A wider range of interview subjects might have broadened the perspective, yet before criticizing a tradition, it’s useful to define it, and Jones (a superb critic who now heads the New York Film Festival) offers deep insight into the watershed moment and the enduring forms of Hitchcock’s canonization.

There is honor, boldness, and grip in the new movie, but other directors can deliver those. Werner Herzog is the last great hallucinator in cinema, so why break the spell?

The project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.

Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner, directed by Steven Spielberg, and derived in part from Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," is a curious beast. The title suggests a monolith, as if going to this movie were tantamount to visiting Mt. Rushmore, and the running time, of two and a half hours, prepares you for an epic. Yet the film is a cramped and ornery affair, with Spielberg going into lockdown mode even more thoroughly than he did in "The Terminal."

Much of the writing is good, and the acting is superb, but the constant wrangling wore me out at times.

It suggests not just a subversion but a putrefaction of the Ruddy-comedy genre—a portrait of male loneliness so totalizing, and so scarily close to the bone, that laughs and screams all but bleed together.

Buoyant and observant, 50/50 is a small winner; the director, Jonathan Levine ("The Wackness"), has a great touch, mordant but light-handed.

Singer honors a child's desire not only for adventure but for noble deeds, for loyalty and friendship. [18 March 2013, p.87]

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.

Ad Astra is Gray’s most formidable paradox to date, liable to leave you awed, confused, and sad. It is a work of calculated grandeur, and, if you get the chance to catch it in IMAX, and thus to revel in the breadth of its beauty, do so. But there’s something small at the movie’s core.

A major film without being a great film. It's a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one, and the strangeness and pessimism connect it to other recent American films in ways that suggest that something unhappy in the national mood has crept into the movies.

It’s worth seeing precisely for the heat of the arguments that you can enjoy after the screening and, above all, for Emma Thompson.

Among the Scots, look out for James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the bellow of whose triumphal rage is at once thrilling and scarcely human. For a few seconds, we forget that we are watching a well-mounted period drama about a minor regional conflict; a blood-thirst as basic as this feels horribly timeless.

What makes the movie memorable is the over-all excellence of the performers.

The movie has a hard forties snap to it -- lust is a weapon and love is a letdown.

The Halloween of today is slick and sick, but little is left of that sleep-destroying dread. Still, not all is lost, because the Bogeyman, bless him, has not forgotten his manners. For old times’ sake, he gets to sit up straight.

Though it has few dimensions it has pace and "entertainment value."

The latest showpiece for computer animation, with all the contoured, suspiciously gleaming perfection that this entails.

Bonnie Bedelia, who plays Shirley from 16 to 40, gives a tightly controlled starring performance; she's compelling and she brings the role a dry and precise irony.

The story fits together too neatly and the characters remain ciphers, but scenes of news reports of the high-profile deals—in which the protagonists see themselves—evoke an eerie air of plausibility and alienation.

Michael Pertwee, who wrote such English comedies as Laughter in Paradise and Your Past Is Showing for the director Mario Zampi, had a good idea here, too.

Murray’s linking up with Jim Jarmusch is a case of Mr. Cool meeting Mr. Cool, and the result is intriguing and elegant, but not quite satisfying.

The film has the tawdry simplicities of many of the 30s movies that were built out of headline stories, but it also has more impact than most of the melodramas played out in more elevated surroundings.

You want to go to the town; you want to go back to the movie. It has a mellow, dotty charm.

The entire construction of The Souvenir: Part II, the connection between its drama and Julie’s student film, reflects an earnest and principled, if simplistic, didacticism about the pain and the privilege that allow aesthetic pleasure to be created.

Like Ken Loach, Arteta is clearly confident of preaching to the converted, and of whipping up indignation at those who mean us harm. Thanks to his leading players, however, the movie grows limber, ambiguous, and twice as interesting, and the sermon goes astray.

The movie is over before you know it, and is not one to linger in the mind, or indeed pass through the mind at all; but it's a good-humored ride for the senses, never too sickly, and who can say no to that?

The 25-year-old Errol Flynn has the smile and dash to shout "All right my hearties, follow me!" as he leaps from his pirate ship to an enemy vessel.