Herself has a largeness of spirit that finds room for its passionate, funny and fiercely desperate heroine and everyone who rallies around her.

The best thing, though, is the movie’s modest scale. It’s a good-natured epic, dedicated to the nontech principle of dispensing plain old pleasure.

The upshot is an emotionally satisfying fusion of the mixed up and the magical.

Here's a debut feature from Norway, a coming of age comedy so fresh and droll that the actors seem not to have been directed at all, but simply observed as they went about their odd lives.

What makes "The Winter Soldier" so enjoyable, though, and what will make it so profitable, is its emotional bandwidth — all the vivid, nuanced life lived by its characters in between their frenzied escapades.

Walks a fine line between bold indie film, with the attendant in-your-face roughness, and sodden Lifetime Original Movie.

Everything and everyone is observed sharply, succinctly and indelibly.

This documentary feature is fascinating and infuriating in unequal parts, the latter far outweighing the former, since Mr. Jarecki’s instrument is a shoehorn.

Sweet, funny, a little melancholy and a little obvious.

Delightful and insightful romantic comedy.

Rousing, provocative film.

Ultimately an original film that forces us, time and again, to reconsider what we think we've just seen, and what we're sure we feel - not only about mere appearance, or fateful gender, but about who, under our skin, we truly are.

Shall We Kiss? gives us storytelling as art. Emmanuel Mouret's romantic drama, in French with English subtitles, is expert, intricate, ineffably droll, ultimately provocative and entirely enchanting.

Social media is not an inherently cinematic subject, but Ms. Binoche is, and in the hands of director Nebbou and cinematographer Gilles Porte the story of Claire becomes, both visually and psychologically, a bridge between worlds, ethereal, tragic and more than a little scary.

The film, like its subject and everyone who talks about him, is frustratingly short on analysis or insight. It’s as if BASE jumping had been invented and psychology had not.

Calmly, almost serenely, Mr. Van Sant and his superb cinematographer, Harris Savides, reveal a vision of contemporary American youth quite unlike any other.

Doubt leaves none in one respect: John Patrick Shanley was the right person to direct this fascinating screen version of his celebrated play.

Mr. Howard wants us to know that greater challenges lie ahead — not a welcome reminder while we’re in the grips of the coronavirus. Yet his documentary also dramatizes the resilience and resourcefulness we can bring to bear in meeting them. Calamity, the film says, isn’t destiny.

Like the "girls," the movie is flamboyant in almost every respect - the costumes, the humor and the sentimentality. [1 Sep 1994]

A kind of blues song in its own right, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory is an affectionate attempt to showcase three major figures in the development of Chicago blues, musicians who spent their entire lives eclipsed by the oversized stars they played with.

Nightmare Alley is, in its entirety, a beautifully visualized period piece that holds our attention and evokes plenty of horror, to be sure, but never brings us under the tent of wholehearted involvement. This time the beauty is screen deep.

The narrative engine leaves the rails when Irving, like Hughes, plunges into paranoia (though Irving actually is the object of a high-level plot) and the style turns to the sort of intensely manipulated surrealism that Charlie Kaufman practiced, not successfully, in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

Who Killed the Electric Car?, a fascinating feature-length documentary by Chris Paine, opens with a mock funeral, then follows the structure of a mock trial in which multiple suspects are found guilty.

Makes an eloquent case for John Kerry's courage, both during and immediately after his service in Vietnam.

Winningly human, and wonderfully funny.

Mr. Penn has been praised lavishly for his work in "Mystic River," in a role that was no reach for him at all, but this is one of the stand-out performances of his career, layered and exquisitely nuanced. And, remarkably, he's only one-third of a stellar ensemble.

Merchants of Doubt, a provocative and improbably entertaining documentary by Robert Kenner, means to make people angry, and to make them think. It will surely do the former. I’d like to think it will do the latter.

An enthralling, even visionary drama that regards its subject with empathy and horror, locates him on the actual piece of land he once owned in Montana and portrays him through a stunning performance by Sharlto Copley, who finds emotional mercury in Kaczynski’s boiling cauldron of rage.

This English film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is also wonderfully funny, terribly touching and a vehicle — with comically dilapidated vehicles — for the boundless gifts of Maggie Smith.

All but one of the actresses in Caramel are nonprofessionals -- not unprofessional, just untrained in the craft -- and they are, to a woman, enchanting. So is this Lebanese comedy.

With Mr. Harrelson, Mr. Moverman has created an antihero of epic proportions and indiscretions.

Writer-director Kirk Jones doesn’t do a great job finding anything fresh to say about this unnerving situation, with one exception.

The result is a raw look at not just celebrity, but also what it is to parent and grow up in the 21st century.

Rough around the edges, it's humor decidedly sophomoric in parts. But that's part of its charm. [19 Jan 1995, p.A16(E)]

There are clashes of philosophy and practical action that need sorting out, and After the Bite treats both sides with respect.

“Focuses” is a relative term for a documentary that dispenses lots of information without organizing it very well, but Fantastic Fungi is never uninteresting, and often startling in the natural beauty it reveals.

What makes The Old Guard special is that, for all its canny action tropes, the film really does deal with the prevalence of evil in the world, and the limits of doing good. It’s a lot to squeeze into a smaller screen.

As Only the River Flows follows its winding course, the movie seems to lose its grip not merely on the mystery but on its protagonist, becoming less psychologically penetrating and more haphazardly hallucinatory. Looking for clues, we find only the fragments of a fractured mind.

Pieces of April would deserve your attention and respect even if all these colorful threads didn't come together into a luminous whole. But they do, beautifully and unaffectedly, because what's been on Mr. Hedges's mind is not just a comedy of alienation but a drama of acceptance and reconciliation.

I wanted to believe in Bad Santa. At least half of the time I did.

Real-life events have overtaken District B13, and they give this feverish, yet oddly flat French action adventure a whiff of substance to go along with its spectacular stunts.

This lovely debut feature by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz trafficks in the pleasure of watching intriguing people working through outlandish problems in unlikely ways. Go in expecting the best and you’ll come out smiling.

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.

The result feels perfectly American — I wonder if Conrad was named in honor of the troubled brother in “Ordinary People” — yet the film lives and breathes with a lovely intimacy and density of detail that we associate with fine independent features from Europe.

The main thing about Cedar Rapids is that it makes you laugh-often and out loud.

There are degrees of villainy in “Operation Varsity Blues,” but it’s hard to peg the privileged, bribe-paying parents as the worst of a bad lot. Besides, they have to live not just with their criminal convictions but with those wiretapped conversations, in which they reveal what they really think of their own children.

Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.

It's nothing less than a miracle that the director, Craig Gillespie, and the writer, Nancy Oliver, have been able to make such an endearing, intelligent and tender comedy from a premise that, in other hands, might sustain a five-minute sketch on TV.

Beguiling, meditative and elegantly photographed documentary.

Mr. Waititi, a popular standup comic in New Zealand, is wonderfully droll and entertaining in this acting role, which isn't all that far, geography and culture notwithstanding, from Steve Zahn at his stoner best.

Nothing about the emotionally unmoored Inglourious Basterds adds up. Whether it's parody, farce or a fever dream is anyone's guess.

The most remarkable thing about The Mermaid, though, is its clarity as a cautionary fable.

For its delicate tone, provocative themes, impeccable craftsmanship and superb performances-by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley-Never Let Me Go earned my great admiration. I wish I'd been affected in equal measure, but I wasn't, and it's not the sort of film you can will yourself to enjoy.

We are set up to dislike her, but we do not. We like her very much, despite, or thanks to, the potent sense of diva that lingers in the air.

The ultimate poor judgment: the decision to put Babel before the camera. That defies comprehension in any language.

The sparkle is what's been missing in the star's (Cage) recent performances. What's not to love in a movie that transmutes Terence's moral squalor, and the squalid state of post-Katrina New Orleans, into darkly comic gold?

Who knew that Unstoppable would be sensational? Talk about well-kept- and welcome-surprises. Tony Scott's latest thriller turns out to be pure cinema in the classic sense of the term. It's a motion picture about motion, an action symphony that gives new meaning to the notion of a one-track mind.

This is less a film in the lustrous Pixar tradition than a Disney fairy tale told with Pixar's virtuosity. As such, it's enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.

A startlingly beautiful movie.

The greatest reward of Old Henry is Mr. Nelson’s performance.

And The Donut King is about the doughnuts themselves — how they’ve evolved over the decades from a sturdy staple into a fantasy, if not quite a delicacy, of prismatic colors and preposterous toppings.

The movie is stifling, all right, and depressing in the bargain.

This fourth iteration of a series that first burst upon the world in 1988 turns out to be terrific entertainment, and startlingly shrewd in the bargain, a combination of minimalist performances -- interestingly minimalist -- and maximalist stunts that make you laugh, as you gape, at their thunderous extravagance.

Ms. Coppola, who is Francis Coppola's granddaughter, has made a coming-of-age film about a culture in which few people — adults included — ever grow up. It's essentially plotless and slowly paced, much like the recent work of her aunt, Sofia Coppola, but astutely observed, full of fine performances and ever so guardedly hopeful about April and the boy who adores her.

When the movie stays more on subject, it can be engaging, and it helps that cinematographer Cecilie Semec has a talent for mining the mundane act of people talking to each other for visual interest.

Saroo is played dazzlingly by Dev Patel, who gives his richest performance since Mira Nair’s “The Namesake.”

The press notes boast that Mr. Cutler was given "unprecedented access" and the right of final cut; these advantages don't seem to have done much for this listless film.

Ron Howard's Depression-era movie also works from the inside out, building a classic underdog drama from depth of character, rich texture, vivid detail and stirring performances.

One's confidence in factuality is weakened by a cliché-ridden narrative that reads Ma di Tau's mind during her buffalo hunt, and by incessant manipulation of the imagery-not only the use and abuse of slo-mo, but digital enhancement of colors in concert with an almost obsessive concentration on stalking and killing.

What makes Rocketman a gift of entertainment that keeps on giving is the brilliance of the musical numbers coupled with the complexity of the star’s portrayal.

Its ironic complexities tease the brain without pleasing the heart.

Terrific actors give glum performances.

The more elaborate the plot becomes, the sillier it gets.

Mr. Morris is among the most intellectual of documentary makers, but on an artisanal level his trademark is the head-on confrontation, the face-to-face interview. In refining that process, he developed the Interrotron, which enables him to interview a subject eye-to-eye while still having that subject look directly into the camera.

The common problem of Solondz's characters is an inability to see the world in shades of grey, which is fitting in a film where color-garish, boring or just plain ugly-is so important, and the actors are working off palettes of such extreme emotions. A few of them-notably Ms. Rampling, Mr. Hinds and Ms. Sheedy-are as good here as they've ever been.

This film, which might have been called "The Fog of Words," isn't haunting, but dismaying. Mr. Rumsfeld is, as always, articulate, energetic and self-confident. Yet his words suggest a paradox — a restless mind with no discernible gift for self-reflection.

Halle Berry is something else as Leticia Musgrove, the widow of an inmate who's just been executed by Hank and his crew, and that something else is commandingly passionate.

Like no one before or since, she had what she valued most in others - good, old-fashioned pizazz.

It shows us the woman in full, a fearless, joyous eccentric committed to carrying the oriflamme of French cuisine to the Jell-O-scarfing masses.

Watching the film is such an intense experience that most of its flaws fall away and its red herrings serve only to enhance the local color.

The film honors maturity and all its weighty deliberations without putting a sheen of sentimentality on the condition.

Green Book warms the heart, then numbs the mind. It’s a broad-brush lesson in racism, a sermon on the power of empathy, a user’s guide to tolerance packaged as a mismatched-buddies comedy.

Mr. Cailley is interested in the allegorical implications of his story, but not interested enough to pursue them very seriously.

The film is all the more powerful for its grounding in fact. How powerful? Sufficiently, during most of its length, and extremely during several eruptions of searing drama.

A slow start, a single star performance surrounded by indifferent acting and an onslaught of computer effects that range from seen-it-all-in-"Transformers" to a whole sky full of spectacular stuff in the midtown Manhattan climax.

But even as the film's weaknesses make themselves more and more apparent, so does Mr. Turturro's virtuosity. [15 Aug 1991, p.A10(E)]

Here’s a nice surprise, a zestful, slightly autobiographical debut feature from Israel, written and directed by a woman, Talya Lavie, that takes satirical aim at the passions, frustrations and sexual politics of women in the army.

The film is a scintillating drama that explores a weighty historical dispute with Gothic flair.

Essentially a coming-of-age story set in working-class North Carolina in the 1970s. But it's so startlingly original that it transcends the genre. This is a wonderful film, from puckish start to momentous finish.

Sure, the formula has worn thin; this installment is, in fact, the end of the road. But what was great at the outset — supersmart banter coupled with sensational celebrity impressions — is still pretty darned good, and the meander takes an unexpected turn.

The filmmaking is strong and confident throughout, while Mr. Brummer’s performance is a constant revelation.

I felt much the same way as I sat goggle-eyed through this endless extravaganza of visual abracadabra. It seemed entirely possible that I might die of the fidgets or old age while waiting for Baron Munchausen to kill the Turks. And yet I found myself wanting to see the end of the movie before I expired. [9 Mar 1989, p.1]

Still, the essence of the film lies in the athletes' towering charm, and the nature of their journey.

This fine debut feature by Elizabeth Chomko dramatizes well-worn themes — degenerative illness, family dysfunction, anguishing choices to be made in the face of implacable decline. Yet the cast is exceptional, the performances are extraordinary, the writing and direction are heartfelt, and the film is, consequently, stirring, frequently funny and consistently affecting.

Some films make do with stories that present an interesting surface and little more. In “The Boy From Medellín” undercurrents run constantly. Depression and anxiety provide two of them, but the most dramatic one—the source of the film’s genuine suspense—flows from politics.

The film's real shocker is its unpleasantness.

This clever thriller has the juiced-up, hyperactive feel of a rock video. [07 Mar 1995]