The movie is ungainly – you can almost see the chalk marks it's not hitting. But it has a loose, likable shabbiness. [19 Oct 1987, p.110]

The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma.

The picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future.

It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it's like a well-cared for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good, until the last half hour or so.

Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.

The emotional wallop grows more zealous with almost every sequence, and Loach’s refusal to go easy on us is as stubborn as it was when he made “Cathy Come Home.”

The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile. Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music--seductive, insolent, triumphant.

With this film, Wenders crystallized his style of existential sentimentality. His cool eye for urbanism and design blends a love of kitsch with a hatred for commercialism, historicism with a fear of history’s ghosts.

Christopher Nolan, for all his visionary flair, wants to suck the comic out of comic books; Anne Hathaway wants to put it back in. Take your pick.

Gray is hampered, to an extent, by treading in the tracks of Werner Herzog, who went to South America with Klaus Kinski, his leading man (or, as Herzog calls him, “my best fiend”), and returned with the extraordinary “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982).

A modest, skillful, unfussy genre piece that tells an exciting story and lets its more serious concerns remain just below the surface, gently complicating the smooth-flowing rhythms of the narrative.

The one thing you do need to know about Avengers: Endgame is that it runs for a little over three hours, and that you can easily duck out during the middle hour, do some shopping, and slip back into your seat for the climax. You won’t have missed a thing.

The overarching and underlying question that the film poses is nothing less than: What is art? And, for that matter, is the conventional definition of good art too narrow to account for the merits of such works as these?

It's only at the end of Blue Ruin that my pleasure drained away. [28 April 2014, p.86]

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

It’s a freestanding, freewheeling work that relies on familiar characters to tell a story closer in substance and tone to the sexual fury, social outrage, wild humor, and outlaw freedom of John Waters’s films, and it has a vociferously didactic streak that’s playful yet focussed.

In the end, Ex Machina lives and dies by Alicia Vikander. The film clicks on when she first appears, and it dims every time she goes away.

Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck, and out of time.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

What fleshes out the movie, and lends it such an extraordinary pulse of life, is the want of words.

There's another reason for the lure of The Sisters Brothers. If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux.

With “It’s Not Me,” Carax confronts the aberration of celebrity (even art-house celebrity) by means of a cinematic self-creation that’s both a matter of sincere reticence and an audaciously assertive work of art.

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

We get one lovely, cheering sequence of a trashed room putting itself in order, like the untidy nursery in "Mary Poppins," but the rest of the magic here feels randomly grabbed at.

Zootopia, like its heroine, is zesty, bright, and breakneck, with chase scenes and well-tuned gags where you half expect songs to be.

The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races.

Never, though, has the evolution of an automaton been depicted with the extensive grace and wit that Dan Stevens, speaking good German with a slight British accent, brings to I’m Your Man.

The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life.