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.)