The film’s view of a mind thrown back on itself, and the profound vulnerability, mental derangement, and physical degradation that result, is, true to form, a political horror.

The problem for Detroit is that, when contrivance is required, it tends to jut out... Where the movie scores, by contrast, is in those casual deeds that reveal the shape into which lives have been bent.

Only Hailee Steinfeld’s committed performance as Nadine, a troubled high-school junior in Oregon, and Woody Harrelson’s deft turn, as a teacher who helps her, make this thin and cliché-riddled comic drama worth watching.

When Logan and Laura unleash their furious scythes nothing feels settled or satisfied. The world grinds on, fruitlessly weary and wild.

Buzzes with the long-term historical power of the occasion, and notes the divisions that the organizers struggled to overcome.

The actors provide the nuances, with stirring grace: just as Taylor-Johnson tempers Jamie’s own alpha machismo with a gentle, unfeigned paternal tenderness, so the extraordinary Comer gives Isla, even at her most despairing, an astonishing toughness of body, mind, and spirit.

A scruffy, thick-grained piece of work, shot in thirty days and scrawled not with luscious coloring but with the tense and inky markings of a society that is fighting to keep its reputation for togetherness, and wondering what that reputation is still worth. [18 & 25 Feb 2002. p. 199]

Searching for Mr. Rugoff is an entertaining and instructive jaunt, and it bristles with small shocks.

Filmed in 1969 but unreleased until 1989, Michael Roemer’s dyspeptic comedy, about a small-time gangster newly freed from prison, bares unhealed and unspoken wounds of New York Jewish life.

The movie is no more than a novelty, but it may surprise you by making you laugh out loud a few times.

The voice work, by Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, and America Ferrera, among others, is also lively and fun. This sequel also adds a major new character, Valka (voiced exquisitely by Cate Blanchett), a protective den mother who runs a dragon sanctuary. She gives the film a surprising emotional resonance.

Lo and Behold is, by virtue of its scope, one of Herzog’s more scattershot endeavors.

Seems a touch too long, too airless, and too content with its own contrivances to stir the heart.

Abrupt and fragmentary, but powerful. [Dec 10 2001, p. 111]

It's an enormous pleasure to see a movie that's really about something, and that doesn't lay on any syrupy coating to make the subject go down easily.

Between its melancholy view of disconnection and incomprehension, it offers a hint of ironic optimism about what a family’s future depends on—namely, its past.

Infinitely charming new romantic comedy.

Few movies this year will be more likely to molest your sleep.

The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion.

The film, directed and co-written by James Gunn, is joyfully irreverent. Gunn lends his underachiever superheroes a geeky, comic camaraderie, and he brings a spry touch to the wacky intergalactic adventure.

We don't get enough understanding of Stroud to become involved in how he is transformed over the years.

The whole film, in fact, which Pitts wrote and directed, lurks on the borders of the unspecified. That is the source of its cool, but also of its sullen capacity to annoy.

In short, the Sheridan of In America wants us to pity his characters for the rough ride that they endure, yet at the same time he traps them inside a bubble of the picturesque and the outlandish. Even if you like this movie, you have to ask: What has it done to deserve its title? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

What Kreutzer aims to impress upon us is the effect of smothering and constraint—not only upon her heroine but also upon the female sex, at every social stratum, under Habsburg rule.

Singleton's plot is disappointingly conventional; it obeys screenwriting-class rules. The experience he's dealing with here deserves something more than the tidy dramatic structure that he has imposed on it.

It's giddy in a magical, pseudo-sultry way -- it seems to be set in a poet's dream of a red-light district.

Red Rocket is over-plotted, over-aestheticized, under-characterized, and under-observed.

In this movie, Fonda really is iconic. 3:10 to Yuma may be familiar, but, at its best, it has a rapt quality, even an aura of wonder.