Sometimes, a movie can just make you feel better, and that’s no small gift.

Pike shows us both the strength and the quietly growing fear, as Marie becomes a jittery shadow, her voice getting thicker, more desperate.

Taut, powerful, brilliantly lit, The Handmaid's Tale casts a spell, even as it spells out its dire warning. [09 Mar 1990, p.20]

With a Morricone-inspired score, gorgeous cinematography that screams to be witnessed on a big screen, and bleak humor, this film’s tightly executed, meticulously controlled surface barely contains the seething fury within.

And whether or not you think Allen's an irresponsible home-wrecker and/or Farrow's gone round the bend, Husbands and Wives towers above the recent batch of mediocre-to-awful summer movies that were created by people with less-dished private lives. For those of us who aren't directly involved, it's the work that matters. [18 Sept 1992, p.3]

Franklin's special gift is in illuminating the contact point between ordinary human folly and heinous crime.

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov classic isn't as racy as the new one by Adrian Lyne, which opens in theaters tomorrow. But it's a lot funnier, thanks in no small part to the casting of Peter Sellers as a mystery man of many accents and Shelley Winters as Lolita's silly mother. [01 Oct 1998]

King Richard, though perhaps a tad overlong, is as irresistible as the young legends at its center; you watch with pleasure, thinking of the many future champions it might inspire.

Though Wright can’t quite sustain the tension through the final half-hour, Last Night in Soho is full of dark pleasures.

Marshall is a handsome, old-fashioned film about a real-life hero, with a message of equality and justice that always bears repeating.

It’s a lovely, inspiring picture of a crucial institution; one which, as an employee describes, serves as “a warm, welcoming place that’s committed to education and committed to nurturing everyone’s passions and curiosities.”

The Barbie world was a grown-up one — wildly sanitized and outfit-focused and unrealistic, but grown-up nonetheless — and, for a kid, an irresistible place to visit. Greta Gerwig’s exuberantly pink new movie “Barbie” both understands that thrill and has sly fun with it.

The Fabelmans is a movie about being seen — and about learning to see.

In only his second movie as a director, Peele is already a master of tone, and Us is full of memorable, vivid touches.

There’s so much that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever does right that it’s frustrating to blame it for the one flaw it can’t help. But you watch it wondering about the movie that never got made, the story that never got finished, the life cut short too soon. Maybe, in a few years, this franchise can make a truly fresh start; this movie efficiently and skillfully lays the groundwork for that. It takes time, as wise Wakandans remind us, to move on.

Tight, hilarious and - in its final shots - strangely moving, "Miami Blues" is a marvelously invigorating piece of work. [20 Apr 1990, p.3]

By the end, you look at the musician’s faces — particularly Ma’s beaming smile — and find a truth: through music, we can always find our way home.

The film is little more than a well-oiled machine that serves a strictly limited function, but like a precision timepiece, it is a thing to marvel at, even under close scrutiny.

The Irishman is long, to be sure, but it’s never less than compelling — Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino and Pesci, all in their mid-to-late-70s, are each carrying a lifetime of work, with practiced ease.

The special-effects sequences are up to the usual high standards of Marvel excellence, but by far the best elements of “Homecoming” are the writing, which brims with humor, and the performances.

Not every moment in the film works perfectly — Matsoukas, on occasion, slips the actors’ dialogue into internal monologue voice-over, which mostly just seems confusing — but Queen & Slim has a remarkable power. You watch it recognizing the world you know, and wishing you didn’t.

You have undoubtedly seen many films that cover, generally, about the same territory as Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River.... But you probably haven’t seen one quite like “Wind River,” a movie less interested in examining the crime than in uncovering the icicle of grief at its core.

A classic European film noir with an irresistible score by Miles Davis, it builds tension from a series of seemingly minor mistakes that echo the political/military context of the postwar era.

Cooper, carrying the movie from start to finish, has a final, devastating close-up that’ll haunt you for quite a while. Darkness has enveloped this man; he won’t wake from his own nightmare.

Josh is flying solo this time, but Marty Supreme shows he’s capable of achieving a greatness that’s all his own. While brief plot elements weigh the film down, Safide defies gravity even as Marty cannot.

The drama of Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women takes place in Annette Bening’s masterful pauses.

Feels utterly fresh for our times.

It doesn’t have the same wild unfamiliar sparkle as the original, but that’s the point. The joys of this film are similar to the joys of a beloved (real) band’s reunion concert: watching decades of personal and musical history play out onstage, cheering for the revolutionaries of their day and, in the case of the actor-creators of Spinal Tap, seeing what more than 40 years of commitment to a bit — and to each other — really looks like.