An exhilarating two hours of serious fun.

Kick-Ass moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is. But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly.

The Trip may have familiar elements - it's pretty much "My Dinner With Andre" pinned to the plot of Alexander Payne's "Sideways" - but the badinage provides an immediate and lasting kick, as well as the spectacle of two champion combatants at the top of their game.

Ford v Ferrari is a little too long; some scenes leave unnecessary skidmark trails. But the movie still has amiable style and energy to spare. It’s fast but never furious.

The French Connection is a knockout police thriller with so much jarring excitement that it almost calls for comic-book expletives. POW!, ZOWIE! The film has all the depth of a mud puddle, but Director William Friedkin (The Night They Raided Minsky's) sets such a frantic pace that there is hardly a chance to notice, much less care.

John Wick: Chapter 2 has style to burn, and oh! what violence — terrible, bone-crunching, glorious violence, beautifully orchestrated by director Chad Stahelski.

The movie is ridiculously over the top, inelegant and so defiantly ?crazy?that it works, reminding you how fun gore and creatures that go bump ?(and? grind) in the night can be. It's a sci-fi horror film, but no actual ?comedy?has made me laugh as much this year as Splice.?

A performance like De Niro's, in a well-made entertainment like Midnight Run, is cheap at any price. And capable of restoring the audience's faith in the form. [25 July 1988]

By giving his movie a very effective realistic look, by helping his actors to shape strongly believable performances, even when they are doing implausible things, Benton lends credence to these inspirational fibs.

Beetlejuice means something good: that imaginative artists can bring a fading genre back from the dead. [11 Apr 1988]

Not since "This is Spinal Tap" have I had such a good time watching amiable idiocy stumble on toward uncertain glory.

It is also extremely well acted at every level (one especially wants to single out Bob Balaban as the Government's chief aggressor and Wilford Brimley as its belated voice of conscience), and directed by Sidney Pollack with a sort of crisp but unassuming professionalism that is rarer than it ought to be. Perhaps best of all, the script, by sometime Journalist Kurt Luedtke, who was once part of a Pulitzer-winning investigative team on the Detroit Free Press, has a marvelously entertaining intricacy, briskly and believably building, half-inch by half-inch, Michael's outrage over and Megan's entrapment in the plot to get him.

The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape—a shape you could almost trace with your thumb, as if it were made of clay and not images, air, and feeling.

It is a rattling good outdoor adventure movie.

In its soft-spoken way, it is fierce, shaggy and deeply weirded out.

Both horrifying and hopeful.

A banquet of creepy, gory or grotesque incidents is on display in Hannibal. but this superior sequel has romance in its dark heart.

To say Toni Erdmann is funny doesn’t even begin to capture the out-there texture of the jokes, and of the actors’ timing.

Droll, reticent, flawlessly filmed fable of generosity.

This miniature epic is a film that, like its young hero, will enrich those who peer into its poignant heart.

A superb film.

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.

Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality).

Lawrence's style, naturally lit and roughly realistic, matches the writing. Lantana sometimes has the air of a routine police procedural, sometimes the quality of a dour film noir. But this movie, so alert to mischance and dreams that don't quite work out as they should, has a good soul, a heart yearning for decency.

Terse is the word for Eastwood's directorial style. It rarely editorializes; it doesn't emote or orate. It just tells the damn story of a soldier's honor, which means doing the job no matter the odds--indeed, no matter the mission.

Dern’s mastery is so complete that it makes conversation about the actor’s skill or the awards she’ll likely win seem unworthy; her performance ignites the screen with increasing tension, stuffing a lifetime’s worth of repressed trauma into a moment.

The confounding thing, and perhaps the ultimate irony of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, is that Alex is surprisingly but undeniably engaging.

If The Hobbit doesn't equal the achievement of Jackson's earlier Middle-earth movies -- and, honestly, what could? -- it is still, in sum, a thrilling effort.

It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental.

McKay approaches this adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book with wit, energy and a surprising degree of clarity. But if the movie is a crackerjack entertainment, it’s one with a conscience.

This is a smart, lustrous film, and a bracingly honest one, the kind of movie that leaves you feeling both invigorated and a little blue.

A thriller for modern women who identify more with the messiness of human lives than with flattened slogans about how great women, as a monolithic group, are.

Though it borrows some of the gauzy mood of The Virgin Suicides, it’s essentially unlike any other Sofia Coppola film, a serene, supple picture that hits more than a few notes of despair.

This is an imperfect film that still captures an elusive and incandescent vibe, as alluring as a strand of lights strung up for an impromptu concrete picnic.

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically.

In this arid landscape, the edifice of Ghost World, with all its acute insolence, stands out like the Taj Mahal.

Plenty of tech-noir savvy to keep infidels and action fans satisfied.[26 Nov 1984, p. 105]

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

We are free to adore a sad, funny, always good-natured film that eccentrically, tolerantly explores that moment when revolutionary ardor commingled with bourgeois stolidity to form our present weirdly ambiguous culture.

An intentional heehaw at whodunits, an uproarious parody that may become a classic of caricature...Sophisticated? Well, not really. But fast, smart, shrewdly directed and capably performed. And though the film will scarcely eradicate the sex and violence that encumber contemporary movies, it may at least persuade producers that sick subjects may be profitably proffered with a healthy laugh.

The result of all this high-priced maladjustment is terribly funny, terribly upper class. No one could have written it better than Plahywright Barry, who has written it often ("Holiday," "The Animal Kingdom," et al.)...It's a good, entertaining show.

Hall’s Christine draws us closer rather than pushing us away — this performance is a quiet, multidimensional marvel.

Unlike most sure-fire movies, it was put together with good taste, honesty, wit—and even a strong suggestion of guts.

Most of the movie is Actors Acting: gifted guys (Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Chris Penn) running nattering riffs on familiar lout themes. [16 Nov 1992]

What is startling is how well While You Were Sleeping recaptures the true spirit of the best kind of modern fairy tale -- classic romantic comedy.

This is a movie that feels, in the best way, like the last day of summer: radiant, bittersweet, redolent of memories in the making.

They bring their characters to good, slightly surprising, quite satisfying places. And leave us beaming happily.

It’s ridiculous, and it’s wonderful. Falling in love is stupid like that.

A gross-your-eyes-out horror movie that is also the year's most poignant romance.

Here, the effect of merely hearing his voice and watching his hands is so intimate that we walk away with an almost tactile sense of who Martin Margiela is, the way we confidently, yet only sort of, know what the man in the moon looks like. His mystery becomes our secret too.

The Favourite is a wicked delight, a fantastic little cupcake of a movie laced with thistle frosting.

Out of Africa is, at last, the free-spirited, fullhearted gesture that everyone has been waiting for the movies to make all decade long. It reclaims the emotional territory that is rightfully theirs.

The result – believable, hopeful, tender, delightful – is a movie of (increasingly rare) truly indie sensibility, made by women who are confident about healthy feminine resilience.

But the carnage, like the sex scenes, is shot so pristinely that it becomes a nouvelle-cuisine feast; this is a splatter film Martha Stewart could love.

Intellectually austere but technologically and aesthetically riveting documentary.

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

Bravely and with penetrating intelligence, Before Midnight elevates instead the practical, a partnership: frayed by disappointment, worn by time, but for the very luckiest—which we sincerely and selfishly hope includes Jesse and Celine—durable for the long day’s journey into night.

The devastating truth of 45 Years, so beautifully wrought, is that even the most devoted couples are made up of two people who are essentially alone.

Hogg has made a gorgeous, haunting movie drawn from a very real place and time.

A careful, finally powerful film.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is 2 hours and 48 minutes of an irresistibly shiny, shimmering Taylor Swift. She’s the lure skimming through the water; we’re the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence. All that for less than 20 bucks.

The next time you hear a director complain about the studio or his stars or the weather or whatever, think of what Jorgen Leth achieved with Lars von Trier as his boss -- when five obstructions became five splendid opportunities.

To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

No deep solutions are suggested in this subtle and meticulously observed study. Yet Director Norman Jewison has used his camera to extract a certain rough-cut beauty from each protagonist. He has shown, furthermore, that men can join hands out of fear and hatred and shape from base emotions something identifiable as a kind of love. In this he is immeasurably helped by performances from Steiger and Poitier that break brilliantly with black-white stereotype.

Don’t blink–not even once. That’s the best advice for viewers of the dazzling new documentary Harry Benson: Shoot First.

No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating, a vital affirmation of the creative process.

The special effects are marvelous, the good-humored script is comic-bookish without being excessively campy, and there are two excellent performances.

It is indeed impressive; and we mean not just this solid, satisfying final film - in which the Potter saga reaches its climax, if not quite its emotional apex - but the entirety of producer David Heyman's blockbuster franchise.

Nothing short of an invasion could add much to Casablanca.

What lifts this film into orbit—and what saves it from being a shaggy flying-saucer story—is the breathless wonder that the director brings to every frame. Whether he is showing us a pristine, starry Midwestern sky or displaying Special Effects Wizard Douglas Trumbull's formidable arsenal of spaceships and celestial storms, Spielberg seems to be looking at everything onscreen as if for the first time. The freshness of his vision is contagious—and exhilarating.

The picture is potent and engaging; even its fictionalized elements ring with the spirit of truth. And Stewart is off the charts, though that’s hardly a surprise.

Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.

Mangrove, too, tells a sometimes harrowing real-life story. Yet it has a lightness of touch that McQueen hasn’t shown before. Mangrove, as is all of Small Axe, is personal for McQueen — he is of West Indian descent himself — and his affection for these characters, as well as his passion for their cause, ignites his telling of their story.

His performance is a canny portrait of leadership - part genius, part crazy guts, part dumb luck - and worthy of moving Pitt up to the playoff round of Oscar finalists for Best Actor. We'd put money on it.

Rich in humor, pained or frolicking.

An easy charm, a cleverly unforced sense of humor and a benignity toward all its genially oddball characters. If moviegoers skip this one, they'll be missing a real treat.

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

But the writer-director is canny enough to salt the stew with poignance, so that by the end these attitude machines have become human beings -- more than the sum of their chiseled jokes.

Going into C’mon C’mon, you may think you know exactly what it’s going to be. Coming out, you’ll probably see that you were mostly right, but that you also got a million little firefly flashes of feeling you weren’t expecting. And that right there is the Mike Mills touch.

The Worst Person in the World is a comedy, not a drama. But it’s ruthless in the way the best comedies can be.

Director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio are great guys to waste time with. The latter has a real flair for writing strong, confrontational scenes -- brisk, needling, well shaped -- and the former stages them with coolly concentrated intensity. And the cast is terrific. [19 Dec 1994, p.75]

One problem with social-issues documentaries is that you almost always know where they stand, and where they’re headed, from the start. But Collective is as tense and as taut as a great fictional drama.

Even the car chase in Fletch is witty and believable and something an adult can attend without flinching. As the adolescent revels of summer wear on, that alone could make it a movie to cherish.

I’m Your Man is funny in such a gentle way that you may not realize how piercing it is until after the credits have rolled.

A grand, sprawling entertainment that incites enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min.

To Be is a very funny comedy, salted to taste with melodrama and satire.

From beginning to end, for kids and adults, Heaven Can Wait is nonstop —and blissfully uncomplicated—pleasure.

Miss Bala is a tragedy rendered with the savviest, moviewise virtuosity. A young woman's despair, and a nation's, was never so damned entertaining.

The picture packs a wonderful wallop.

It could as well be called Best Thing of Undetermined Species.

If Incredibles 2 harbors a current of seriousness, what really makes it work is that it is so purely delightful.

The film has refurbished the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer.

Weird, beguiling premise.

Patient and plodding -- but as realized by John Malkovich, in his directorial debut, utterly absorbing.

Now and then McGrath's film feels a bit rushed and breathless, but mostly you sink gratefully into its handsomely staged plenitude.

Roy-Lecollinet’s face, both haughty and welcoming, both anchors the movie and sets it free in the wind. No wonder Paul can’t shake the memory of it. It’s the thing that will age him before his time—and also keep him young forever.

A devious mind game, Trance is also the most entertaining smart movie so far this year.

No matter how much money has been poured into a movie, it’s emotional generosity that matters, and Johnson gives without squandering. His great gift is that he knows when to stop.