This gripping documentary doesn't exactly say what went wrong, but the pain and puzzlement of its principals as things inexorably fall apart is palpable and saddening.

Seems to encompass all the humor, sadness and weirdness of ordinary life in an utterly winning, morally acute way.

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

What a pleasure it is not to be hectored by a director as we laugh our own little laughs, watching a profound story unfold.

Dial M is starred with fine scenes and good performances. Though played as contemporary melodrama, it somehow manages to reflect the gaslight magic of turn-of-the-century London.

Results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.

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.

After that kick-ass opening, the picture devolves into an action-action-plot-action-plot-action monotone.

In the way of most Apatow films, Trainwreck is a little too long, a little too shaggy and a little too conservative in insisting that all’s square in love and war.

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.

We know relatively little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction—paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been.

Origin works as a visual summation of Wilkerson’s ideas. But it’s also a movie about a woman striving to bring her ideas to the world, even in the midst of her own personal crisis. The life we plan and hope for is rarely the life we get. Origin is an exhortation to use every heartbeat wisely.

The picture is precise, potent, and ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the United States government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling anything out in detail, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about.

Okja takes the worst impulses of Walt Disney, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton and Michael Moore and rolls them into one movie.

Maurice (pronounced Morris) is all high-mindedness and good taste. It has no emotional tension or - heaven forfend - strong expression of frustration or need.

Titane only makes you think it’s revving you up—until you realize there’s nothing going on beneath the hood.

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.

What Kelly Gang lacks in historical accuracy it makes up for with brash punk energy.

It appears to be a true reflection of her (Shelly) spirit -- eccentric, good-naturedly feminist, kind of funny and kind of sentimental. Despite its realistic setting in a small Southern town, it is much more a fable than it is a slice of authentic life.

It is in the transcendent strength of Joanne Woodward that the film achieves a classic stature. There is no gesture too minor for her to master.

Most films today are afraid to try anything new. Natural Born Killers is an explosive device for the sleepy movie audience, a wake-up call in the form of a frag bomb. [29 August 1994, p.66]

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

As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko.

Plays like a vacation at a seedy seaside resort. The issue at hand - whether McKinney engaged in criminal behavior with Anderson - is of little moment; what's important is the personality of the lady in question.

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."

Frankenweenie has that youthful verve and the ghoulishness of strange kids who will some day be eccentric creators. This movie is an attic experiment for its makers to be proud of and for audiences to cherish.

It takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.

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.

Bottoms, though it presents itself as a sort of sideways heir to comedies like Heathers and But I’m a Cheerleader, simply runs its jokes into the ground.

Adam Yauch, known as MCA, was both the founder of the group and guy whose vision helped hold it together for more than 20 years; he died in 2012, from parotid cancer, and though he’s present in spirit in Beastie Boys Story, you can’t help feeling that the whole thing would be a lot more fun, and smarter, if he were around.

Both horrifying and hopeful.

For its first hour or so, this upscale heart tugger motors along familiar trails. So ennobling -- and predictable -- in director Penny Marshall's fidgety rendering of a case study by Oliver Sacks. [24 Dec 1990, p.77]

My Old Ass is a bit crazy. It’s also winning, in the gentlest, sweetest way.

The movie may not soar like Aladdin or roar like The Lion King, and it demands plenty of parental guidance; but it fulfills the Disney animators' dream.

I’d argue that the Jackass movies, including this one, are mostly filled with joy.

Inception is precisely the kind of brainy, ambitious, grand-scale adventure Hollywood should be making more of.

The 80 minutes it spends on the atoll alone with Hanks make for engrossing storytelling. The film is less sure-footed back in civilization.

Bones and All is fastidiously romantic. It’s so carefully made, and so lovely to look at, even at its grisliest, that it ends up seeming a little remote, rather than a movie that draws you close.

Villeneuve lays it out before us without smirking or winking; his go-for-broke earnestness feels honest and clean. And the effects, while lavish, also have a tasteful, polished quality.

There's a great story here, but Tucci's literate, civilized, wistful movie lacks savage impulse and refuses to show how mutual exploitation led to minor tragedy.

Doesn't offer much.

The pulse of Curtis Hanson's direction is lethargic; the comic bits are so slack and deadpan you could mistake the film for an earnest drama--an Afterschool Special for troubled kids and their pooped parents.

A documentary as vivid as any horror film, as heartbreaking as any Oscar-worthy drama.

It’s sweet and funny, but also, in places, as raw as a scraped knee.

An expert, sensitive study of the fateful tie that inevitably binds the strong to the weak, this film may well be the best western of 1960.

This is rapture in pictures. [22 December 1997, p. 81]

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

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.

For all the ways in which Plan B is sometimes thunderously obvious, there’s still a lot going on beneath the surface.

Disobedience, based on a novel by Naomi Alderman, cuts deeper than your standard forbidden-love story, largely because the actors are so attuned to their characters’ anguish.

An excellent film. [16 Jan 1989, p.64]

The film is one-note; misery is the only game in town.

The actor (Puri) and the film make something fine, winning and memorable.

The real battle here is between two generations of acting styles: meticulous method vs. star quality.

Hidden Figures, both a dazzling piece of entertainment and a window into history, bucks the trend of the boring-math-guy movie.

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

Suspicion (RKO Radio) is good Alfred Hitchcock—up to the last few minutes. In those final minutes the picture falls apart at the seams.

It's rare to see an ensemble movie like this, so loaded with talented actors, in which virtually all of them get an opportunity to make an impression. Affleck is the boss and the star, but he knows how to share.

Transcending Holo-kitsch, In Darkness is often a thrilling adventure picture - as if Anne Frank had found an "Inglourious Basterd" to help her make "The Great Escape."

The scariest romantic comedy of the year.

Unsparing but never unsympathetic, emerges as one of the year's best, most brutally honest movies.

Its easygoing structure may also be what makes it feel so intimate. Davis and Einhorn — both of whom are New York Times reporters — don’t have to spell out codes of masculinity, familial duty and love for one’s country. Instead, we’re allowed to bear witness as Eisch and his family show us what those values mean to them.

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

It provides intimate glimpses of people usually seen, and then only briefly, as faces on a post-office wall or numbers in a cemetery.

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.

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

Ward Serrill's feel-good doc, which covers seven years in the life of Resler's Roughriders, is hobbled by a narration so syrupy, it could be poured on pancakes. But the movie soars because of the sport's natural drama and its luck in finding a complex heroine.

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

The better class of moviegoers will love Billy Elliot. And I loved hating it.

Muppet magic remains a bewildering succession of wonderful bits.

An uneven doubleheader by Walt Disney, who has combined into one film two dissimilar literary classics: Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The contrast in the handling of the two unrelated stories neatly illustrates some of Disney's outstanding vices & virtues.

The new picture provides a master coursed in cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment.

The two leads, Wu and Golding, are charming and genuine, and the supporting performers around them keep the whole mad story spinning—this thing is never boring.

This is a movie of gentle but resonant pleasures; it slows the world down, a little, for the span of time you’re watching it. And couldn’t we all use a little of that these days?

Sixty years after Snow White, Hercules proves that Walt's art form is still sassy and snazzy.

This movie does not fully separate itself from our admittedly low -- even slightly shameful -- expectations, does not become the pure documentary it might perhaps better have been.

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.

A witty comedy of manners that arcs into poignance, this is a Christmas movie only a Grinch could hate... One of the brightest, bittersweetest fables of this or any-year. [10 Dec 1990, p.87]

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

Sin City is brazenly, thrillingly alive.

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.

Take this Shower and feel refreshed; it's a cool dip on a hot day.

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

It is a tremendous downer when the second half of the movie shirks logic, defies its own established principles and raises more questions than it answers.

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.

Directed by the enormously talented New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, it’s well intentioned but ultimately numbing, an instance of fun overkill whose ultimate goal seems to be to put us into a special-effects coma.

Has a whirligig wit, and 11 songs crammed into its 67 minutes: that's more melodic content than in most Broadway musicals.

This is what Arnold is so great at capturing: people just doing their best, which often means they surpass every expectation without even knowing it. Her generosity toward her characters is also generosity toward us. She hands us nothing, even as she gives us everything.

In this movie version, directed by Robert Wise, the specter is slightly censored—what's left is just the usual commercial spirit. Whenever it appears, the violins on the sound track start to didder, doors open and shut by themselves, people stare about in terror and squeak: The house, it's alive! The picture, it's dead.

Queen & Slim is a movie made of equal parts sorrow and glamour, all tempered by the grim reality that during the course of their odyssey Queen and Slim do some things they’re not proud of.

Here's another warning: you may laugh yourself sick--as sick as this ruthlessly funny movie is.

Boyle's ingenuity with the camera gives this fraught journey plenty of menace and pizazz.

Japanese Story is a simple, austerely told tale. But there is something memorable, even haunting, about it.

With his round, ruddy face, Tighe always seems on the verge of derisive laughter or flash-fisted rage; it's enjoyable guessing which fever will surface first. The rest of the movie is less entertaining, a righteous homily without the grits.

Martin, who wrote the pretty-funny, too-soppy script, means to drink from the river this time. He wants it all: laughs, tears, low comedy, uplift. It doesn't quite happen, partly because the movie begs for poignance like an orphaned puppy, partly because modern plastic surgery makes the plot anachronistic, partly because, even with his Cyranose, C.D. is a darned sight more attractive than his beefy rival. Aaaahh, who cares, as long as Steve Martin gets a chance to strut his physical grace, wrap his mouth around clever dialogue, clamber up to rooftops like a Tarzan of the Northwest, give new life to the old-fashioned nobility of the love letter, and drink wine through his nose?

There’s no tortured drama, no grand revelation. The movie is funny in the gentlest way, and how could it not be? Coppola’s script is built around Murray’s deadpan savoir faire, with Jones’ forthright radiance as a foil.

The film is a lavish, linear, way-too-long (3 hr. 21 min.) storybook of Malcolm's career, the movie equivalent of an authorized biography, a cautious primer for black pride.

I think the central mistake of this film derives from its lack of irony, a sense it refuses to impart that the world may not be exactly as the zealous Christopher perceives it to be. The film needs at least to entertain the possibility that its protagonist was driven less by high principle than by lamentable screwiness. And we need to leave it carrying some sense of tragic consequence with us. Instead, we're simply glad to be finished, at last, with this annoying man-child.