The film is slowed by its own beauty, but it is salvaged by two majestic scenes.

Above all, the film decries the impunity that the war’s masterminds and the country’s leaders enjoyed while William and other frontline grunts took the blame. It’s that notion of the prevailing order’s insidiously hermetic system of self-protection that gives The Card Counter its furious energy.

If “Marry Me” plays with the obvious and brings it to obvious conclusions, its actors nonetheless invest its gestures and its dialogue, its broad lines of action and its closeup incarnations, with the spark of surprise.

A frankly practical look at professionalism and its blurry borders.

Ends with a burst of movie-ish mayhem, and then a burst of sentiment, but when Brewer, Howard, and Ludacris stick to the bitter texture of South Memphis failure and success they produce a modest regional portrait that could become a classic of its kind.

Leconte lacks the austerity to complete a film in which nothing much occurs. And so, with some reluctance, we are bustled toward a climax. [12 May 2003, p. 82]

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.

Locy infuses the film with empathy and wit, and his grandly bittersweet imagination pulls the story toward tragedy, but he also plays loosely with stereotypes better left behind.

Almost everything about Permission feels flighty and parochial when laid beside the fateful mire of “Loveless,” yet Hall, in particular, lends a sober grace to the erotic roundelay.

For all its tenderness, empathy, warmth, and verve, The Fabelmans has the feel of mythmaking—a feature-length promotional video for an authorized biography of a filmmaker who, if far from self-made, is in any case self-propelled. What’s missing is a sense of history.

Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, Saint Omer... which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary.

More than forty years have passed since A Woman Is a Woman won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for "originality, youth, audacity, impertinence." (When did you last see a movie that might warrant such an award?) [26 May 2003, p. 102]

The great virtue of the movie is its length: a fat-free seventy-six minutes.

The theme is richly comic, and the film is great fun, even though it sacrifices Serpico's story--one of the rare hopeful stories of the time--for a cynical, downbeat finish.

The stage of Early Man, though, is stuffed with men and women — on the Neanderthal spectrum, it’s true, but propelled by needs and greeds much like our own — whereas the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air are reduced to the role of extras. It pains me to say so, but Hognob is not enough.

Just when this sunshiny and affectionate comedy is beginning to bloom, the inevitable, tear-jerking conclusion closes off the fun like a Venetian blind blocking the light. (29 Oct 2001, p.93)

Their kinship (Gere/Molina)--wholly unsexual yet lit, like that of Martin and Lewis, with an exasperated love--is the beacon of the movie, and it just about survives the lengthening shadows of the later scenes.

The central conceit of glorifying progress and moral uplift in a musical comedy set in New Mexico in the 1880s is certainly a strange one, but it worked out surprisingly well--though the charm is mostly heavy.

This Freudian gangster picture, directed by Raoul Walsh, is very obvious, and it's so primitive and outrageous in its flamboyance that it seems to have been made much earlier than it was. But this flamboyance is also what makes some of its scenes stay with you.

The whole archaic big musical circus here surrounds a Happening -- Barbra Streisand -- and it's all worth seeing in order to see her.

The audience for Turn Every Page, I’d guess, will be a medley of Freudians, students of political muscle, and New Yorkers—each bearing a copy of “The Power Broker,” Caro’s 1974 book on Robert Moses, whittled down by Gottlieb to the size of a mere warehouse.

Christie’s passionate, vulnerable performance keeps pulling the entire movie into her point of view.

Yet the film, against my wishes, left me unmoved.

It packs political machination, helicopter gunships, single-malt whiskey, Las Vegas, Islamabad, naked butts, and eight years of war. The film, adapted from George Crile’s book, doesn’t always work, but it sure offers value for money.

Despite all this desolation and depression, however, Still Life is an extremely beautiful movie.

The best scenes--especially an assassination attempt at Royal Albert Hall--are stunning, but Hitchcock seems sloppily unconcerned about the unconvincing material in between the tricks and jokes.

Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit—emotional, social, and eventually legal—of white men.

This muckraking melodrama has considerable power and some strong performances. The script, by W.D. Richter, has offhand dialogue with a warm, funny edge.