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

The Green Pastures is the nearest thing there is to modern U. S. folk drama.

The film is a way-out, walleyed, wonderful exercise in cinema. It is also a social satire written in blood with a broadaxe.

It’s the kind of story that was made for the intimacy of the movie theater, and for the possibly lost tradition known as movie-date night. As ambitions go, that’s a pretty noble one.

It has many of A Separation’s strengths — the acute observation of complex characters in a story that keeps unpacking surprises — but they have become familiar. They lack the revelatory wallop of the first film.

The Coen brothers merrily subvert that standard caper trope.

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."

Here is a picture that has wit, a hairpin-turn narrative, high pizazz and ensemble star quality. Ready, set, Go.

Jolie Pitt, in her third film as a director, infuses her original screenplay with a sparseness reminiscent of Hemingway’s tales of mislaid love and Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinematic alienation. But By the Sea is its own lovely creation, deadly serious about how grief divides, conquers and possibly unites.

Even in its failures, Odd Man Out is admirable. It is a reckless, head-on attempt at greatness, and the attempt frequently succeeds.

Some moviegoers may opt for an easier cinematic pleasure than this carefully crafted, discomforting look at familial misery in hyper drive, but it is the most provocative movie about parenting I’ve seen since "The Kids Are All Right."

A lot of very good actors...do honest, probing work in a context where, typically, less will do.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

As the gags pile up remorselessly, and the viewer strains to keep up with the story line and the cutting subtext, a furious but benign apnea takes hold. You can't enjoy a good long laugh because you'll miss too much. It's the happiest form of internal injury.

It's got power and depth, and two kings whose greatness is diluted by hubris, and a thrilling dragon fight, and the demon Grendel as a tortured outcast, and a naked monster who looks a lot like Angelina Jolie.

To Have and Have Not is neither an action picture nor a Bogart picture. Its story is, in fact, just a loosely painted background for a kind of romance which the movies have all but forgotten about—the kind in which the derelict sweethearts are superficially aloof but essentially hot as blazes, and seem to do even their kissing out of the corners of their mouths.

The documentary is a riveting piece of work.

The chemistry this trio has is special; the premise of the sequel seems worn, but the way they work against and with each other is what provides the pleasure.

For all the film's murky misdirections, it is very enjoyable. That's because Nolan's recreation of the illusionists' backstage world is so marvelously detailed, including as it does revelations of how some of their best tricks are accomplished.

Red Rocket isn’t the warmest of Baker’s films; it has a flinty edge that makes it hard to embrace. But as movie characters go, Rex’s Mikey, a magnetic egomaniac, is an extraordinary creation.

Despite some rough edges and language, this is at heart a beguiling fantasy of comradeship.

For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too.

If the Unbroken needle stops at Impressive and doesn’t quite rise to Enthralling, it’s because Jolie stints on exploring the doubts that tortured Louis nearly as much as Watanabe’s punishments did, and whose details so enriched Hillenbrand’s biography.

Beyond the Hills may be the best movie no one will want to see in 2013.

To watch this movie’s actors, many of them playing versions of the men they used to be not so long ago—to see them incorporating classic pop-locking moves into their swordplay, or tinkering with the phrasing of Hamlet’s soliloquy until it rings true to their experience—is to witness a cautious but joyful reawakening.

Downton Abbey: A New Era goes down as easy as a Nice sunset.

A wry, openhearted, vaguely outré romantic comedy, albeit a bittersweet one.

The movie is lively and fun, without betraying the heavy undertones of some of its subject matter. It’s a reclamation, but a buoyant rather than somber one.

The Courier is almost two films in one: the second half is much darker and more intense than the first, but the shift is so delicately abrupt that at first you barely register it. That’s part of the movie’s edgily engaging artistry; what begins as a shadowy spy adventure ends in a place of mournful resignation.

Universal entrusted the direction of Frankenstein to James Whale. He did it in the Grand Guignol manner, with as many queer sounds, dark corners, false faces and cellar stairs as could possibly be inserted.

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention is a cure for nagging ethnic generalities. This Palestinian sort-of-comedy has a sly wit that amuses and disturbs in equal, salubrious measure.

The movie is an act of loony generosity we shouldn’t refuse. This is ludicrous entertainment for frazzled times.

As Bernal plays him, Cassandro is a hero for our dismal times, not just because he crashes through norms, but because he makes it look fun, even when it most certainly isn’t. This is a performance filled with truthful joy, and it floods this modestly scaled but open-hearted movie with light.

This is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn’t necessarily bad sex: if anything, it’s the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness.

Minari is a gentle, lovely picture, one that acknowledges there really is no “immigrant experience,” beyond the pure human experience of finding yourself adjusting to a new environment.

You could compare Armageddon Time to autobiographical reflections like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma or, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, both stories in which kids’ eyes are suddenly opened to the unfairness of the world. But for all its tenderness, this isn’t a movie that allows you to make peace with yourself, or with our highly imperfect world.

If anything, Whedon’s writing is almost too sharp. The characters are so finely drawn and verbally quick (they name-check Banksy and Eugene O’Neill) that they seem to belong to a different universe than the cartoonish one they find themselves in.

Fast, witty, glamorous, with thrill piling on giggle atop gasp. [11 June 1990, p.85]

The impact of this sisterhood fable on viewers should be as warm and rapturous as Olaf the snowman’s dream of summer. Child, teen or septuagenarian, you’ll warm to Frozen.

In No Bears, the 62-year-old Panahi shows nothing more than the normal effects of aging: his hair is grayer than before, the lines in his face perhaps slightly more pronounced. But this is hardly a broken man. He knows one thing for sure: defiance is the ultimate act of survival.

It must have been difficult for Schanberg to confront the record of his own blindness and powerlessness when he wrote the articles on which this movie is based. It must be nerve-racking for the producers to offer a tale so lacking in standard melodramatic satisfactions. But the result is worth it, for this is the clearest film statement yet on how the nature of heroism has changed in this totalitarian century.

Even on the chaste screen Hawks manages to get down a good deal of the glamorous tawdriness of big-city low life, discreetly laced with hints of dope addiction, voyeurism and fornication. A round dozen minor players help him out with great efficiency— not to mention Miss Bacall, who is like an adolescent cougar.

It also offers the fun of watching an eye-rolling, lip-twitching Robert Newton as he wallows outrageously through the role of Long John Silver, one of fiction's most ingratiating scoundrels. Disney apparently liked him well enough to let him steal the whole treasure (as well as the picture), instead of the single sack of coins that Stevenson let him get away with.

The Testament of Ann Lee is unimaginable with any other actress—but then again, it’s unimaginable, period, a movie that takes big chances in a culture that, most days, seems allergic to them.

Wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film.

The film doesn't scale Shakespearean heights, but it does give its star a nicely gnarled ogre to play.

The Freshman is no small thing. Well, actually, it is a small thing. But to a moviegoer deafened by and reeling from the rolling barrage laid down by the early summer's big box-office guns, the determined modesty, the unsprung affability of Andrew Bergman's comedy are precisely what make it treasurable.

John Wells's The Company Men is a juicy, judicious drama, and one of the few current movies to address an issue that affects many of the people who will see it - or, because reality is too depressing, avoid it.

Works as a sweetly loony ensemble piece, a sort of cracked romance that's typical of director Barry Levinson at his shrewd but unpretentious best.

McConaughey's fans might be shocked to see him in this role - more likely, they'd skip the opportunity - but they ought to give his performance a shot. The dimpled demon lover proves he can be just as seductive playing Texas's creepiest, craziest cop.

Spielberg has energized each frame with allusive legerdemain and an intelligent density of images and emotions.

It is intensely raunchy and silly and joyous and tapped right into my inner teenager in a glorious way.

By the end, the canniest viewers may not be fooled, but--and you can believe this--they may be mesmerized.

Everything that happens in Happy Feet Two is good-to-great.

It's an exercise in style by Robert Rodriguez and not to be taken any more (or less) seriously than his giddy "Spy Kids" movies.

The Eternal Daughter isn’t just a ghost story but a song, sung by a daughter to her mother across a small table at dinner, or across the space that remains when the people we love have left us.

The result is a lovely movie, one that allows its characters unexpected spurts of growth and regression, darkness and grace.

Bad 25 is an intimate view of a performer at his peak in the intense splendor of creativity.

The movie ends in a burst of violence that we are unprepared for and don't believe. Maybe it's the film's final joke. It's a miscalculation -- though a calculated one -- but it does not erase one's fond memories of all the odd, deeply humorous behavior that preceded it.

Visually the most ravishing and complex Pixar movie, Brave evokes memories of Walt Disney's early experiments with the multiplane camera, but with the more persuasive intricacies available to CGI artists.

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.

A ghost story, a bustling action-adventure and an example of the comedy tour-de-farce, in which the star validates his virtuosity by appearing in a plethora of funny disguises.

This is your basic, and very enjoyable, Disney princess musical, an empowerment tale to teach bright, dreamy girls how to grow to maturity - and outgrow the adults in charge.

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.

Respect honors the utilitarian nature of songwriting, and of making art in general. But the movie honors subtler elements of Franklin’s nature, too—as much as we can know of it—most notably her guardedness, born of necessity.

Blue Moon is both a modest movie and a dazzling, generous work.

The players are uniformly good, but a special word must be said for Fiennes, whose portrayal of physical awkwardness and painful taciturnity never begs either for laughs or for sympathy.

Stand By Me is a shuck. It trumpets its sensitivity while reveling in coarseness. And at its climax it suggests that manhood can be found through the barrel of a gun. Maybe this is how Rambo discovered puberty. Maybe real kids should be discouraged from following his example.

The picture returns the lately heavily dramatic Barbara Stanwyck to glamor, with 25 swank costume changes, and reveals homespun Henry Fonda, with a drawing room haircut and 14 sound tailoring jobs, as one of the screen's most socially eligible juveniles.

This high-IQ sermon is long but never lazy. Renouncing his tendency to make every movie take emotional flight, Spielberg sticks to the story as Kushner has artfully compressed it. Lincoln is brain food and, at another pivotal moment in American political history, an instructive feast.

Babel is a movie that leaves you feeling limp and wrung out, but mysteriously moved by its vivid human encounters with the hot, tightly wired, chancy and coincidental world, ever capable of terrorizing us when we least expect it.

Ambersons is not another Citizen Kane, but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the novice or one-picture-prodigy class.

An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.

A rich man, perpetually tiddly from drink, gets incompetent self into various muddles; unflappable gentleman's gentleman gets him out. It has always been an excellent joke, and Writer-Director Gordon has added a dash of sentiment to their relationship, trusting Sir John's expertise to keep things taut and tart, which he does admirably.

Rosenberg's treatment of evil, personified by the brutal prison guards, descends too often from portrayal to caricature. Still, there is enough left in the old theme to make Luke a prisoner of grace, and a picture of chilling dramatic power.

It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide.

The result is a laff riot. Well, all right, a laff scuffle -- a picture that isn't quite as funny as it might be, but is as funny as it needs to be.

The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.

These people are fools for heedless love and, perhaps, needless complication, and you can't help responding to the heat of their passion.

This is a movie that’s both entertainment and spiritual toolkit — take from it what you need.

McTiernan does not fall too much in love with any scene, character or gadget. He has judged his material (and our attention spans) very well. His alternation of menace and human interest, technological wizardry and action sequences is subtly calibrated, ultimately hypnotic in its effect. [5 Mar 1990, p.70]

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.

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.

The Thirty-Nine Steps neatly converts its essential implausibility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the predicament he is in.

Samantha Morton, as Emmet's "mute orphan half-wit" of a girlfriend, is the sweet revelation. Rarely has a performer mined such complex and potent emotion from such simple materials: a smile, a shrug, an attentive winsomeness.

This is no-holds-barred humor of the finest, grossest kind, centered around the theme of arrested development.

It will fascinate and possibly even delight cinephiles. Who does not enjoy gawking at accidents, particularly those in which there are no fatalities and the sad story unfolds in almost slow-motion clarity?

Faithful and bold adaptation.

This picture has a more melancholy, resonant edge. And as with "Beginners," there’s an extraordinary performance at its heart: Bening is terrific, getting at the way middle-aged loneliness and contentment can be so intermingled that it’s almost impossible to tell which is which.

This wee, discreet little movie has a certain rueful intelligence about the ways we rather carelessly talk ourselves into love--and out of it as well.

It is hard to imagine anyone, with the possible exception of preadolescent males, who will not, in the end turn on to Turning Point.

It’s a pleasure — both a delight to watch and a great piece of pop scholarship, an entertainment informed by a sense of history and of curiosity.

This isn't just a thrill ride; it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie.

This moving tribute to a handful of candles flickering in the darkness has the power to summon us--one prays--to our better selves.

No Sudden Move riffs on stereotypes of the 1950s, even as it suggests we haven’t come as far as we might think.

Everything finally came together under the sensitive directorial hand of, yes, Francis Coppola. The supporting cast is splendid. The film's occasional lapses never puncture the airy tone; they are easily forgiven, like Peggy Sue and her friends, whose only sin was to grow up. This prom-night balloon of a movie floats easily above the year's other exercises in '50s nostalgia. If you dare reach for it, it will land smartly in your heart.

But the most impressive thing is how, a few minutes into the film, you stop noticing Huffman's external transformations and start to focus on the character. Not that the external stuff isn't impressive.