It’s the kind of movie that miraculously makes you feel better about everything.

It is pristinely acted; and its range and heart dwarf other summer films, so cogent is it about our common aches and dreams.

[Murray] has the natural actor's charm of making manners matter. He carries Groundhog Day with his uniquely frittery nonchalance and makes the movie a comic time warp anyone should be happy to get stuck in. [15 Feb 1993, p.63]

It’s all just Dwayne Johnson getting the job done. There ain’t no mountain, nor skyscraper, high enough for him.

The wonder of Kelly Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Are You There God? isn’t just that it deals directly, and without condescension, with the vagaries of preteen awkwardness. It’s that it speaks so ardently to the adolescent in all of us—particularly, maybe, women who are going through menopause or already on the far side of it, an event that in some ways returns us to a lunar landscape whose contours we’d forgotten.

With his fifth movie as 007, Craig is so extraordinary he leaves only scorched earth behind. There will be other Bonds for those who want them. For everyone else, there’s Craig.

Cheers for a Cannes director who has infused his technical mastery with radiant life. In the Museum of the World of Wes Anderson, the dolls are dancing.

Cleo from 5 to 7, acclaimed in France as "the most beautiful film ever made about Paris," is a curiously, spuriously brilliant attempt to contemporize the legend of Death and the Maiden.

Much of the movie is bitterly funny; some of it just amusingly droll. But the finale, a rallying cry that’s both galvanizing and wistful, is a wrap-up worth waiting for.

Elegant and understated.

Gremlins has enough style and savvy to stand on its own as the summer's most original Hollywood picture.

Rocketman is magnificent and ridiculous, a feathered melanage of clichés and originality, of respectful homage and unrepentant nostalgia. Sometimes it’s comfortingly conventional; other times it’s gloriously off the charts. Even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s just so damn alive, meeting right at the intersection of the human heartbeat and the also-human love for shiny things.

At some low, what's-next level, Sleepers works like, well, gangbusters. [28 October 1996, p. 113]

A stylish, well-paced film with a good variety of moods and moves.

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]

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

This is a movie about close family bonds and a more universal web that connects us, infinitely precious and worth preserving at all costs.

Sentimental Value is a drama about one family, but it could also be a message in a bottle for the greater world. Larkin, a proto-punk, poked fun at the way humans, just by procreating, pass their worst traits to their children and beyond, through infinity. Trier has much more hope, and his tender punk manifesto echoes something the English clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller said more than three centuries ago: Charity begins at home, but it shouldn’t end there.

There’s no way to put a positive spin on Parkinson’s. But how we handle the cards we’re dealt is everything, and Davis Guggenheim’s remarkable documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie reminds us that a person stricken with a disease doesn’t become that disease.

The filmmakers throw in a few cheesy scares: mom in a monster mask, a baby sitter jumping in front of a camera. But the rest is pretty freaking cool.

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.

Mostly, Kung Fu Panda 3 is just fun.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

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.

Materialists is more bittersweet than sweet—which is what makes it so wonderful, in a wistful, elusive way.

This might be a turning point in feminism and comedy, provided that both sexes can embrace it.

Even if Ad Astra doesn’t have the mystical power of Gray’s last film, the magisterial "Lost City of Z" (based on David Grann’s book of the same name), it has enough magnetic pull to keep us close.

Though Lawrence’s views of sex overall were complicated and sometimes contradictory, and not always what you’d call progressive, Clermont-Tonnerre and her actors draw from his ideas with clear-eyed generosity, presenting them so that they feel fresh as a new crocus.