Bridges knows just what he’s doing, and with the splendid West Texas waltz of a drama, Hell or High Water, British director David Mackenzie has given him the perfect hook on which to hang his hat.

All About Eve is probably Hollywood's closest original approach to the bite, sheen and wisdom of high comedy. It crackles with smart, smarting dialogue. Sometimes at too earnest length, but mostly with wit and always with insight, it jabs at the quirks and follies of show business and its "concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits and precocious children." It matches some penetrating characterizations with top-drawer acting. With all these merits, plus a full-blooded story, the picture is absorbing enough to ride over an occasional lag, satisfying enough to redeem a contrived epilogue.

The majesty of nature is Embrace of the Serpent’s true star, and Guerra captures the glory of every leaf, every inch of sky, in pearlescent black-and-white as luminous as the lining of a clamshell. In Guerra’s eyes, as in Karamakate’s, the forest is magic itself—and it’s no less remarkable for having sprung from something as lowly as the earth’s soil.

Tom Ford -- the Texas-born fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci -- financed this first feature himself. The producer couldn't have hired a smarter director.

Darren Aronofsky brings wild ambition and thrilling artistry to one of the Old Testament’s best-known, most dramatic, least plausible stories — Noah and the ark — with Russell Crowe infusing the role of God’s first seaman and zookeeper with all his surly majesty.

Shoeshine may strengthen a suspicion that the best movies in the world are being made, just now, in Italy.

It's a cagey delight, and an imposing feature directorial debut for one of Britain's TV stalwarts.

Sorkin takes a rather dense, complicated court case—one peopled with figures who clung to stubborn differences even in the context of their shared ideals—and keeps it aloft every minute, as if he were following the aerodynamic principles of hang-gliding rather than moviemaking. Best of all, he brings out the best each actor in this enormous ensemble cast has to offer; every character is rendered with jewelers-loupe clarity.

Simultaneously meticulous and casual, it’s the kind of movie only a master filmmaker could have made—though it's doubtful Soderbergh, perpetually moving away from one movie and toward the next, thinks of himself as a master filmmaker at all.

Director Joel Schumacher's breathlessly paced and incident-crammed movie will induce a certain sense of deja vu among veteran viewers.

The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me."

For dinosaurs to rule the earth again, the monsters needed majesty as well as menace. And Spielberg got it all right. [14 June 1993, p.69]

This darkly seductive, flawlessly acted piece is worlds removed from most horror films. Here monsters have their grandeur, heroes their gravity. And when they collide, a dance of death ensues between two souls doomed to understand each other.

Parallel Mothers is a movie of infinite tenderness, that rare ode to motherhood that acknowledges mothers as women first and mothers second.

Davies recalls all these sights and sounds -- so horrifying, so beautiful -- and, with his unflinching style, turns anecdote into artistry. The distant voices still live.

It is a powerful portrait of a slightly befuddled man who, when inhuman demands were placed on him, found within himself an unexpected response.

A mellow, brassy, vigorous movie, rich in adventure and melancholy, The Man Who Would Be King represents the best work Huston has done in a decade.

Funny, hurtful, splendidly acted.

Campion has spun a fable as potently romantic as a Bronte tale. But The Piano is also deeply cinematic. [22 Nov 1993]

Matthews brings to The Interrupters what every terrific documentary needs: an out-of-nowhere personality with the same magnetic watchability as any Hollywood star.

Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.

Now that those rights are even more imperiled than before, a movie like Emilia Pérez—one that, instead of pleading for trans acceptance merely treats it as a given—feels even more like movie fireworks, fierce and glorious, a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart.

[Lean's] sentimental Zhivago is perhaps warm and rewarding entertainment rather than great art; yet it reaches that level of taste, perception and emotional fullness where a movie becomes a motion-picture event.

If A Quiet Place has one flaw, it’s that it never lets up. There’s little breathing space between its breathtaking moments. Even so, Krasinski has made one of the most poetic horror movies of recent years.

It’s meditative, mournful and gently funny, and celebratory, too, but in a muted way. If you don’t know what kind of movie you’re in the mood for, this may be the one. It’s a tonic for listless times.

Weitz knows his muse. But he’s smartly made room for Tomlin to explore her own wisdom, to look into a mirror (literal and figurative) of an older woman’s past and present with remorse, tears and, best of all, delighted laughter at discovering something new in herself. At 75, Tomlin remains the coolest.

Rambunctious, disturbing, often hilarious new documentary.

Sometimes a movie reaches the unreachable in us, not because it’s a grand masterpiece but because it’s as quiet and intimate as air.

Sandler has perfected the art of talk-smiling through his teeth, barely moving his lips, and it’s perfect for Howard: He’s a guy who’s always hustling, because to stop would be a kind of death. He shows what he’s feeling by trying to hide what he’s feeling. He’s extreme, but he’s also for real. And his is the shtick you keep buying even when the movie around him tempts you with cheaper, shinier stuff.

I wouldn't call the film inspirational -- it is too well observed to succumb to easy sentiment -- but its realism is patiently engaging and subtly insinuating. And Linney and Hoffman are extraordinary.

It is the hilarious business of Shrek, a delightful new animated feature based on the William Steig book, to subvert all the well-worn expectations of its genre.

Alfred Hitchcock's direction, in which the story is told in sharp, abbreviated sequences gathering speed steadily toward their explosive climax, makes The Man Who Knew Too Much one of the neatest melodramas of the year.

The Incredibles has those characters, that heart.

Nearly a century after that black-and-white cartoon short, and 65 years after a “classic” animated feature that missed the mark, Disney finally got Cinderella right — for now and, happily, ever after.

There is never an instant, in fact, when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material: script, camera, cutting, props, the handsome set constructed from his ideas, the stars he has Hitched to his vehicle.

What makes this movie work is the kind of cool that made Get Shorty go so nicely: an understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and situations as if they were the most natural things in the world.

But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions.

Mrs. Miniver is that almost impossible feat, a great war picture that photographs the inner meaning, instead of the outward realism of World War II.

Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors’ and the camera’s movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse.

Repressing its rage to tell an important story, The Invisible War identifies soldiers who are true heroes because they dared to fight for justice.

As McCarthy and Byrne carry on a filthy volley of insults (with what is surely secret sisterly glee), Feig keeps his Spy machinery cranking so smoothly that nothing said or done feels as outrageous as, in fact, it is. The truth serum Spy drops into our fizzy drinks makes us feel so good that we don’t even realize we’ve been schooled.

The voluptuousness of visual detail offers proof, if any more were needed after The Little Mermaid, that the Disney studio has relocated the pure magic of the Pinocchio-Dumbo years.

A smart, shrewdly crafted movie.

Comic, suspenseful, romantic.

Kong is an exaggeration ad absurdum, too vast to be plausible. This makes his actions wholly enjoyable.

Some of us knows that there's an American style -- best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic -- that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing.

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.

Smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining, North by Northwest wears its implausibilities lightly, bobs swiftly past colored picture postcard backgrounds from Madison Avenue to South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, the U.N. Secretariat to George Washington's wattles.

The viewer almost has to be a journalist--or a good editor--to sniff out the meat under all the fat.

Big and pretty, vigorous, thoughtful, this Hamlet expands the story with helpful flashbacks.

The new boys know how to create wonderful transformations in a character's expression with a deft stroke or two, and they have mastered the deliciously parodistic plasticity required by the movements of their ever twisting-turning-tumbling creatures. Their pastoral scenes still glow with the old Disney sweetness, and the ones of foreboding glower with the old relish for the grotesque. They satisfy an older viewer's nostalgic feeling for his childhood's delight while fulfilling the younger crowd's need for a kind of magic the movies too rarely even try to provide of late. It is never too early to learn that animation is still the best special effect.

What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain.

The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world.

This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations.

Bening gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy. But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every sense of the word, to Beatty.

This is an original work in an antique mood. The actors and authors all have fun with the genre without making fun of it. Rather, they revive it.

Pictures with the grand sweep and dreamy energy of The Lost City of Z don’t come along every year—they barely come along at all. This is itself a message in a bottle, a missive from a lost city of movies.

It is truly something to see; for among all the lives to be ruined it is a visual rhapsody, attentive to every nuance in the spectacular land and foliage around the family home, following the lives within as meticulously as it traces the dramatic changes in weather — from clear day to torrential showers — in one of the longest, most intricate and beautiful tracking shots in cinema.

Getting full comic effect from its class-comedy abrasions, Philomena rises to poignancy and profundity as Dench reveals her control of a character stained by the loss of her child and troubled by her suspicion.

With her film adaptation, Gerwig re-embroiders and reinforces that unspoken reassurance. Like Alcott, she leads by example: She has made a film that’s complex and thoughtful but that is also, at every moment, pure pleasure to watch.

Though beautifully made and acted, The Souvenir had the sad, chilly pallor of a centuries-old miniature portrait, a bit of the past you could hold in your hand and yet never fully grasp. The Souvenir Part II puts the earlier film in a bigger, more detailed frame, rushing in with swirls of context, color and perspective.

An elegantly polished little film.

My Life as a Zucchini is so warm, so alive, that we forget we're watching cartoon figures. And when they belong to us, they're no longer orphans.

Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. He’s the character you want to protect, and the one who sends your heart sinking when you see him harden, out of necessity, against the world. He gives The Banshees of Inisherin its soul and its beauty. To look at his face is to understand the half-welcoming, half-unforgiving place known as home.

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

There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it.

The picture is more than a brilliant exercise in moviemaking techniques; it is also a blistering commentary on Hollywood manners & morals.

The most mature and satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career.

This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.

t's a movie for adults -- if they can keep up with its careering pace -- and, yes, you can take the kids. It juggles a '90s impudence with the old Disney swank and heart.

The rhythm of rural life has rarely seemed so lucid and luminous.

A brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism.

A contemplative crime drama with a high startlement quotient.

With Gloria Bell, Lelio revisits a story he’s told before: It’s a close remake of his 2013 Spanish-language film "Gloria," starring the superb Chilean actress Paulina García. Both films are terrific, but with Gloria Bell, Lelio may have buffed out a few rough edges; the new picture feels subtler, more shimmering.

The whole rollicking adventure zips along a mile a minute.

To see this movie in the theater is a special, shuddering pleasure, a tilting-at-windmills affirmation of what movies, seen big, can mean. This is movie as black magic. To give yourself over to it feels a little dangerous. It also feels great.

Ornamented with some bright and lilting tunes, it is a lively feature-length Technicolor excursion into a world that glows with an exhilarating charm and a gentle joyousness.

Director Ursula Meier's Sister is a penetrating study of familial bonds, quietly devastating in parts, beautiful on whole and destined to make you fall in love with a practiced and entirely amoral preteen thief.

It also accomplishes that rarest achievement, the breathing of life into an ossified art form. The '70s has its first great epic.

A bit much? Yes, but it's meant to be. Like Doctor No and From Russia with Love, the two previous Bond bombshells, this picture is a thriller exuberantly travestied. No doubt Goldfinger's formula for box-office gold contains entirely too much brass, but who cares? In scene after scene Director Guy Hamilton has contrived some hilariously horrible sight gags.

Whatever city this one is showing in...move there.

Glover, as usual, is phenomenal.

Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the finest of the season's action epics.

It twists it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.

This being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces.

Although Dumbo offers no startling innovations in animated cartooning, it is probably Disney's best all-round picture to date. Though it lacks the bomb-burst novelty of Snow White, its craftsmanship is far beyond that memorable fairy tale's. Seldom has Disney articulated his characters so aptly. Dumbo is a most human little fellow, not bright, but willing.

All in all, Nurse Betty is a wonderful movie, unpredictably alive to the fact that the American citizenry is a lot stranger than we like to admit.

Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors.

It is a mark of Voight's intelligence that he works against his role's melodramatic tendencies and toward a central human truth. In the process, he and Hoffman bring to life one of the least likely and most melancholy love stories in the history of the American film.

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

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.

If this madly entertaining movie has a fault, it's that it's too ingenious for the genre it ostensibly inhabits.

Smaug is different: a really good movie, superior to the first in that it brings its characters to rambunctious life.

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics.

The Squid and the Whale is domestic tragedy recollected as comedy: a film whose catalog of deceits and embarrassments, and of love pratfalling over itself, makes it as (excruciatingly) painful as it is (exhilaratingly) funny.

There’s no need to worry that this version might crush the gentle charms of the 1991 picture: Even though Condon more or less faithfully follows that movie’s plot, this Beauty is its own resplendent creature.

The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave.

It is a measure of its complexity--and of the forces Penn and Sarandon have held in reserve during their hypnotic struggle for his soul--that its final moments leave us awash in emotion.