Kubrick’s masterpiece moved so slowly that it was something of an endurance test, even for avid sci-fi fans. Europa Report, by contrast, is brisk, thrilling and ultimately terrifying. And unlike 2001, it’s (mostly) grounded firmly in one of the most exciting areas in modern science.

A melodramatic journey from coast to coast shows Hitchcock at his best. It gives movement, distance and a terrifying casualness to his painful suspense.

So, for those of you who were wondering if a great TV show could top itself at feature-film length, the good news is that The Simpsons did it! But "South Park" did it first.

Maybe these lives are, objectively speaking, inconsequential. But they have a resonance that big, sappy "relationship" pictures ought to envy.

Poor Things might have benefited from some trimming—it takes a little too long to get cooking—but it’s Lanthimos’ finest movie so far, a strange, gorgeous-looking picture that extends generosity both to its characters and the audience. And Stone—so dazzling in The Favourite—provides its thrumming pulse.

Japanese Story is a simple, austerely told tale. But there is something memorable, even haunting, about it.

It is, like quite a few Lumet pictures, rather small in scale, easy to overlook. But I think it is time to gather around a director who has embraced his octogenarian bleakness and sing his praises. Ultimately, I think you'll laugh a lot at what he has wrought here -- but only well after the movie is over and the full scale of its perversity settles into your bones.

Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this excellent adventure.

In The Sacrifice, the cryptic Tarkovsky style helps create a towering cathedral.

The sweetest and funniest of Guest's true-life fake-umentaries.

The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from.

I found myself -- all twitchy intellectualism aside -- liking it enormously. There's more to Stevens's exteriors than those great shots of the looming ranch house. He had learned John Ford's trick of keeping the horizon low in the frame, and there are literally dozens of long, wide shots that are more than merely awesome. They suggest an emptiness that stumbling, ill-educated, materialistic people will somehow fill with something -- oil derricks, bragging Texas talk, reactionary politics. [Reprinted in the NY Times: 25 May 2003, p.21]

Elegantly made, romantically doomy, curiously affecting movie.

This is rapture in pictures. [22 December 1997, p. 81]

Limbo, tender and searching, shows what can happen to people when they’re between points A and B, a nowheresville that can change the shape of a life forever. It’s also about the meaning of musicianship, of how songs and sound can define who we are and where we come from.

This, possibly, is the best kind of movie, the stealth achievement that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness. [22 July 1996, p.95]

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 new picture provides a master coursed in cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment.

The poise and passion in Eve's Bayou leave one grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.

There is no solace to be had in this raw, intimate drama, a feature-film debut for writer-director Josh Mond. No triumph of the human spirit. There is instead something rarer and more valuable: urgently personal filmmaking, and Abbott’s stunning performance.

The best movie of this very young millennium.

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

Kramer vs. Kramer is a rare movie that finds its tone, its focus and its poetry in its very first image.

It’s an enormous, steroidal blast, and as much ingenious fun as a blockbuster can be.

The result is Soderberghs liveliest experiment since the strenuously weird "Schizopolis" six years ago -- except that this one works.

If only every actor we loved could leave us with a farewell film like this one.

The movie, which drops the postcards but keeps the edge, is a show-biz mother-daughter film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. [17 Sept 1990, p.70]