This isn't a passionate, showy part, but it's a finely drawn performance, worthy of a veteran actress (Lane) who started her career as Secretariat did in the 1970s (in A Little Romance) and has since earned a champion status of her own.

With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

That metaphor is pitch-perfect, but the film works a little too hard at proving the vileness of beauty pageants.

It is a serious, often hilarious peek under the rock where nightmares strut in $800 suits and Armageddon lies around the next twist of treason.

In spite of its age and the fact that its 145-minute mass is sometimes dragging, Oklahoma! hollers itself home as a handsome piece of entertainment.

The film offers no message, no solutions, only a great time at the movies.

Alvin's tragic memories give perspective to the triumph of his trek, even as Farnsworth's weathered brilliance makes this movie a G as in gem.

Kevin Spacey (gives) a truly great performance.

The summer's zazziest action movie.

The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, with a loud and mighty Viking burp.

It’s all so silly. But it’s also kind of great, like a single glass of sparkling wine after a really bad day. And the light dancing off the brilliant blue sea isn’t so bad, either.

There has never been a movie musical quite like Tommy, a weird, crazy, wonderfully excessive version of The Who's rock opera.

What people want from Bill & Ted Face the Music matters a lot less than what it actually is, a crazy, imperfect but deeply gratifying burst of optimism at the end of what has been — inarguably — a terrible summer. Its ramshackle earnestness, its certainty about nothing beyond the fact that we need to get our act together as human beings, is its great strength.

Director Robert Aldrich gets convincingly raw, tough performances in even the smallest roles.

Besides rehabbing a hero who overcomes anxiety to save the world and defeat the terror-industrial complex by the simple matter of cloning his body armor, the movie proves that there’s still intelligent life on Planet Marvel. As you’re propelled out of the theater on IM3′s hydraulic lift of pleasures, you’re likely to say, “That is how it’s done.”

So even when they don’t achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens’ rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl.

A smart live-and-let-live parable.

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

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 Father is a horror movie with not a single supernatural element: All of its terrors are implied, drawn from the tricks the human mind plays on itself, even more so in old age.

In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning.

The actors, all terrific, serve as able guides through the material.

Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a much better film than its predecessor was, and much better than it needs to be overall.

Though it’s the townspeople who slowly fall victim to the epidemic, the white-suited, gas-masked military men are just as imposing as any movie virus.

Little Big League was a movie for kids that never talked down to its target audience. It gave equal weight to issues that could easily be expected under these unusual circumstances.

The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.

Like the provocative classics Dog Day Afternoon and Network, this is discomfiting entertainment–its edges are serrated, sharp enough to cut. The camera moves to just the right place every minute, and the editing is crisp. Moments of nearly unbearable tension are broken by bursts of energy and even humor.

It’s a true movie, with the taut pacing, satisfying conclusion and grand visual scale that distinction implies.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]

The picture delivers the high-octane, testosteronic goods of a warm-weather smash, and maybe the first great film of the post-human era. It's just a shame that every theater showing this nonstop auto race, this animated car-toon, can't be a drive-in.

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.

The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons.

There is some elemental human desire -- lately largely denied at the cinema -- to see pretty people in handsome landscapes assuaging our need for epic romance. On that level, Australia delivers with real panache.

Has so much razzle-dazzle that viewers may end up both raised and dazed. It's remorselessly inventive, trying anything fast and sassy to keep you watching. In other words, it's the most honest display of showpeople's need to be noticed this side of a Madonna concert.

Directed by England's pudgy master of melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock, Secret Agent is a first-rate sample of his knack of achieving speed by never hurrying, horror by concentrating on the prosaic.

It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth.

Gives its fine actors room to breathe and behave--and in Michelle Rodriguez's case, glow.

From its first shot, of a mangled car high up in the branches of a tree, this cool, handsome thriller proceeds with an elliptical elegance.

If The Equalizer is the hit it should be, it will give this veteran action star his very first movie franchise. In the sequel, Denzel-McCall could make things right in Ukraine as Obama’s Secretary of Defense and one-man army.

The movie can be flat-out fun, a sort of carnival of combat that can turn even a sophisticated audience into a group of gawking kids at a Saturday matinee.

A fanciful film with the patina of hyper-realism, Looper is well served by actors who behave not as if they were dropped carelessly into the future but spent their whole desperate lives there.

The movie has its political-parable aspect, with malevolent forces convincing both the 1% and the 99% that they have reasons to fear the other. But The Boxtrolls is mainly a delight for the sharp eye and the capricious mind.

This is an ambitious, handsome-looking picture that strives to capture the essence of life in the deep South in the mid-20th century in a way that makes movie sense, without excessively romanticizing it.

The movie made me laugh as much as anything since "The Hangover" or the love scenes in "Avatar."

This is a movie about the way resilience can blossom from vulnerability. No child asks to be a victim of war; sometimes survival, with your soul intact, is the best possible outcome.

An exhilarating ride, start to finish. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg set a high bar for this subgenre with "Shaun of the Dead," but Reese, Werner and Fleischer may have trumped them. This isn't just a good zombie comedy. It's a damn fine movie, period. And that's high praise, coming from a vampire guy.

The King, written by Michôd and Edgerton, zips along—it never feels like a slog, though it still has a satisfyingly hefty dramatic weight.

As much a dark, odd couple comedy as it is a quirky, efficient little thriller.

A spirited, irreverent and hugely fun comedy.

The atmosphere which Director von Sternberg cleverly built up through the slow beginning of the picture and the brilliant photographic effects achieved by his camera man, Lee Garmes, have effect of giving this melodramatic cliché a reality which it could not possibly achieve in a medium less persuasive than the cinema.

Fincher seems to be having a great deal of fun with The Killer. Though he takes it seriously as a piece of action craftsmanship, there’s nothing overserious about it.

The joy of Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is that these two haven’t gotten the memo.

Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. It could all be a little too hushed and antiseptic—but Hüller’s performance gives the movie the vitality it needs.

If Kaluuya is the backbone of Judas and the Black Messiah, Stanfield is its agonized soul. William O’Neal wrote his own tragedy, and Stanfield breathes life into it here, a confused, twisting spirit forever trapped in a hell of its own making.

The film dances; the heart sings.

Future III is all smiles, nostalgically respectful of the western genre, serenely sure of the strength of its own more immediate heritage and of our affection for it.

This Pooh, which takes its gossamer plotlines directly from A.A. Milne, will be a boon to parents of very small children everywhere.

It is propaganda, or was once, but it is so well done that it is chiefly propaganda for the human race.

Even if you’ve never had the pleasure of eating in an Automat, Hurwitz brings the experience to life.

For all its japes and jokes, the movie is really about exhaustion of the spirit: sitting in a bleak hotel suite at 4 a.m. with the bad taste of last night in the mouth and the feeling that tomorrow will not be a better day.

Johnson and her father share a sense of humor, and the bond between them informs the finest moments of Dick Johnson Is Dead. Yet I can’t stop thinking about the friend crying, alone, in the church, so verklempt he forgot he was in a movie — one place where this documentary’s joyful dark humor isn’t as amusing as it should be.

At the center of this clever pinwheel of a story—Moore co-wrote the script with Johnathan McClain—is Rylance, whose economy of motion and emotion is a marvel.

There is something arresting about it too. The damned thing keeps gnawing at your mind -- if only for its almost perfect lack of conventional sentiment. Or movieness.

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.

This one starts at the level of lunacy and keeps on escalating. Next to Filth, "Trainspotting" looks as sedate as "The Polar Express."

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.

The director and his splendid cast assure that this tale about a strong little girl fighting to keep her family alive and together has both high art and a big heart, audience appeal and gut impact.

The fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing Eddie’s curled lip of contempt, which he flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his.

It is, of course, always a pleasure to watch Martin's steam-gauge face register his rising internal pressures and to witness his exquisitely expressed blowoffs. But Candy offers even more insinuating delights. Covering lonely need with empty gab, insecurity with a not entirely trustworthy savvy, he is the most dangerous kind of pest, the type who worms rather than blusters his way into your life.

Layer Cake is a treat--especially if your taste in desserts is devil's food.

We have this movie--full of acceptant, sidelong glances at human quirkiness--to delight us.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

It’s LaBeouf’s performance as his father that haunts the movie. He’s hateful, but even within the context of this upbringing-as-horror-show, LaBeouf locates crystalline reflections of the better man his father might have been. His performance both exorcises a demon and makes peace with it, which may be a better gift than his father deserves. But then, it’s the giving that counts.

The beauty of Brett Morgen’s velvet-and-facepaint collage Moonage Daydream is that it doesn’t try to be definitive. Instead, it’s a glide through Bowie’s career, hardly complete yet somehow capturing both the spirit and the genius of this most enigmatic and alluring artist.

The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call pep.

It has the wiggy energy of a workplace that might sometimes drive you crazy, but is never boring. This is a great workplace comedy about the ways in which people who seem to be holding you back can also, sometimes, be the ones pushing you forward. Crawling under your desk gets you nowhere. It also means you miss all the fun.

These characters don’t always behave as we want them to; they feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

Cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny.

Realistically, it’s probably not possible to dance your cares away. But the determination of these girls makes you believe in it.

Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable.

At two hours, the film version is a third the miniseries' length, requiring severe compression by screenwriters Peter Straughan (The Debt) and Bridget O'Connor, which they've accomplished smartly.

If Stigter’s film is at times somber, it’s more often ruefully poetic.

Love Excalibur or hate it, but give Boorman credit for the loopy grandeur of his imagery and imaginings, for the sweet smell of excess, for his heroic gamble that a movie can dare to trip over its pretensions— and still fly.

Gadot is simply marvelous. Physically, she’s bold and commanding. But there’s a sweetness about her too, as if she and Jenkins understand intuitively that Wonder Woman can’t just be blandly awesome. She's got to be able to feel wonder too.

There’s nothing jarring or upsetting about Marcel the Shell With Shoes On; it deals very gently with the realities of death and loss. But its quiet tenderness feels expansive regardless, proof that good things really do come in small exoskeletons.

Black Bag succeeds on its chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars. Blanchett strides through the movie with lioness grace; Fassbender makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac.

Boldly entertaining.

The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton.

Without insulting modern Africa, Naked Prey writes the wild poetry of its past in raw colors.

Marvin's Room, the 1991 Scott McPherson play, filmed by Jerry Zaks, is an old-fashioned weepie of noble mien with many bright moments and a superb cast.

The Wave, with the exception of a few overwrought moments, is low on sadism and high on humbling. We’re all at the mercy of nature’s power. It’s the Whatever we can never outrun.

Like Space Odyssey itself, the ambiguous ending is at once appropriate and wrong. It guarantees that the film will arouse controversy, but it leaves doubt that the film makers themselves knew precisely what they were flying at. Still, no film to date has come remotely near Odyssey's depiction of the limitless beauty and terror of outer space. In this 2-hr. 40-min. movie, only 47 minutes are taken up with dialogue. The rest of the time is occupied with demanding, brilliant material for the eye and brain. Thus, though it may fail as drama, the movie succeeds as visual art and becomes another irritating, dazzling achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of the most erratic and original talents in U.S. cinema.

School Life is a bit woolly in its pacing, but the picture’s easygoing structure is part of its charm—it mimics, perhaps, the passage of time at Headfort itself.

This very patient film reaches out and unshakably grips us.

Enigma is not for everyone, but the thoughtful (and the historically minded) will find it an absorbing and extremely well-textured experience.

A good-neighborly, Technicolor whimsey that has made Walt Disney one of South America's favorite North Americans.

It feels as if it has been recovered from a time capsule, and what larger meaning it may have is anyone's guess. But it is way cool -- and funny -- in ways that more expensive comedies trying harder rarely are.