee shop. -- But Williams and Pacino just don't mesh. [27 May 2002, p.124]

July’s aesthetic imagination is inseparable from her empathetic curiosity and emotional urgency; it tempers a howl of anguish at a world of pain into a kind of cinematic music that unfolds it in nuanced detail and extends a hand of consolation, even offers a note of hope.

Those who worship Joy Division may bridle at Corbijn’s film for its reluctance to mythologize their hero. Speaking as someone so irretrievably square that I not only never listened to the band but didn’t even know anyone who liked it, I can’t imagine a tribute more fitting than this.

There are agreeable overtones of Mark Twain tall tales in this good-humored, though uneven, version of the paradoxical life of Judge Roy Bean, with Walter Brennan in the part.

What’s most impressive about Top Gun: Maverick is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track.

BlackBerry plays like a prototype still waiting to be realized, a sketch that’s still undeveloped.

Langella is superb, and Starting Out in the Evening is a classy film.

What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie. He probably believes he's numbing us by the power of his vision, but he's actually numbing us by its emptiness. [13 July 1987, p.75]

Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.

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 movie doesn't have Dahl's narrative confidence and it goes in for a little sweetening, but it has major compensations.

Dabis embraces the conventions of melodrama with sombre grace. As a director, she orchestrates scenes of separation, discord, and shattering loss with an emotional restraint that’s equally evident in the way she plays the role of Hanan.

Warfare, you come to discover, is waging a war of its own—against the glamorizing tendencies and readily digestible classical conventions of its genre.

Although the script is a conventional melodrama, the director, Edward Zwick, has made something more thoughtful than that.

O.K. for children.

What we have here is a fouled-up fairy tale of oppression and empowerment, and it’s hard not to be ensnared by its mixture of rank maleficence and easy reverie. The gap between being genuinely stirred and having your arm twisted, however, is narrower than we care to admit.

After Yang shows how easily the taste for beauty can be tainted, subverted, distorted, and abused by the powers that be.

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.

What Landes has done is to revise, and to render yet starker, the premise of “Lord of the Flies.”

In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.

Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche on Broadway only a few years ago, gives the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. The actress, like her character, is out on a limb much of the time, but there’s humor in Blanchett’s work, and a touch of self-mockery as well as an eloquent sadness.

Like a finely wrought short story, and it's all but perfect.

The film is said to be honest and about real people, and it affects some viewers very powerfully.

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

In short, the last half hour or so of the movie’s nearly three-hour span is giddily intense, swoony, swashbuckling, and sensational yet superficial fun. Right after I saw the movie, I couldn’t stop talking about that ending. It makes the rest of the movie worth sitting through.

The documentary is a mere encyclopedia-like info-product, which reduces its rich audiovisual archival material and its heartfelt interviews with people who knew and loved Bourdain to freeze-dried sound and image bites. It hardly deserves the attention it’s received—and Neville’s audio stunt, far from marring the film, merely serves as a brazen form of self-promotional publicity.