There's no denying that for many people sequences such as Bambi's birth have an enduring primal power.

For Wiseman, the “small pleasures” of the title are highly concentrated distillations of mighty exertions, from the grand and carefully catalogued tradition of French cooking to the immediate tradition of the Troisgros family restaurants (now in its fourth generation).

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

With its clean lines and precise assembly, it's nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that's still in search of its characters.

The movie is an O. Henry-like conceit--the slenderness of the initial premise is part of the charm--but the anecdote becomes almost momentous as it goes on.

At the heart of La Chimera is the question of how we bear the weight of the past while living in the present, and the answer that Rohrwacher settles on strikes me as both sensible and hopeful: we must, to the best that we can, eradicate any meaningful difference between the two.

The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.

Haim brings a constant and instant focus even to riskily inchoate emotions, and Hoffman lends his driven energumen a lambent glow of innocence. Both inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.

Has the sure grip and the unstoppable momentum of a dream – which are qualities, too of great fairly tales and the most memorable pop songs. [16 Nov 1992, p.127]

The film has a strong style that is very different from Lean's earlier work. He seems to have finally to have let go--to have pulled out all the stops. The film is emotional, exciting, full of action.

Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.

Wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up.

In its lived-in, completely non-ideological way, Winter's Bone is one of the great feminist works in film.

How could Frears and his cast rise above the sins of the miniseries? One answer is the force of that cast...The other thing that rescues and refines The Queen is one of the basic bonuses of moviegoing, more familiar of late from documentaries like "Touching the Void" and "Capturing the Friedmans": you come out arguing.

The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.

For all its droll shading of the screenwriter’s art, “All of Us Strangers” is a screenwriter’s movie, in which the power of intention over observation, of the blueprint over the finished product, is asserted with a vengeance.

The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film. Visually, Part II is far more completely beautiful than the fist, just as it's thematically richer, more shadowed, fuller.

The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky notions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C. Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it.

In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.

Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.

For the viewer, the miracle of Bloody Sunday is that firm moral judgment can exist side by side with a wild and bitter exhilaration in the sheer physicality of violence. [7 Oct 2002, p. 108]

Rough, tender, funny, and harshly searching.

That is the quiet triumph of American Splendor: behind the playfulness, it cleaves to an oddly old-fashioned belief that a life, even a life as mangy as Mr. Pekar’s, gains in depth and darkness when it is crosshatched with the imaginary. The nerd needs no revenge. [18 & 25 August 2003, p. 150]

His thoughts look more dramatic than other actors’ deeds, and his deeds are done with a deliberated grace. If it is true, as Day-Lewis has declared, that Phantom Thread will be his final movie, we will miss him when he retires from the game that he has crowned. He is the Federer of film.

Altman achieves his dream of a truly organic form, in which everyone is connected to everyone else, and life circulates around a central group of ideas and emotions in bristling orbits. [14 Jan 2002, p. 92]

Some of the special effects are amusing, and a few are perverse and frightening, but the effects take over in this Hitchcock scare picture, and he fails to make the plot situations convincing. The script is weak, and the acting is so awkward that often one doesn't know how to take the characters.

As much as Enyedi enjoys positioning her camera among the branches, Silent Friend is ultimately too invested in the power of human faces and bodies to adopt a purely plant-centric perspective; what it achieves is more of a hybrid gaze, which encourages us to marvel at creation in all its forms.

The director Chris McKim incisively intertwines a generous batch of audio interviews with Wojnarowicz’s friends, family, and associates; a rich set of archival footage to conjure his time and place; and vigorous effects to evoke his inner world.