The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me."

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is 2 hours and 48 minutes of an irresistibly shiny, shimmering Taylor Swift. She’s the lure skimming through the water; we’re the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence. All that for less than 20 bucks.

Peter Hujar’s Day captures that elusive feeling of the past catching up with the present, in a city alive with whispering ghosts.

Upon all these folks, writer-director David O. Russell turns a bland, almost anthropological eye. Nothing surprises him and nothing outrages him, except for bed-and-breakfast lodgings, about which, at last, his movie tells the terrible truth. [1 April 1996, p. 72]

This is a survival manual turned into an existential prison-break movie; it cuts deep and, at its ecstatic climax, soars high.

Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality).

I wish I found The Illusionist as pleasing to sit through (twice) as to write about. I'm glad there's a "new" "Tati" film to add to his small, important body of work, yet I wish that the creator of "The Triplets of Belleville" had made a true Chomet film instead. I'll be waiting for that, with a hope to be found nowhere in this handsome, airless movie.

The movie is a museum of emotions, brought to contemporary life through the director's artistry and his leading lady's fire. Here, they show us, is how people felt, and hurt, in another time. Their love and pain can touch us today.

[Darabont] makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it.

So much of Vortex is stirring, compelling, upsetting. But a greater share is merely numbing in its depressive showiness.

Comic, suspenseful, romantic.

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.

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]

Two of Us keeps you guessing where it’s headed until the very end. But it’s not giving too much away to say that it’s about the unconscious dance steps a person takes as she moves toward the person she calls home.

Watching Street Gang is a largely joyous experience, but there’s also something heartbreaking about it.

It turns a hot topic into a pretty cool entertainment--one that satisfies the viewers' need for righteous revenge while leaving them a queasy little question on the way out: Does gun diplomacy make sense only in movies? Or do Americans want it to play out in real life?

In many ways the new film is a better film than Star Wars, visually more exciting, more artful and meticulous in detail. As a special effects wizard, Lucas fairly dazzles the eye with his optical magic.

Somehow, it works, thanks largely to Farrell.

It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop-social memory.

The film's both mental and experimental, more melodious than Yentl and at heart as soft and gentle as a Christmas kiss.

In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience.

Intellectually austere but technologically and aesthetically riveting documentary.

The Squid and the Whale is domestic tragedy recollected as comedy: a film whose catalog of deceits and embarrassments, and of love pratfalling over itself, makes it as (excruciatingly) painful as it is (exhilaratingly) funny.

Three of the hippest indie film princes make a perfect commercial comedy.

It's a real family film, relatively light on the violence and funny without being overly crude; it even has some touching moments.

If A Quiet Place has one flaw, it’s that it never lets up. There’s little breathing space between its breathtaking moments. Even so, Krasinski has made one of the most poetic horror movies of recent years.

Going into C’mon C’mon, you may think you know exactly what it’s going to be. Coming out, you’ll probably see that you were mostly right, but that you also got a million little firefly flashes of feeling you weren’t expecting. And that right there is the Mike Mills touch.

The perfect e-ticket for a flight of fancy into a world far more gorgeous than our own. The film doesn't halve itself to appeal to two generations. At its best, it turns all moviegoers into innocent kids, slack-jawed with wonder.