The whole rollicking adventure zips along a mile a minute.

The result – believable, hopeful, tender, delightful – is a movie of (increasingly rare) truly indie sensibility, made by women who are confident about healthy feminine resilience.

This high-IQ sermon is long but never lazy. Renouncing his tendency to make every movie take emotional flight, Spielberg sticks to the story as Kushner has artfully compressed it. Lincoln is brain food and, at another pivotal moment in American political history, an instructive feast.

In this film, however, he battles the elements and mortality with a thinking man’s resilience the equal of any astronaut, freighter captain or free man enslaved. That he fights fate on his own makes All Is Lost a signal film achievement and the capstone to a great star’s career. This is Ultimate Redford.

Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. He’s the character you want to protect, and the one who sends your heart sinking when you see him harden, out of necessity, against the world. He gives The Banshees of Inisherin its soul and its beauty. To look at his face is to understand the half-welcoming, half-unforgiving place known as home.

There’s some creepy, spooky stuff in Hereditary, images and ideas that just might surface in your nightmares. But the radical, undiluted humanness of Collette’s performance is the movie’s most haunting effect. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Call it the best humans can do without witchcraft.

Reimagined instead of recycled, an adaptation of a '60s old TV show emerges as a first-rate thriller.

Even in its failures, Odd Man Out is admirable. It is a reckless, head-on attempt at greatness, and the attempt frequently succeeds.

What we come to care most about in writer-director Joshua Marston's film is how his heroine achieves the state promised by his title, Maria Full of Grace. Our emotional investment in her derives primarily from the astonishing performance of Moreno, 23.

The true, rare glamour of the piece is its revival of two precious movie tropes: the flourishing of words for their majesty and fun, and--in the love play between Fiennes and his enchantress--the kindling of a playfully adult eroticism.

This is spellbinding reality cinema about duplicity and, worse, ignorance at the highest level.

For all its brave beginnings and real achievements--its assault on western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale--Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.

Despite the efforts of Producer Irving Thalberg, Director Frank Lloyd, three scenarists and $2,000,000 to give it balance, polish and direction, the picture lacks all three. There are intervals when the two hours which it lasts seem as interminable as Bligh's voyage in the open boat must have seemed to its occupants. The narrative, which skips the saga of Pitcairn's Island entirely for Tahiti love interest, still contains enough material for at least three films. These faults are indigenous to the historic material used. The picture has few others.

To see this movie in the theater is a special, shuddering pleasure, a tilting-at-windmills affirmation of what movies, seen big, can mean. This is movie as black magic. To give yourself over to it feels a little dangerous. It also feels great.

There’s enough magic, and extraordinary visual imagination, to smooth the edges of the movie’s problems.

We the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.

The most mature and satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career.

His performance is a canny portrait of leadership - part genius, part crazy guts, part dumb luck - and worthy of moving Pitt up to the playoff round of Oscar finalists for Best Actor. We'd put money on it.

An often deft, frequently droll little movie.

Roy-Lecollinet’s face, both haughty and welcoming, both anchors the movie and sets it free in the wind. No wonder Paul can’t shake the memory of it. It’s the thing that will age him before his time—and also keep him young forever.

The rhythm of rural life has rarely seemed so lucid and luminous.

Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight.

The film is an achievement in civilized comedy; even in its grave and noble moments it preserves a graceful, tender gaiety.

What amazes is that at just 26, Soderbergh displays the three qualities associated with mature filmmakers: a unique authorial voice, a spooky camera assurance, and the easy control of ensemble acting. [31 July 1989, p.65]

To Be is a very funny comedy, salted to taste with melodrama and satire.

Al Pacino gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.

Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. It could all be a little too hushed and antiseptic—but Hüller’s performance gives the movie the vitality it needs.

To transport picturegoers to a unique place in the glare of the earth, in the darkness of the heart--this, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies can do.