DaCosta takes some big stylistic swings — particularly with the soundtrack — that sometimes makes you feel as if you’re watching a comedy rather than a horror film. It’s a welcome, offbeat balm to the more intense moments sprinkled throughout and reflects the movie’s more pondering approach to a story that questions who the real monsters are.

Aside from the Brechtian ending, Taste of Cherry is not a difficult film, although the implications of the characters' references to "true" Moslems, "brave" Kurds and multiplying Afghans may be entirely clear only to an Iranian audience. [3 July 1998]

You have, I promise, never seen a movie quite like Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden. It’s a period drama gone mad; a lavishly colorful, beautifully-filmed-erotic-revenge-crime thriller set in 1930s Korea.

By the film’s poignant final scenes, you feel like you’ve really been somewhere, with a new appreciation of what it means to be home.

The Marx Brothers at their purest and funniest - no romantic subplot, no musical interludes with Harpo, no distractions from the fun of watching Groucho deflate Margaret Dumont as he becomes dictator of Fredonia and frivolously declares war. Cleverly directed by Leo McCarey, it was the team's least popular 1930s film, perhaps because the tone of non-stop anarchy proved too unsettling to Depression audiences. [10 May 1991, p.65]

Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki deftly create tension by twisting time around.

You can't help getting into the spirit of it.

Much of the film’s pleasure is in hearing Morrison speak.

It’s a simple, moving story about love, loss and storytelling itself.

This film celebrates Halston’s work but shows more interest in the man — and the unexpected corporate drama — behind it.

Bigelow has a way of making scripted drama feel like an utterly gripping newsreel. That’s not necessarily all to the good — I found myself wishing for more character development — but you can’t deny the power of the filmmaking.

Simultaneously smart and myopic, sneaky and forgetful, the mother Debbie Reynolds plays in Albert Brooks' Mother always keeps you guessing. [10 Jan 1997, p.F1]

Filmed in black-and-white shadow, Coen’s version of Shakespeare’s taut tale of murder and consequences in murky Scotland here seems so creepily ethereal it practically floats in the air, with gorgeous language gliding by on the cold wind.

Bugsy is really pretty wonderful. It's the kind of old-fashioned yet multi-layered movie that Hollywood filmmakers seemed to have forgotten how to make in 1991, when well-written, carefully structured screenplays often appeared to have gone the way of manageable budgets. It couldn't have arrived at a more welcome moment.

Martial-arts action, excitingly mounted, is all part of the package as Po battles a glowering, green-eyed bull (J.K. Simmons) and tries to whip peaceable pandakind into a fighting force to defeat the villain. One-liners fly as fast as kung-fu fisticuffs in this sweet and satisfying picture.

The interweaving of animation and nonanimated footage gives the picture a kind of surreal quality that befits the sense of the survivors of how unreal the event seemed to them.

In a digital fantasy world where culture has been abandoned in favor of commerce, talent is the cheapest commodity.

A soothing 76-minute respite from the noisy clutter of Hollywood's holiday-oriented movies, Microcosmos invites us to "fall silent" while it shows us the spectacularly exotic sights of a world almost beneath our notice, where "time passes differently." [22 Nov 1996]

Both inviting and confrontational, Blindspotting shakes viewers in their seats and announces Diggs as a star-in-the-making leading man.

Farrow is hilarious when she's aggressively pursuing Mantegna; amusingly dumbstruck when she's fighting off a group of male partygoers (one of the secret potions makes them fall in love with her); and touching when she's trying to reconcile with her sister (Blythe Danner) or sell her lame script ideas to an old friend who works for the networks (Cybill Shepherd). The performance is a triumph of sensitivity to rapid mood swings that stops just short of turning the movie into The Three Faces of Alice. [25 Jan 1991, p.22]

Darkly comic and submerged in irony, events unfold with the inevitability of a slow-motion car wreck. When the emotional and physical carnage finally recedes, Sigurðsson leaves us with one haunting image that proves the universe has a sick sense of humor indeed.

Its honesty and power makes it feel large; you live among these characters in their weary trailer park, aching for them.

By the time the film turns into this unusual buddy adventure, it is an absolute joy, the pair putting their big brains to the task at hand and playfully ribbing each other as they go.

The movie’s a playful commentary on overdependence on technology — Wallace has machines that bathe him, dress him and make his tea — but it’s also just fast-paced fun, and you look forward to watching it a second time to catch the sight gags you missed.

A magnificent work of minimalism, the film is about these minute moments just as it’s about the most existential parts of life.

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

Oh yes indeed. Avengers: Endgame brought it...This film had an insanely difficult job to do — to gracefully and tidily wrap up a 22-movie Marvel Comics cycle with a cast list bigger than the Hulk, and to do so with both poignancy and hold-your-breath action — and it delivers.

In the midst of that hostile physical and psychic landscape, de Clermont-Tonnerre has made a stringent tale of a struggle for redemption.