It’s both intimate and almost comically egotistical—yet Branagh has clearly poured so much love into it that you can’t be too hard on him. It’s hard to resist the movie’s affectionate energy.

Cotton is that rarity in the horror genre: a genuinely intriguing character.

It's like a restaurant where you go for the food and go back for the atmosphere. Or for the waitress. [13 July 1995]

DiCaprio, here as in "The Departed," proves himself the most watchful and watchable actor of his age. Since his teens, he has known how to make moral dilemmas seem both profound and sexy, and at 32 he just keeps getting better.

With a two-fisted script by John Milius (who later wrote Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn), Huston and Newman created a raucous, Rabelaisian, revisionist western of the sort popular at the time.

The Mastermind is a sneaky, undulating movie; it’s perhaps even less direct than Reichardt’s usual brand of sly, behind-the-beat filmmaking. But O’Connor’s slippery charms hold the picture steady.

The lumpiness of The Good Lie’s progression – from infancy to adulthood, and from the horrors of war to gentle social comedy and back again – proclaims a respect for facts and truths that can’t be molded into a smooth narrative.

World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and Fury occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.

Mojave’s real reason for existing is the wiry, woolly dialogue that Monahan has spun out for his actors.

The grand scale of this Frankenstein is unavoidable; what it’s lacking is intimacy.

We all make mistakes, and we all have the ability to wound when we’re just trying to be clever: Holofcener makes allowances for all of that. But she always favors warmth over sarcasm. And as if she could read our minds, she puts in her characters’ mouths words that we ourselves have sometimes failed to find the guts to say.

Reasonably genial and diverting. [18 May 1987]

Never quite transcending the sum of its agreeably disparate parts, IV is less groovy than gnarled and goofy, but in a studied way. Call it an acquired taste with a kinky savor.

As usual for Farhadi’s films, A Hero is beautiful to look at. Even the interior scenes are brushed with a golden light, and sometimes that light feels like a benediction. But as humanist works go, A Hero demands extra measures of patience on the viewer’s part.

But the actor (Nolte) finds truth in Wade's emotional clumsiness, in the despair of a man who hasn't the tools or the cool to survive. There are too many of these men in life, and not enough films that tell their sad tales.

It's hard to know how to respond to Falling Down: deplore its crudeness or admire its shrewdness. But it is occasionally the movies' job to plunge into the national psyche, root around in its chaotic darkness and return to the surface with some arresting fantasy that helps bring our uglier imaginings into focus. In that sense, this often vulgar and exploitative movie has some value. [1 March 1993, p63]

Harold and Kumar are pothead patriots in the first feel-good torture film.

This British film has the regal, clubby aura of Masterpiece Theatre. [21 July 1997, p. 70]

It’s one thing to dole out the happy pills that make an audience love you and another to earn their trust minute by minute. Sandler, it turns out, knows how to do both.

Well, it's sorta funny, and most genial: for all their ranking on parents and drooling over hot babes, Wayne and Garth are innocent kids wasting time creatively.

Chasing Mavericks may treat its characters with a little too much reverence, but it gives its titular subject its awe-inspiring due.

The project loses traction toward the end, as the picture strains to become a full-blooded action film - the very thing it spends the rest of its time mocking. And yet 21 Jump Street earns my genial nod because of its limber, 120-IQ take on the whole notion of movie revivals.

Charm City Kings lands on an elegiac, bittersweet note rather than a happy one, and doesn’t feature as many crazy, exhilarating bike stunts as you might hope. But in its view of a world where kids make their own fun and also, sometimes, their own bad choices, it rings true. Sometimes becoming a man is the hardest stunt to pull off.

Sunshine is a trifle schematic. But it also makes you feel, quite poignantly, the crushing tides of history: heedless, inhuman--and tragic.

This is a fairly low-keyed comedy, but a grown-up dropping in on it can appreciate its lack of frenzy, its fundamental good nature, as easily as its core audience will. It isn’t exactly a gem, but as zircons go, it’ll do.

Not all of Hill’s movies are great, and The Assignment certainly isn’t. Maybe, in the strictest terms, it isn’t even any good. But even a mediocre Walter Hill film has more style and energy — and a finer sense of the sweet spot between joy and despair — than ninety percent of the action thrillers that get made today.

The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures...Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is that plate of morsels in movie form, a breezy caper that mostly sustains its novelty, even if it stumbles a bit in the last third.