Whose Streets? marks the filmmaking debut of Folayan and Davis, and it’s charged by its personal touch.

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]

Smarter and funnier than the recent theatrical release, "Drop Dead Gorgeous," Michael Ritchie's superficially similar beauty-contest satire was mostly ignored when it came out in 1975. It has since become a classic, and a high point in the careers of Bruce Dern, Annette O'Toole, Barbara Feldon, Michael Kidd and Melanie Griffith. [05 Aug 1999]

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.

The silence in Silence is deep and profound.

It’s an artful, moving and often beautiful film, but be careful about showing it to young children; nightmares could ensue. (It haunted me, and I’m quite grown.)

A knowledge of the novel is helpful as well.

Jane Campion's screen adaptation of New Zealand writer Janet Frame's memoirs is sometimes brilliant, and never less than good. [21 Jun 1991, p.21]

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

Green Room is one nasty piece of work. And I mean that in a good way.

Working with Western funding and Western camera technology for the first time, Yimou also has created the most visually striking of recent Chinese films to reach this country. [15 Mar 1991, p.25]

Take-no-prisoners storytelling, the work of a master storyteller.

Techine never quite makes the crime element stick here. It seems unnecessary, imposed on the material, an unnatural outgrowth of a series of relationships that have more to do with dysfunctional family ties and midlife readjustments.[17 Jan 1997]

You leave The Assistant thinking about why some of us are invisible and some of us don’t notice — and about how evil lives in the places from which we look away.

Compelling epic filmmaking.

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

Isabelle is complicated, in a way that movie women often aren’t; Binoche makes her an intriguing puzzle to solve.

Though every performance is splendid, it’s Washington and Davis who create a mesmerizing symphony of emotion, finding both love and tragedy in every look, every line.

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.

Its settings and cinematography are beautiful, filled with marble hallways and vivid red carpets that seem to be punctuating the scenery with a slash. . . And its performances are a pleasure, everywhere you look.

Sing Street reminds us of being young and lost in a song, realizing with a jolt that someone else had the same feelings we did.

Coppola tells the story through lush mood, meticulous art direction, swimmy music (not Presley’s) and her two actors’ gloriously big-screen faces.

Completely ignored at the Oscars in 1939, "Midnight" seems more sophisticated and durable than several of that year's winners.

With impeccable performances — particularly an electric, extended scene between Marcus and the college dean (Tracy Letts), and Gadon, whose wistful character has a face full of secrets — Indignation is an elegant debut for longtime producer Schamus; a visit to the past, with both sunshine and darkness.

A Different Man spins out of control in its final act, but still leaves you pondering its questions.

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.

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]

Magical, sinister and prankish, The Witches is a triumph.