Tótem offers a promise of light beyond the sorrow, a concept that’s hard for children to comprehend. But then, adults need to be reminded of it too.

Nickel Boys is a picture on the move, a work that’s traveling forward, the thing we always ask for yet often don’t know how to accept when it arrives.

Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism, a melodrama in the grand manner of Public Enemy and Little Caesar. But he fails to do anything more serious—largely because he tries too hard. In searching for the general meaning in little lives, Director Kazan has trained his lens down fine on small events; he has too often watched his characters through the magnifying glass of special prejudice—the old sentimental prejudice that ordinary people are wonderful no matter what they do.

There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like Tangerine and The Florida Project, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with Anora, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It's his best movie yet.

The Favourite is a wicked delight, a fantastic little cupcake of a movie laced with thistle frosting.

A solemn, subtly structured, beautifully acted and ultimately hypnotic movie.

In this arid landscape, the edifice of Ghost World, with all its acute insolence, stands out like the Taj Mahal.

If the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too.

Edward Plumb's background music is expertly keyed into the production, but none of Bambi's four songs is notable. Some innovations are. For the first time, Disney has done his backgrounds in oils instead of watercolors. The result is striking. The russet reds, browns, bright yellows, make autumn look like autumn. Each season has a special color impact.

The Brutalist is a kind of crazy space church, designed specifically for the communal moviegoing experience. It's a place to gather and give thanks.

Alice Rohrwacher's enigmatic and bracing La Chimera, its touch as glancing as a zephyr, asks more of us while demanding less. It’s the kind of movie you wake up from, as opposed to one you merely watch.

The Worst Person in the World is a comedy, not a drama. But it’s ruthless in the way the best comedies can be.

A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.

Licorice Pizza feels pleased with how casual and effortless it is, which is the exact opposite of being casual and effortless.

What matters most and comes off best in the picture is the great scenes of spectacle, particularly the chariot race, a superbly handled crescendo of violence that ranks as one of the finest action sequences ever shot. All by itself it would be worth the price of admission.

In a style of agitated naturalism, Jordan examines poignant matters of life and death, sex and friendship, duty and loyalty, freedom and bondage, manhood and womanhood and all the ambiguous areas in between. [30 Nov 1992]

A picture that’s both tranquil and dazzling, two qualities that should be at odds with one another yet somehow bloom in tandem under Reichardt’s gentle touch.

Mirren, who won an Emmy playing Elizabeth I for HBO, may deserve an Oscar for this ripe appraisal of Elizabeth II.

What lifts this film into orbit—and what saves it from being a shaggy flying-saucer story—is the breathless wonder that the director brings to every frame. Whether he is showing us a pristine, starry Midwestern sky or displaying Special Effects Wizard Douglas Trumbull's formidable arsenal of spaceships and celestial storms, Spielberg seems to be looking at everything onscreen as if for the first time. The freshness of his vision is contagious—and exhilarating.

This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.

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.

For three hours, Kechiche puts the audience on a ride nearly as exhilarating and exhausting as that endured by Adèle and Emma, Adèle and Léa. The film is like a tough exam that everybody aced. The director, the actresses, the moviegoer — we all deserve a très bien.

A kind of bipolar movie, not exactly haha funny but true to life.

There’s no doubt Phantom Thread will be forever lauded as a great fashion movie, but I don’t think it’s even a good one. Its view of how fashion is made feels desiccated and airless, as if beautiful clothes can come into being only under a dome of oppression and anxiety.

Tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes.

Director Alfred Hitchcock goes nattering on with an hour of some silly plot-boiling about a flirtatious society girl (Tippi Hedren), a lovelorn schoolmarm (Suzanne Pleshette), an Oedipus wreck (Rod Taylor) and a pair of lovebirds. Hitchcock addicts will just be getting jittery for their first fix of gore when it suddenly becomes clear that the birds is coming: man's feathered friends set themselves to wipe out an entire village on the California coast. Why did the birds go to war? Hitchcock does not tell, and the movie flaps to a plotless end.

Though beautifully made and acted, The Souvenir had the sad, chilly pallor of a centuries-old miniature portrait, a bit of the past you could hold in your hand and yet never fully grasp. The Souvenir Part II puts the earlier film in a bigger, more detailed frame, rushing in with swirls of context, color and perspective.

To Have and Have Not is neither an action picture nor a Bogart picture. Its story is, in fact, just a loosely painted background for a kind of romance which the movies have all but forgotten about—the kind in which the derelict sweethearts are superficially aloof but essentially hot as blazes, and seem to do even their kissing out of the corners of their mouths.