With Half-Blood Prince, again we have a stalwart, satisfying visualization of the Rowling cosmos.

There are enough under-the-radar subtleties, rendered with a refreshing lack of smart-aleckiness, to make Zootopia feel current and fresh. It’s a modest, unassuming entertainment that’s motored by a sly sensibility.

Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving.

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.

The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere. Second, it is executed with panache and utter conviction.

Though the film rarely ventures out of the single indoor set that housed Sidney Kingsley's 1949 Broadway hit, Detective Story makes an even better movie than a play.

The poise and passion in Eve's Bayou leave one grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.

Dickinson is superb at tracing that veiled anguish, and Hittman--who wrote and directed the 2013 film It Felt Like Love--is a discreet and sympathetic guide to his fractured world.

The fable of four Englishwomen on a Portofino holiday gives moviegoers a vacation in rapture.

In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.

A hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson ...would like it to be.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.

The grand scale of this Frankenstein is unavoidable; what it’s lacking is intimacy.

The most of-the-moment movie on the landscape right now — it may end up being the most politically and culturally relevant movie of the year. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s far from perfect.

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]

Mendes has made a film that feels wholly alive. It’s a carefully polished picture, not one that strives for gritty realism. But its inherent devotion to life and beauty is part of its power.

Delightful and visually splendid.

The Substance is distinctive less for its nutso, over-the-top gore than for a single scene midway through the film that exposes a different kind of body horror—or, more specifically, the way insecurity can be its own kind of horror.

The fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.

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

Independently financed and distributed by Soderbergh, Logan Lucky is a magnificent movie that comes disguised as a modest one. Or, as I like to call it, a Joe Bang.

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

Denis’s movies can be imaginative and poetic; sometimes they’re unflinchingly brutal. High Life, her first English-language picture, is all of those things, a work of great beauty that’s also at times difficult to watch.

Even if a Chinese movie doesn't sound like your idea of summer fun, give 2046 a chance. Its pearly artistry and gorgeous faces should put you quickly, deeply, in the mood for love.

Moviemaking doesn't get much smarter, funnier, handsomer, better than this.

The result is that rare Hollywood achievement, an adventure of the intelligent spirit. From lift-off to splashdown, Apollo 13 gives one hell of a ride. [3 July 1995]

Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield may not be perfect, but it is alive, at least partly because of its perceptive, jaunty casting and fine performances.

What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. [28 Oct 1991]

Despite its star's heroic efforts, The Aviator is a gorgeous jet, flying on automatic pilot.

When you look at the faces of the elderly Donahue and Henschel, even at their most frail, the young women within shine through. It’s enraging that society made them feel they had to hide. But their happiness is the ultimate triumph.

Till is an affirmation of just how much Emmett Till’s life mattered, and continues to matter long beyond his last breath.

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

Because Nope, enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place. Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones.

Rescue Dawn is a tale of heroism untainted by political skepticism. In an age when U.S. soldiers are seen as villains or victims, the movie offers a GI who bravely, or madly, simply refuses to die.

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

Indeed, viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock.

It's beautifully photographed and explained at every stage from market to table, a foodie's dream night at the movies. The gentle shaping of the fish and sushi could lull you into a trance. A hungry trance.

It is very fussy about period detail, and goes to some length to evoke the dim days of Depression America, while just about everything else is left to slide.

The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from.

At times the joints in the movie's carpentry are strained, at times the mood swings jarring. [16 Oct 1989, p. 82]

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.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a rare movie that finds its tone, its focus and its poetry in its very first image.

See Hairspray. It's light and airy, but it will stick around: the first aerosol movie. [29 Feb 1988, p.101]

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

There's something old-fashioned and dauntless about the way the film pushes past our initial resistance to its setting and subject matter, past pain, past defeat, to make this point. Because it rejects easy victories, this may be one of the few inspirational movies that could actually inspire someone, somewhere, sometime.

We should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required -- think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," and of course, "Chinatown."

Somehow this Jungle Book works, because Favreau has both a sense of humor and a sense of spectacle.

A seemingly straightforward story about an addict barely holding his life together on the streets of London, Urchin is effective because of all the things it doesn’t do: there are no grand revelations, no horrific bottoming-out or OD moments. We’re simply left alone with an addict and his feelings—or, occasionally, his seeming lack of them.

This is a bold, drastic and utterly persuasive inhabiting of a doomed fighter by a performer who has graduated from the shirtless rom-com Romeo of the last decade to indie-film actor du jour.

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.

This is a modest, clear sighted film, and it profits considerably from a lack of the bravura landscape photography that most directors would have used to puff up a movie set in Australia.

This may be hard ground for the audience that loves to cheer the lump out of its throat at the end of a movie. But for actors, it is the high ground. There is a ferocity in Cruise's flakiness that he has not previously had a chance to tap. That, in turn, gives Newman something to grapple with. There is a sort of contained rage in his work that he has never found before, and it carries him beyond the bounds of image, the movie beyond the bounds of genre.

The Harder They Come is always exuberant, and sometimes strong, as casually surprising and effortlessly sinister as the blade sliding out of a gravity knife.

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.

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.

Presence follows you home, long after the camera has stopped rolling.

Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur.

Don't ask us why this minimalist drama won prizes last year at Cannes or why it is getting raves in its U.S. release.

Nunez's film neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a bee. It just drones on.

Body Heat is full of meaty characters and pungent performances...a film to be seen at a drive-in, on a heavy summer night, with someone you trust.

This is a complex and sophisticated picture, the kind of grown-up love story we see all too rarely these days, especially when it comes to starry, big-ticket moviemaking. It’s entertaining and robust and forthright; it’s also tremendously sad, not necessarily in a bring-your-hanky way, but in a deeper, more truthful way.

Altogether wondrous.

Gosling is such a human, and humane, actor, that he can easily mirror the humanity of a creature who’s not even human—one who doesn’t even have a face. Together, these two are unbeatable, and they also represent an old-fashioned ideal of what the movies used to mean to us.

This is a horror movie with a soul. It’s less ambitious and aggressively complicated than, say, Ari Aster’s "Hereditary" — another movie about the sometimes-unnerving complexity of parent-child bonds — but it’s also, in the end, more thoughtful.

A melodramatic hodge-podge that lacks the vivid outlines and clear characterizations of previous Hitchcock films, but is, nevertheless, a fair sample of Hitchcock devices.

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

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.

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.

He's (Wilson) a terrific sidekick to Chan's funny, earnest, often victimized righteousness. This kid could be a star.

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.

Without Duvall's rich, supremely skilled performance, this slim period piece wouldn't amount to much.

The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

A well-intentioned picture, it’s also a flawed one. This is filmmaking that sets out to make its points but fails, in big ways and small ones, to forge an emotional connection with most of its characters.

The Edge of Seventeen is particularly perceptive in how it deals with teenage sex—maybe even with sex in general.

The picture is mostly tedious and unpleasant, which is a shame for the sake of the performers. Jackman works hard here, and his performance does away with vanity altogether.

This is an ambitious picture, filled with grand ideas. Parts of it are wondrously beautiful; some sections are so mawkishly morbid they might make you groan. But at least you won’t be bored.

The sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice -- snappy dialogue, wacky situations -- but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another.

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

A movie that manages to be atmospherically rich while also satisfying the slash-crash imperatives of the police-action genre.

Anthony—whose previous documentary, Rat Film, traced the history of Baltimore via the city’s relationship to its rodent residents—has fashioned a thoughtful, if sometimes frustrating, meditation on the acts of “seeing” and “interpreting,” particularly as they apply to law enforcement and the criminal-justice system.

The purity of Dequenne's performance inspires awe.

Fast, bold, harsh and primitive, like a prodigious student film with equal parts promise and threat.

It’s also hugely entertaining and joyously profane, a movie whose spirit is so big the screen can barely contain it.

It’s a bit of a botch.

It's best to see this as a drug buffet. Graze through the vignettes... and you'll find three or four tasty bits to snack on.

Like Harry and Sally, the movie is hardworking, spot on; it winepresses its conversation into epigrams. No surprise here.[31 July 1999, p.65]

Emma Bolger is -- no other word for it -- magical in the role...In her way she encapsulates In America's virtues. It's a realistic movie, but one that's always aware that transformative hope may be just around the corner.

Together, Kreutzer and Krieps explore the idea of female loneliness, a state that isn’t necessarily caused by men, but one that even so shuts them out of a woman’s world.

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

Remarkable. [22 July 1991]

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.

Who says remakes are always inferior to the original film? And who says the western is dead? Especially when a movie is as entertaining as this one, you begin to think this formerly beloved genre is due for a revival.

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

Meticulously and sensitively made, though its best moments may be the lovely but intense watercolor-toned interstitial animated sequences that illustrate the monster’s thorny spiritual allegories, cartoons for grownups rather than for little ones.

Buck has the air of a beautiful little mystery; even knowing the uplifting outcome, you wonder at the strength that brought him to this place.

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.

Not a conventionally satisfying movie but a kind of illustrated journalism: an engrossing, insider's tour of the world's hottest spots, grandest schemes and most dangerous men.

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.