Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.

This adaptation of one of the S.E. Hinton novels that became favorites of high-school kids in the 70s has an amiable, unforced good humor that takes the curse off the film's look and even off its everything-but-the-bloodhounds plot. The earnest naivete of this movie has its own kind of emotional fairy-tale magic.

The failure of innocence here is touchingly absurd; the film is stylized poetry, and it is like nothing else that De Sica ever did.

Rather shrill and tiresome.

Still, there is a time to stop quibbling, and to laud the fact that this movie was made at all. [24 June 2013, p.85]

Cheesy low farce, with Danny DeVito as a thieving millionaire who wants to kill his heiress wife (Bette Miler) and is overjoyed when she's kidnapped.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?...is an overwhelming experience. It fills the current American landscape with the hatred, oppression, and violence that also scars its history.

I am casting no aspersions on the director when I say that The Saddest Music in the World is a work of manic depression. The mania is there in the frenzied editing, the inability to concentrate on a detail for more than a few seconds; and the depression is there in the forcible lowering of spirits. [10 May 2004, p. 107]

The memoir is strongly written, and I wish that the movie, directed by John Curran (Marion Nelson did the adaptation), had more excitement to it.

The battle scenes are extraordinarily mucky and violent, but here, as in Tavernier's "Let Joy Reign Supreme," the intricate protocols of aristocratic sexual passion are the most startling elements. The movie, however, is opaque at its center. [25 April, 2011 p. 89]

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 most spirited satisfying Western epic in several years--it may seem a little loose at first, but it gets better and better as it goes along and you get the fresh, crazy hang of it.

Del Toro’s empathy for the Creature is total—and so, owing to the aching poignancy and underlying rage of Elordi’s performance, is ours.

Boots Riley’s first feature is a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury.

For all his dedication to this ambitious project, the director, John Huston, must not have been able to keep up his energy level; at times, his work seems surprisingly perfunctory.

Hudson and Wyman are hardly an electric combination, but this Ross Hunter production is made with so much symbolism that some people actually see it as allegorical.

The so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.

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

Fargeat’s movie can be called many things: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles where it unfolds. It’s also a movie of process, deliberately paced, exactingly observed, and no less gripping for its sometimes gruelling repetitions.

Never quite shrugs off its literary manners. [18 & 25 Feb 2002, p. 200]

In Logan Lucky, Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial.

Denis delves into the group psychology of a beleaguered crew, housed in an interplanetary rust bucket. Her devotees will claim, correctly, that her movie blooms with provocative ideas.

One of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial. I think people will really fight about it. It's the story of a woman who has a second chance thrust on her; she knows enough not to make the same mistake again, but she isn't sure of much else. Neither is the movie. Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don't believe in what's going on--when the issues it raises get all fouled up. [13 Jan 1975, p.74]

The images aren’t only stripped of superfluities; they’re hermetically sealed off from anything that could impinge from offscreen, from the world at large. They feel designed, deadeningly, to mean just one thing.

Costa-Gavras's antipathy to Americans appears to be so deep-seated that he can't create American characters. The only real filmmaking is in the backgrounds: in the anxious, ominous atmosphere of a city under martial law -- the sirens, the tanks, the helicopters, the feeling of abnormal silences and of random terror.

As for the title, well, it made me think of Thomas Carlyle's wife, who read Browning's long poem "Sordello," enjoyed it, but still couldn't work out whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. So it is with 2046. A place? A date? A hotel room? A bar tab? You tell me.

Ousmane Sembene's approach is thoughtful and almost reticent; the viewer contemplates a series of tragic dilemmas. Yet for all its intelligence, the movie isn't memorable--partly because the last section is unsatisfying.

To be fair, A Quiet Passion is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it’s when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity.