Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about PA is that it's not just a fun thrill ride; it's an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy.

The movie is smart, lavish and fun without being assaultive.

You’ve seen every element of Sing Street hundreds of times before — it’s Carney’s knack for assembling them that makes the difference. In his hands, this isn’t just a nostalgia trip. It’s an homage to teenage kicks and the urgency of getting them any way you can.

Robots goes for a color scheme that is cool, muted, instantly aged. Director Chris Wedge wants the eye to concentrate on the gags he and his writers (including veteran comedy craftsmen Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) have stuffed into the film.

There’s a fantasy element to Master Gardener that bolsters the movie’s convictions rather than weakening them.

This is a sad, subtle and very good movie, designed not so much to make you think, but to make you feel the impact of large events on little lives.

Everyone in the cast has his or her solo, and all rise brilliantly to their occasions, notably Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Beals, Mina Badie and a divinely neurotic Jane Adams.

The scenes cut so close to the emotional bone that you can understand why they might cause a panic amongst MPAA boardmembers, although of course, it's nothing to be afraid of: just the realism of love in its varied forms.

It stands, soars on its own. It moves to a seductive rhythm and vision.

Diane Keaton, directing her first fictional feature, gets us safely through a movie that could have turned to mush at any moment.

Despite its elements of brutality, this is a buoyant hymn to life, and a movie to celebrate.

Sex, drugs and rack 'n' ruin; pretty people doing nasty things to one another...honestly, what more could you want in a movie?

Chris Paine's documentary makes an unapologetic case for the car and an unofficial indictment of the forces allied against it.

The film is generous to all its besotted creatures, and to the audience as well. Viewers who fall in love with Café de Flore will find that it loves them back.

All three actors are clearly having a blast with this satire of actorly egos and vanity projects, but it’s Cruz who truly dazzles.

Scripter Jules Furthman and Director Edmund Goulding have steered a middle course, now & then crudely but on the whole with tact, skill and power.

[Pfeiffer & Demme] and a gang of co-stars have created a coherent farce symphony.

To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.

Before Director Ron Howard and his gargle of writers (Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman) arrange a satisfactorily romantic ending for their odd couple, they also manage to satirize everything from presidential politics to daytime television. They are a jostling, busily observant, fundamentally good-natured crew, and audiences are well advised to take a plunge on Splash.

Well acted, and it achieves a strong, smart, engaging life of its own.

To make an unembarrassing movie about embarrassment is definitely an eye-opening achievement.

You can probably guess every beat of The Mustang ahead of time, but what does that matter? The picture, shot by Ruben Impens, is gorgeous to look at.

Shazam! just breathes, and it’s bliss.

Edwards (director of 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the 2014 Godzilla) and Koepp (who wrote the scripts for the first two Jurassic Park movies) know what they’re doing here: they locate the perfect ratio of human business to dinosaur antics, favoring the dinosaurs when in doubt.

It’s not going to change the summer-blockbuster landscape single-handedly, but at least it comes by its thrills honestly: This is a spectacle that trusts us to think.

As long as Training Day stays tightly focused on the struggle between the two cops, the movie is first rate.

There’s enough magic, and extraordinary visual imagination, to smooth the edges of the movie’s problems.

The scariest romantic comedy of the year.

The film's spare wit is as applicable to Broward County as to the Persian Gulf. Secret Ballot offers further evidence that an Islamic regime can foster humanist satires with a critical, political edge.

Like Crazy is a cinematic love potion and you leave it feeling bewitched.

Orchestrating the efforts of a superb production team — and of the reluctant Mr. Chayefsky — Russell has devised a film experience that will astound some viewers, outrage others and bore nobody. Laugh with it, scream at it, think about it.

A pastiche that's nearly as funny as it is long (2hr. 45min.), and quite as politically troubling as it may be liberating, Django Unchained is pure, if not great, Tarantino.

It features as ghastly a group of interstellar pirates, the Klingons, as ever entered the star log, plus a spectacularly self-destructive planet and plenty of technically adroit and sometimes witty special effects. These are classic directorial occasions, and Nimoy rises to them with fervor, in effect beaming his film up onto a higher pictorial plane than either of its predecessors.

A modestly mounted, but curiously poignant little documentary... which somehow -- quietly, devastatingly -- shows and tells you more than you may perhaps want to know about the dehumanization implicit in the mighty, blighted Iraqi adventure.

When Rose-Lynn opens her mouth to sing–her speaking voice has a Glaswegian burr, but her singing voice is all Tennessee–you’re wheedled into forgetting her flaws and sins and wanting only the best for her and her kids

Though Guadagnino is a gifted director, his style is sometimes showily baroque to a fault. (Exhibit A: Suspiria.) But Queer, stylish as it is, may be his most heartfelt movie, at least since Call Me By Your Name.

Aside from the fact that Operation Mincemeat features not one but two former Mr. Darcys (one from the much-loved 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series, the other from Joe Wright’s similarly marvelous 2005 film adaptation), and works beautifully as a romance, it’s also a cracking espionage caper.

Nichols—director of Take Shelter, Mud and, most recently, Midnight Special—tells the Lovings’ story in a way that feels immediate and modern, and not just like a history lesson.

It has everything you want in an epic: sweep, scope, wild reversals of fortune and plenty of bold, basic emotions.

Murphy, abetted by director Tom Shadyac and a whole raft of writers, cannot entirely escape the curious blend of aspiration and sloppiness that marked the earlier film.

[Matlin] has an unusual talent for concentrating her emotions--and an audience's--in her signing. But there is something more here, an ironic intelligence, a fierce but not distancing wit, that the movies, with their famous ability to photograph thought, discover in very few performances. Children of a Lesser God, though given a handsome openness in Director Haines' production, cannot transcend the banalities of the play. But Matlin does. She is, one might say, a miracle worker.

For us dog saps, it is especially nice to see cuddlesomely real pooches instead of drawn ones doing smart-pet tricks.

Fetching little monument to the bard of rapturous bereavement.

It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.

This is primo Nicolas Cage dialogue, inquisitive and soul-deep, the kind of stuff he was born to say. To hear and watch him in this movie is like greeting an old friend. Pig seems to have come out of nowhere, but we’re lucky to have it.

This ambitious blend of live action and computer animation runs the risk of being overwhelming and sterile, but it turns out to be a pleasing and sweet-natured adventure thanks in large part to Spielberg’s big, friendly secret weapon: Mark Rylance, as the BFG himself.

She's (Jolie) got what no other Hollywood woman even tries for, and which is embodied among recent international stars perhaps only by Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh: feminismo.

With his charming, sympathetic picture The Lost King, Stephen Frears digs into the fairly recent rehabilitation of the misunderstood monarch’s legacy—as well as the 2012 discovery of his long-lost bones beneath a Leicester parking lot.

It’s Waititi’s ability to balance unassailably goofy moments with an acknowledgment of real-life horrors that makes the movie exceptional.

Writer-director Ramsay neither sentimentalizes nor garishes up the lost children in this observant and poetic drama.

Damon, beefed up for the occasion, makes Pienaar a stalwart yet courtly figure. Freeman infuses Mandela's speeches with the same gentleness and gravity he's brought to his numerous God roles and the Visa Olympics commercials. But the real deity here is Eastwood, still chugging away handsomely in his 80th year.

Niftily quirky.

Although Eggers is discreet – the things you don’t see are more horrifying than those you do – the picture’s relentlessness sometimes feels like torment. But if you can survive it, The Witch is a triumph of tone.

What's most captivating about Monster is that the camera never looks away and Metallica never hides.

Occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder.

It's a real and rare pleasure to see Costner and Duvall together -- these masters of intense passivity, who know how to be watched when they're listening.

And while more than 30 writers worked on the screenplay and untold numbers labored to re-create the ambiance and effects that the animators once tossed off with a few squiggles of their pencils, The Flintstones doesn't feel overcalculated, over-produced or overthought.

A genial, expertly played political comedy proves that the spirit of Mr. Smith still lives.

A raw, unblinking film. It teaches that in dire circumstances our only obligation is to our own survival; all else -- culture, ideology, even love -- is a dispensable luxury.

There’s poverty in every country, and in every country there are people yearning to do better for themselves. But The White Tiger—especially Gourav’s performance, marvelous in its intensity and shifting tones—captures that drive in a specific and persuasive way.

Isn't an audience that was nurtured on the doomsday screeds of art-house cinema entitled to vacation in the warmth of a superior film about a boy with almost too many people to love?

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.

Maybe they’re all right. Or wrong. It can’t be settled. What matters is that people are still crazy about the beauty of a beautiful movie about going crazy.

As reporters, they’re tireless. As moms, they’re tired. That’s what gives She Said its believable texture. That and the fact that, regardless of this story’s ultimately explosive impact, She Said is simply a story of journalists at work.

This is a comedy with grim underpinnings, set in a society where violence seems to be the only answer. Anderson doesn’t find that exhilarating—if anything, he’s despairing about it—yet he soldiers on, pinpointing some truths so somber and dismal that it hurts to laugh about them.

Little Children does not have quite the bleak discipline of Field's more keenly judged "In the Bedroom." Yet it is a more ambitious film and a considerable achievement.

Well-made fictions like Fatal Attraction prosper because they seem more persuasive than fact.

No kidding: this is the feel-good movie of the year and a cinematic soul massage.

As director, Farmiga is a strong believer in cinematic democracy, allowing the other actors to seize the center of the action and the frame.

There is something brave and original about piling up most of our worst parental nightmares in one movie and then daring to make a midsummer comedy out of them. It really shouldn't work, but it does. The movie does not linger too long over any moment or mood, and it permits characters to transcend type, offering a more surprising range of response to events. [7 August 1989, p.54]

Quite a good movie--a big, fat, rousing, intelligent, daring, retro, many-adjective-requiring entertainment.

The quick flow of comic incident through It Happened One Night reaches its fantastic conclusion...

Like its title -- blunt, thruthful, uncompromising. It is hard on an audience, even harrowing. But that's exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on earth to do.

After Yang invites us to think about big questions that might normally invite melancholy. Yet somehow, Kogonada pulls off the opposite effect. His movie makes us feel less alone, part of a network we can’t fully comprehend from our place on Earth.

Lingua Franca — which made a splash at the Venice Film Festival last year, the first film by a trans woman to be featured at the festival — is a gorgeous and delicate picture, an understated work that opens a window on an intimate world.

The picture is grand and nutty and visually splendid: Vogt-Roberts knows he's gotta go big or go home, so he treads boldly.

This remake hits the jackpot with Wasikowska (pronounced VashiKOVska) and, not far behind, Fassbender.

In Berger’s hands, it all works a treat, right up to the movie’s shockeroo surprise ending. Berger’s 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front won the Best International Feature Oscar, and he guides this film, too, with a sure and steady hand.

Director Chris Smith (Jim & Andy, American Movie) tends to let his subjects reveal themselves without distracting stylistic flourishes—an approach that’s ideally suited to the Fyre story.

In this vigorous, stalwart epic, they blend martial breadth and emotional intimacy, honor and obsession, romance and machismo to show the glamour and folly of war.

Flubber provides fuel for a very funny piece of hyperbolic humor in the grand American tradition of Paul Bunyan, and Director Robert (Kidnapped) Stevenson and Scriptwriter Bill (The Shaggy Dog) Walsh get plenty of bounce out of every ounce.

In his four earlier films, Williams seemed to need a warmup of two backward steps before he could take one step forward, but at least the movement was visible and real. This time, Adapter-Director Richard Brooks has been able to put very little motion in his motion picture. His Cat is a formaldehyded tabby that sits static while layer after layer of its skin is peeled off, life after life of its nine lives unsentimentally destroyed. But in Williams, Brooks has a rare playwright who can make his static electric, and a blinkered grope toward the past as suspenseful as a headlong crash into the future.

That’s the magic of Leigh; it’s white magic, not the dark kind, drawing out compassion we almost don’t want to feel.

Its major sin--a certain ineluctable improbability--is pretty much offset by the moments of winsome humanity Gibson finds for his freebooter; by the rich, nicely tuned portrayals of the other actors; and by director Ron Howard's smoothly professional mastery of yet another genre that is new to him.

Personal Shopper is a strange and beautifully made film, and both star and director are clearly energized by their dual mission.

The picture breaks down awkwardly when it tries to express directly what it has already said better by implication. This generally occurs in earnest scenes between Elliott and his all too dense girlfriend. Dayle Haddon's inexperienced playing adds nothing even faintly convincing to the badly written love interest, and the rest of the film has to struggle to recover from the resulting dead spots. Still, North Dallas Forty retains enough of the original novel's authenticity to deliver strong, if brutish, entertainment.

It's a bright, engaging bauble with half a dozen Elvis Presley songs for Mom and Dad, and just enough sass -- Stitch sticks his tongue into his nose and eats his snot -- to keep the tweeners giggling.

It may be the first film in history that starts at the top, goes steadily downhill, and still stays interesting along the way.

Apt to leave a haunting impression on the children who see it.

A wry and moving look at a time in life that tends to get short shrift in U.S. cinema.

All lives are made of shadow and light, and The Times of Bill Cunningham acknowledges that. But through it all, spending time in Cunningham’s presence is bliss.

Jaden may have to carry the burden of family celebrity, even as he carries his new film. Expertly.

It’s effective in a somber way, and as shot by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, it’s dazzling to look at, a reinvention of classic literature of the old west with a storybook feel.

Writer Shane Black mines his thriller premise while musing on issues of identity and redemption; he also shaped the itchy camaraderie of Davis and Jackson.

Spinning in that wedding dress, or glaring in wary repose, Lawrence catches fire on screen.

What he (Scott) does superbly is establish a raw, compelling reality that transcends his movie's banal premises and predictable conclusion. That permits Moore to play, and us to feel, authentic pain, isola- tion and courage--shocking stuff to find in an action movie these days. [25 August 1997, p. 72]

Pacino seems to recall, from his early Michael Corleone days, the power of whispered menace.

The result is an admittedly minor, but authentic, holiday treat.