It feels odd to be evaluating a dog’s performance, but Bing (the canine actor playing Apollo) definitely broke the heart of this cat person multiple times during the film. It’s a pleasure watching him and Watts connect, and to watch a film about so little and yet so very much.

Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters is one of those films that’s so intimate you feel like you’re in the room with the characters, breathing the same air.

Canadian filmmaker Megan Park’s comedy is a touching charmer about growing up, and about that gradual, heartbreaking realization that everything has a last time. If all this sounds a little gooey, let’s remember that this movie features Aubrey Plaza, a wonderfully sardonic performer apparently incapable of goo.

This Beauty and the Beast had me leaving the theater feeling utterly happy; like I’d spent time with old friends who’d grown and changed, and yet remained the same at heart.

The biggest, baddest, berserkest Purge so far.

Drawing generously and honestly from her own experience as a single mother of two teenage girls, director Allison Anders, making her solo feature debut, has lovingly adapted Richard Peck's paperback novel "Don't Look and It Won't Hurt," crafting a delicate meditation on loves lost and found in the barren but magical truck-stop town of Laramie, N.M. [28 Aug 1992, p.24]

Screen chemistry is an odd thing; often you only notice it when it isn’t there. (See: far too many Hollywood romantic comedies.) But Their Finest, an utterly charming film set in World War II-era London, contains a textbook example.

Darkest Hour is a handsome, old-fashioned film, filled with stirring music, dusty light and thoughtful performances — with one whopper of a star turn at its core.

In a movie that reminds us that parenting comes in many forms, it’s touching to learn that the Cayuga word for “aunt” is “small mother.” We almost didn’t need the definition; it’s visible, in Gladstone and Delroy-Olson’s eyes.

All of the performances are vivid (Webber’s ability to convey heartbreak in a silent gaze is uncanny), but Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since 1996’s “Secrets & Lies,” holds on to this movie the way Pansy holds on to a grudge.

Dark fare indeed, and you won’t shake it off easily.

At 2½ hours, Aquarius is about a half-hour too long for the story it tells, yet it feels like a privilege to be in the presence of such a powerful character and such a quietly commanding performance.

A taut, gripping documentary about one young woman’s dream ... Maiden is wonderfully suspenseful — especially if you, like me, have no idea how the race turned out.

This magic musical seems made for film, full of gloriously elaborate sets — can I please move into that dorm room, or at least borrow a few pieces from Glinda’s mountain of pink luggage? — and action sequences that a stage production can’t duplicate.

Stirring and enraging, The Hate U Give squeezes the air from your lungs. Bleak and heavy, it’s also hopeful and joyous. A palpable manifestation of suppressed anger and frustration too powerful to ignore, it offers a complex look at a complicated problem, one screaming to be addressed.

The film’s action scenes are masterpieces of stately choreography, with elements of humor incorporated.

The night after I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once I had a dream, in which I took a journey that was chaotic and messy and strangely beautiful. I suspect that dream was heavily flavored by the movie I had just seen, which also fit that description. The dream quickly faded, as dreams do, but the movie is staying with me, turning over and over in my head like stones in a kaleidoscope, ever-shifting.

His name might be a punchline, but his story — and the human toll that it took — isn’t.

The British documentary Dark Horse is a delightful story well told — and, like so many good stories, it begins with a dream.

Unlike "The Program," the other current football movie which pales in comparison, Rudy (which spans 1972-'75) is uncompromisingly truthful to its story and characters. Graced with Anspaugh's respect for authenticity, there's not a false note from anyone in the well-chosen cast, which includes Ned Beatty as Rudy's dad, whose disapproval of Rudy's dream is a cautious act of love; Charles S. Dutton as the stadium groundskeeper who offers quiet support; and Jason Miller ("The Exorcist") as legendary coach Ara Parseghian, who rewards Rudy's tenacity with a place on the varsity practice squad.

There are moments in Gleason where it’s very hard — whether you know ALS or are new to it — to look at the screen; moments so devastating you wonder how this couple, and those who love them, can bear it. But there’s also, in this remarkable film, evidence of astonishing courage and miraculous love.

The searing documentary Hooligan Sparrow is a portrait of courage.

And therein lies perhaps the only issue with the movie: Tom Cruise flies so close to the sun he blots out anything that might illuminate a hypothetically talented cast of characters. And that’s OK — it’s a Tom Cruise movie, and Tom Cruise isn’t really an ensemble actor.

Those who love books, picturesque English villages and getting lost in actors’ faces should be very happy

Polanski has created his funniest and possibly his cruelest movie: a thoroughly warped tale of sexual obsession that leaves its quartet of lust-driven characters with nowhere left to hide. [18 Mar 1994, p.D3]

Freidel illuminates the inner struggle Elser goes through as, buttressed by his conscience and his Catholic faith, he finds within himself a strength of character and brave defiance that defines him as a hero in the truest sense of the word.

The genre's other great star-director team James Stewart and Anthony Mann began a string of five remarkable Westerns with this engrossing, genre-reviving chronicle of a stolen rifle and its fateful role in the lives of its possessors. [26 Oct 2003]

A resonant moral conundrum tripling as a wry social satire and an armchair mystery, Six Degrees of Separation has been transferred to the screen with intelligence and panache, if some initial disorientation in the jumpy opening sequences. [22 Dec 1993, p.E3]

Shot in artful, quiet light (many of the frames look like elegant paintings), The Innocents is beautifully performed by its nearly all-female cast; each nun, even those unnamed, is given her own personality and story.

To paraphrase a song that pops up in the film — of course it does — during one of countless swoony moments, you can’t help falling in love with this movie.

Love & Friendship is pure pleasure, from the lavishly precise sets and costumes to the pitch-perfect tone. It’s self-consciously mannered and merrily playful; a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

One is left with a director’s reverence for an artist’s point of view — not a terrible thing, to be sure.

Historians now believe George III's bizarre symptoms (which came and went, until his 1820 death) arose from porphyria, a metabolic imbalance. Whatever their origin, they've inspired a marvelous film. [27 Jan 1995, p.H22]

While Holland may not have imbued the garden with the enchantment so evident in the book, she has sublimely captured the beauty of the garden itself. It offers a simple but overwhelming connection to the kind of paradise we must look harder to find.

Medak and Ridley have taken the stuff of tabloid headlines and alchemized it into cinematic gold. [09 Nov 1990, p.30]

It’s a whiplash journey of humor bordering on callousness, and sadness just shy of suffocating, but you’ll want to hold its twisted, bruised heart in your hands all the same. It deserves some comfort after all it’s been through.

The finished film is graceful, gripping and more accessible than several of Scorsese's contemporary New York movies. Scorsese has created a model adaptation that manages to be both remarkably faithful to its source and more audience-friendly than the Merchant/Ivory movies to which it will be compared. [17 Sept 1993, p.D3]

Not all of Hustlers is beautiful, to be sure, but it’s always a kick.

The interracial love affair in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala doesn't burn up the screen the way it did in Spike Lee's overheated "Jungle Fever." But the movie itself is ultimately more satisfying, generating much more light than sizzle. [14 Feb 1992, p.23]

It’s the kind of movie in which stories are conveyed wordlessly through a half-smile, a droopy posture, a man who looks for just a few seconds like he might cry but doesn’t — a film made all the more heartwarming for the work it takes to get to its heart.

Rappeneau has his weaknesses - the battle sequences lack imagination, and the finale is unnecessarily protracted - but his romantic flourishes keep most of the movie humming. [25 Dec 1990, p.F1]

Mortality rather than morality has become the central theme, and McMurtry and Bogdanovich address it with rare grace and compassion. [28 Sep 1990, p.3]

In his third outing as the Captain, Evans seems totally comfortable in the role. He manages to convey his character’s goodness without making him seem like a self-righteous stiff. There’s an ease in his performance, and a sense of humor that makes him very appealing.

The friendship of George and Harold is celebrated, and the cheery vocal work of Hart and Middleditch gives the picture its sprightly spirit.

The French Dispatch is an elegant ode to good writing, and to those who quietly stand behind the words.

Much like David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” a broken-down Abraham is forced to accept the kindness of strangers along his journey. In return, this proud Jewish tailor bestows the life wisdom that came at a terrible price.

Christmas classic. [06 Nov 1997]

So the ship models look like something from your bathtub; it's magnificent for an 80-year-old movie. [19 Apr 2005, p.E1]

In terms of the imaginative ways it expands on the themes of the first movie, it is the rare sequel that is at least the equal of its iconic original.

All in all, this “Buster” is something else.

Gunn masterfully mixes humor and bloodshed and manages to give a surprising number of characters room to develop their personas. And when it comes to staging set pieces, he’s at his best.

The performances feel wonderfully lived-in, particularly Jackson’s weary, noble Doaker and Deadwyler’s brave, watchful Berniece, a widowed mother determined to make a good life for her daughter and leave the past in the past.

Breezy, good-hearted Irish comedy. [17 Dec 1993, p.H3]

The premise of accountant as action hero might seem absurd, but The Accountant makes it credible and fascinating.

Quiet and meticulously constructed, Leave No Trace offers a powerful, affecting look at people pushed to the fringes and hanging on by the slimmest of margins. Harrowing and enthralling in equal measures, it’s a challenging and rewarding experience.

What begins as a light and fluffy, too-weird-to-be-fiction story goes unimaginably deeper, stranger, darker.

This George Cukor adaptation is nevertheless regarded as the definitive Hollywood treatment. Katharine Hepburn and Spring Byington are particularly well-cast. [15 Dec 1994, p.E3]

Mostly, we watch Binoche’s face, in eloquent, mesmerizing close-up; pain and grief engulf her expression like water flooding into a still pool. She has few words. She doesn’t need them.

The familiarity is part of what makes The Dry tick along so nicely; it reminds you of other good movies even as you enjoy its own special flavor.

With its opening line, “Imagine you’re dead,” The Family Fang instantly invites its soon-to-be-captive audience on an absorbing, provocative, slightly fantastic path that’s like few others.

Thanks to Walken’s superlative, multileveled performance and Edwards’ trenchant writing, this complicated guy...is a weirdly beguiling figure.

On this wintry landscape, with its endless plains and biting wind, it seems as if everyone — even the quietest — has a story, if you take the time to listen to it.

Unfolding like a thriller but uncomfortably real, September 5 is a haunting portrait of a time when seeing terrorism live on television was something new and strange — and a reminder that, sadly, things may not have changed all that much. But it’s also a stirring depiction of people simply doing their jobs, making decisions in the moment as best they can, trying to do things right when there’s no playbook and hundreds of millions of people watching.

The occasional creakiness of Milestone's passionate pacifist war film adds to the sense of authenticity. It's a lot closer to World War I than we are to it. [05 Dec 1997, p.G1]

The film draws you deeply into Baker’s fantasy world, to the point that the entreaty of his famous recording, “Let’s Get Lost,” almost seems like a good idea.

Brewmaster is a great thirst-quencher for fans of craft beer.

Jackson uses seamless, state-of-the-art visual effects to capture the girls' shared fantasies. One would expect nothing less from the director of the technically proficient horror movie, "Dead/Alive." The surprise here, and the key to the film's success, is his casting and handling of the young unknowns playing the girls. [23 Nov 1994, p.D3]

It’s a feel-good film about dreams, about obsession, about believing in yourself when nobody else seems to be doing it for you, and Hawkins carries it with effortless ease.

It’s faithful to the book without being overly devout, asking a multitude of deeper, more probing questions while reflecting on the same unsettling and existentialist ones that the book did. By the time it closes with its unexpectedly mournful yet gently searing final frames, reinterpreting and expanding on the enduring source material one final time, it names all that Camus did not.

The remake is both more romantic and more resonant than the original. It's less of a star vehicle for its leading actor, and it sticks to its guns right down its stunningly orchestrated finish. In almost every way it's an intelligent improvement. [05 Feb 1993, p.3]

A Quiet Place is brief, taut and often quite terrifying. And it creates in its audience a fascinating relationship with sound.

Often beautiful, never pretty, occasionally creepy and perpetually surprising, Poor Things lives in Stone’s fiery eyes; her performance is, to borrow Bella’s words, a changeable feast.

Close owns this movie, from beginning to end; it’s a performance of such intelligence and subtlety that only when the movie is long over do you start wondering about whether the plot holds up.

Solid storytelling, a longtime strength of the best Pixar pictures, elevates Cars 3 into the pantheon with the studio’s finest.

Do yourself a favor and go see The Crime Is Mine, a delicious bit of French froth from master director François Ozon.

There's a welcome lack of blarney (Mason Daring's score is never cloying) and a freshness about the performances that makes the movie feel contemporary. [17 Feb 1995, p.I30]

Outside In is about connection, and about two remarkable actors telling us a story.

But there is bashing aplenty, and it all looks gorgeous. The action sequences are top-notch, the stunning visuals adding a delightful crunch (bones do break) and a sense of scale appropriate for someone like Superman. (There’s so much property damage, it’s ridiculous.) Throw in heat-vision lasers, freezing breath, Mach-speed punches and a superpowered flying dog, and it’s a rollicking good time. (Go see this in IMAX, if possible; you won’t regret it.)

Shot in soft black-and-white, with color occasionally peering in at the movie houses where Buddy spends rapt hours, Belfast is brief, tidy and lovely; a heartfelt story of family and home, and how where the former is, the latter resides.

Shi and screenwriter Julia Cho present a sweet, graceful ode to growing up.

A Private Life is a murder mystery only on its surface; at its heart, it’s an exploration of a lonely woman’s extremely active mind, and an unexpectedly moving story of becoming more present in one’s real life, rather than one’s imaginary one.

Zandvliet is a relatively young and inexperienced director, but his spare use of music and widescreen images is assured and even inspired.

The Dark Half retains its power, offering proof that King and Romero are a match made in horror heaven. Or is that hell? [23 Apr 1993, p.3]

It’s a film about heroism and the right to love, told without stirring speeches. Instead, it unfolds movingly in the tiny moments between Richard and Mildred.

This is a film where the trappings of the procedural plot matter infinitely less than the moments that come when you glimpse the visually beautiful yet bleak pit into which Harker is going to fall.

The acting and script are so strong that the picture is an outstanding achievement even in the 2D version that most people will see.

Yes, this is a standard rom-com, in all the best of ways — both playing with the genre’s well-trodden tropes, and letting us enjoy how much fun they can be.

Despite a plot twist you’ll see coming all the way from Vancouver, The Wedding Banquet is a worthy successor to Ang Lee’s classic, and a chance for a group of actors to shine together and separately. There’s plenty of silliness, but also time to be moved by quiet moments.

Restless Creature isn’t a mere celebration of a great artist; it’s a moving portrait of what happens when that artist confronts the possibility of not being able to make that art any more.

The young writer-director, Greg Mottola, deals forthrightly with trust and betrayal and the destructive tensions in family relationships, whether they're well-worn or freshly hurtful. But he never loses his sense of perspective or humor, and neither does his cast. [04 Apr 1997]

The film may have begun with a joke on one man, but with the cutthroat world we’re increasingly building for ourselves, it may soon be on all of us.

Ne Zha II deserves all the attention and accolades: It’s an empowering film that makes you believe that you, too, can change your fate.

History almost erased Joseph Bologne; this film lets him live again.

Barry Jenkins’ beautiful Moonlight seems to have more in common with poetry than with a typical narrative film. It’s less a story than a collection of moments, which leaves its viewer feeling moved and changed, as if you’ve spent time in someone else’s dreams and woke up understanding who they are.

Jarmusch allows Pop and the music of the Stooges to be the focus of the film. For most fans, that will be enough: Pop proves to be as likable and riveting on screen as he is on stage.

Glander’s debut has vibes to spare, but he never coasts on them even as Billy coasts around the Florida landscapes. In the end, he delivers a full meal of a film that, like the giant hot dog we see in one shot in the middle, is a mesmerizing work of art worth taking a big bite out of. It will never be to all tastes, but to those who find themselves on its wavelength, it couldn’t be sweeter.

It’s Hall’s performance that jolts Christine, carrying the movie on her slumped shoulders.

Frequent, fiery battle scenes are well mounted, and in between are tenderer moments.