This movie is more emotionally remote than Salles' fine "Central Station." But it is starkly beautiful and says something potent to a world in which nations, like these families, engage in mindless blood feuds.

Sometimes engrossing, sometimes exasperating romance. In these scenes, Cotillard shows she doesn't need the validation of Cannes or the Academy. Her strong, subtle performance is gloriously winning on its own.

Val is a portrait of an actor who poured his all into his work. Only now can he see what it amounts to, and find some vindication in the truth that it was worth defending all along.

This film is as smart and funny as its topic and its stars.

Although this thesis produces a lot of talk in Major Barbara, it is the kind of talk that cinemaddicts seldom hear—brilliant, provocative, richly comic. It is solidly backed up by a baker’s dozen of superb acting performances.

Writer-director Chloe Domont’s skillfully constructed debut feature Fair Play is neither a horror movie nor a corporate thriller, though it bears earmarks of both, with some dashes of erotic-thriller intrigue tossed in.

It doesn't work. It is just a mess -- though the sound track, full of Dylan songs is, of course, good to hear. But it is not better than the track on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary of two years ago.

If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.

For a movie whose chief anthem is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come.

Gere is being talked about as an Oscar contender - he's never been nominated. January is a long time off yet, but his name is certainly worth putting on the long list.

In an amazing year for animation, The Princess and the Frog is up at the top. Go on, give it a big kiss.

The film causes no tremors, only a hemi-Demme-semiquaver.

School Life is a bit woolly in its pacing, but the picture’s easygoing structure is part of its charm—it mimics, perhaps, the passage of time at Headfort itself.

It does show us, in threads deftly woven, how circumstances can push hard against people, making everyday living a battle.

Air, Affleck’s fifth movie as a director, may sound like a bore if you don’t care about business, basketball, or athletic shoes. But Affleck, working from a script by Alex Convery, uses classic stealth means to make you care.

When an unknown director turns out a suspense melodrama as dreary and unconvincing as this, moviegoers revel in the thought of what it might have been if Hitchcock had done it. It is disconcerting to come away from Mamie feeling precisely the same way.

Raimi directs the film at Maguire's pensive pace. Some scenes are just inert.

Like its many raucous predecessors, Blazing Saddles is a thing of bits and bits—some good, some awful—pinned to a story line that sags like a tenement clothesline. The movie tends to improve in the retelling, as memory edits out ineptitudes, the better to dwell on moments of glory... But goldarned if it doesn't work. Goldarned if the whole fool enterprise is not worth the attention of any moviegoer with a penchant for what one actor, commenting on another's Gabby Hayes imitation, calls "authentic western gibberish."

Without question, the best crime movie of the year--and one of the best movies of any sort now playing.

So long as Casino stays focused on the excesses -- of language, of violence, of ambition -- in the life-styles of the rich and infamous, it remains a smart, knowing, if often repetitive, spectacle.

Given a budget that encourages their kinesthetic skills, the filmmakers tend to go on a bit, but it's mostly a kind of quick, glancing hipness that's being indulged here.

The Impossible is technologically a marvel - the tsunami experience is harrowingly believable - but also emotionally rich. I hesitate to use this term, since it is so often equated with hokey, but The Impossible is life-affirming.

True Confession is skillfully played and paced, keyed up to the pitch of the dizziest haywire skit.

The script, by Peter Hedges from his novel, spins out a few too many eccentricities, and the direction, by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog), meanders. But DiCaprio and Cates bring loopy authenticity to their roles, and Depp is, as always, a most effacing star.

A grand and poignant movie epic about what is lost in war and what's worth saving in life. It is also a rare blend of purity and maturity -- the year's most rapturous love story.

The film offers no message, no solutions, only a great time at the movies.

It shows Eastwood, at 84, in his finest directorial effort since the 2008 "Gran Torino," while painting on a much broader canvas. Utterly in command of his epic material, he films the Iraqi action in terse, tense panoramas with little cinematic editorializing, as if he were an old Greek or Hebrew God who is never surprised at man’s ability to kill his fellow men, or to find reasons to do so. Directing 34 films over 44 years, Eastwood has honed his craft to its essentials: make it seem as if the story is telling itself.

Intoxicating. [19 Dec 1988, p.78]

A cheerful entertainment, suitable for kids and parents of the brighter stripe. It's just not Nick Park great.

With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton.

Funny Pages still feels slight and only vaguely shaped. Well-observed details are great, but they’ll only take you so far.

Declaration of War is about being under siege from illness, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. This modern-day Juliette and Romeo find their own tragedy, but are not poisoned by it.

Full of sacrilegious rant, absurdist affectlessness and pop social criticism, this film plays like an old B movie: narratively improvisational, delusionally pretentious, weirdly watchable.

To Western eyes, this meandering parable registers as a perplexity and a disappointment.

It blends tension and emotion, computer wizardry and dramatic skill in a vigorous climax--and the most impressive, haunting final shot of the movie year.

The movie around him is sometimes glancingly light. Other times it works way too aggressively at being entertainment, rather than just breathing. But Holland, as both Parker and Spidey, is always fun to watch: His bumbling uncertainty and his boyish eagerness make him believable not just as a crime fighter but as a kid.

It’s LaBeouf’s performance as his father that haunts the movie. He’s hateful, but even within the context of this upbringing-as-horror-show, LaBeouf locates crystalline reflections of the better man his father might have been. His performance both exorcises a demon and makes peace with it, which may be a better gift than his father deserves. But then, it’s the giving that counts.

Fincher seems to be having a great deal of fun with The Killer. Though he takes it seriously as a piece of action craftsmanship, there’s nothing overserious about it.

The first great movie of the summer.

Erin Brockovich is slick, grating and false. We bet it makes a bundle.

An exhilarating ride, start to finish. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg set a high bar for this subgenre with "Shaun of the Dead," but Reese, Werner and Fleischer may have trumped them. This isn't just a good zombie comedy. It's a damn fine movie, period. And that's high praise, coming from a vampire guy.

Mann is a fantastic technician, but his perpetual coolness is a liability. He seems to want us to understand this complex, deeply private man, one who was both revered and reserved. But in the end, he’s more interested in Enzo Ferrari’s mystique than in his humanity.

Kids may be puzzled by rebellious worker ants chanting Marxist slogans, but their parental guides may welcome the relief from the prevailing blandness of family films. [Oct 12, 1998 v152 n15 p116]

Even Galifianakis's pervy charm, and a deeply weird cameo by Mike Tyson, can't save The Hangover. Whatever the other critics say, this is a bromance so primitive it's practically Bro-Magnon.

Director Robert Aldrich gets convincingly raw, tough performances in even the smallest roles.

In Both Sides of the Blade, Sara isn’t acting like a man; she’s simply being herself, and the raw texture of her desire, and how it affects her behavior, isn’t something we can either applaud or disapprove of. It’s just there, in all its cruel, ragged splendor.

The performances in Battle of the Sexes, agile and perceptive, keep the game alive every minute.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is no "Fast Five."

Binoche is especially subtle and radiant in another splendid drama from Leconte.

If there were an Oscar for ensemble acting, Ray would win in a stroll.

Layer Cake is a treat--especially if your taste in desserts is devil's food.

The acting of the brilliant cast is sometimes superb. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is bigger than any of these things. Its real hero is not calfy Jeff Smith, but the things he believes, as embodied in the hero of U. S. democracy's first crisis, Abraham Lincoln.

Surprisingly, the film is delightful—mostly because of 15-year-old Hayley Mills, the blonde button nose who played the endearing delinquent in Tiger Bay. The important thing about a children's picture is that children like it. If they are old enough to enjoy some mild mush and young enough to know childhood's most prized secret—that all adults are boobs—they should like this one.

I think Gonzo, which is wonderfully rich in historical footage, needs some skeptics, some voices suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Thompson was part of the problem, not the solution, when America flirted briefly with revolution (or was it merely anarchy?), leaving consequences that continue to resonate today -- and not always to our advantage.

This memory piece, shy in manner but tough in spirit, has brought out the best in everyone connected with it.

The result is a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor.

Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far this year.

It’s the kind of movie that miraculously makes you feel better about everything.

This is no breathless film fantasy; its pulse is stately, contemplative. But anyone who has keen eyes and an open heart will surely go soaring and crashing with the lovers lost in Malick's exotic, erotic new world.

Funny in its deplorable way.

A slam dunk in the genre, satisfying every period piece craving: torrid affair, mad king, bastard child, throngs at the palace gates and a history lesson that will be fresh to many.

Shelton has written the wittiest, busiest screenplay since Moonstruck, and his three stars do their very best screen work. [20 June 1988]

With seamless grace, Zimny matches vintage footage of Springsteen and the band with their current-day versions; we see how the young faces have blended into the old. Aging, because it means surviving, is the best.

The new film is a toss-up with George Pal's very watchable 1953 version: the special effects are even better here, the drama even lamer.

Blending plot elements of "Double Indemnity" and "Natural Born Killers" with the ripe sensuality of Francis Coppola's take on "Dracula," the film should make audiences sit up in startled pleasure, as if they'd just received the most luscious neck-bite.

Director Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber keep forcing us past disbelief and into the perverse pleasures of nastiness. If nothing else, their film is the perfect antidote to all those warm, forgiving schoolboy dramas we've endured through the years. This corn is not green; it is rotten down to the last kernel.

The Dig—set in Suffolk, England, in 1939 and based on a true story of buried treasure—is a restorative escape, a smart, gentle picture whose transportive qualities should not be underestimated. It’s the cabin-fever-relief movie of this bleak midwinter.

It's like a restaurant where you go for the food and go back for the atmosphere. Or for the waitress. [13 July 1995]

What’s wonderful about Bros is how un-different it is.

The triumph of Matilda, both as Dahl wrote it and as it’s interpreted here, is that one little girl finally finds her place among people who understand her. This is a story about the family you choose, versus the one you were born into. And for some people, the chosen family is the one that makes all the difference.

Can one recommend this unblinking film to the average moviegoer, out for a good time? Only in this way: if James and his crew can spend years with these blighted souls, surely you can spend two hours with them, exploring compassion's outer limits.

Rarely do you see an actor harness such physical energy on the screen, much less dance at this level of intensity while converting raw muscle mass into raging sex appeal. But Tatum is the real McCoy.

Despite Straight Outta Compton’s energetic acting and Gray’s capture of in-studio Eureka! moments, it never manages to transcend biopic hagiography, with characters whose names appear in the production credits – Dre, Cube and Eazy-E’s widow Tomica Woods-Wright – faring best onscreen.

So where’s the line between rigid parental standards and possible abuse? Captain Fantastic crab-walks tentatively toward that question, and even though its conclusion feels rushed, the movie still works as a portrait of an unorthodox family that’s well adjusted in its own odd way.

A very good film, beautifully shot and edited, intelligently structured and — to risk what will surely seem at first a highly inappropriate term —charming.

This is a beguiling, somewhat grisly drama, based on something that happened to one genuinely unhappy, messed-up family.

At the very least, it's awfully entertaining and for "Buffy" fans, reason to put down the boxed sets and run off to the cinema.

How much Tim Robinson is too much? Maybe the exact amount you get in Friendship, the feature debut of writer-director Andrew DeYoung.

This is rather a thin tale, not much thickened by Burton's direction or Depp's playing. There's a distance, a detachment to this film. It lacks passion.

This is a serious filmgoer's treat: intelligence cloaked in elegance.

Rambunctious, disturbing, often hilarious new documentary.

There are no noisy meltdowns or hyper-dramatic revelations in Brittany Runs a Marathon; even the lines that sting have some buoyancy. Brittany has a tough outer shell — you need it in New York, and you need it just being a woman. But Bell makes that shell translucent; her character’s vulnerability shimmers through it, in a gorgeous everyday way.

This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.

Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d'etat into fodder for renewed debate.

This is lip-gloss misanthropy packaged as feminist manifesto, clever but not smart, cynical without being perceptive or particularly passionate. Women are angry for good reason. They also deserve better movies than this one.

Gold, in a word, is guaranteed at the boxoffice, and this is never less than glittering entertainment, but somehow a certain measure of lead has found its way into the formula.

Though Scheider is a wry, sensitive actor, he soon gets lost in the vulgar theatrics. So does the subject of death. When Fosse attempts to put his heart on the table, he does so too literally.

An edgy exploration of role playing and sexual choice in a climate where all options are acceptable.

Ross is a filmmaker with a taste for inherently sentimental tales…but the discipline not to play mawkishly to our sentiments. You will be moved by Seabiscuit--but not to tears.

The time may feel right for a wry dystopian sci-fi adventure-comedy. But as satires go, this one is more mild than habanero.

It is propaganda, or was once, but it is so well done that it is chiefly propaganda for the human race.

The best Hollywood movies always knew how to sneak a beguiling subtext into a crowd-pleasing story. Superman Returns is in that grand tradition. That's why it's beyond Super. It's superb.

It would be nice, for instance, to meet some white man, other than Dunbar [Costner], who is not a brutish lout. And it would not harm the film if there were one or two bad-natured Sioux visible in it. [12 Nov 1990, p.102]

Pakula seems overawed by the book's critical and popular success. Whatever its other virtues, Presumed Innocent was basically a page turner; the movie is a slow burner.

This is a story about a seemingly unforgiving landscape that’s actually giving back every minute, once Rona reopens herself to its windswept language.

The most inventive and entertaining family movie I've seen this year, packed with wickedly smart humor and joyful animation.

This could have turned out to be an exercise in easy sentiment, easy to shrug off. But Frank Cottrell Boyce's script is carefully understated, and director Michael Winterbottom has achieved a remarkably seamless blend of fictional and factual footage.