This is a confident, playful film that skewers both the amorality of the central character and, less comfortably, the gullibility of the people he so easily dupes. [5 Dec 1997, p.G5]

It’s a sweet, faintly screwball, faintly Shakespearean look at love, families and what happens when a well-made plan goes just a bit awry.

Alpha-male sparring is the name of the game in Chevalier, the new deadpan comedy by Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari. And it has rarely looked this deliciously goofy.

Filmmaker Ivan Sen is a quadruple threat as writer, director, composer and cinematographer of this wily Australian thriller.

The fashion alone, designed by the great Jenny Beavan (an Oscar winner for “A Room with a View” and “Mad Max: Fury Road”), is worth the ticket price; if that doesn’t do it for you, there’s also slyly brilliant work from the two Emmas — Stone and Thompson — working hard to upstage the gorgeous outfits in which they’re swathed.

With her wonderfully expressive face, Clarke carries the picture, navigating her character’s gradual transformation with grace and conviction.

An enjoyably lighthearted crowd-pleaser with a serious message at its core.

Bailey gives a glowing performance of effortless starshine; her singing voice has both sweetness and power, and her smile is the sort on which dreams dance.

Captivating 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, starring Michael Sacks as the time-tripping hero. [09 Jul 1998]

Jackie is mesmerizing; a familiar story told from an entirely different angle. It’s voyeuristic, to be sure — the scenes of Jackie alone in her White House bedroom, after the shooting, feel almost unbearably intimate — but you can’t look away.

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.