Lacking space for a proper review, let me say first that Tampopo is right up there with “Ratatouille” and “Big Night” when it comes to peerless movies about food.

Diane navigates some challenging narrative disjunctures en route to a spiritual dimension, but it also has quiet moments that speak volumes. They’re all about Diane achieving a state of grace by awarding it to herself.

The film is clearly not for everyone; sometimes it wasn’t for me. But it’s steadfastly nonjudgmental and wonderfully tender toward two searchers for new versions of old-fashioned love.

Where the film shines is in its vivid and affecting portrait of Tillman himself. Instead of the square-jawed hero memorialized by the army and lionized by the news media, we get to know a man of many gifts for many seasons.

This drama is as big as all outdoors in scope; poetic and profound in its exploration of the senses; blessed with two transcendent performances, by Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay; and as elegantly wrought as any film that has come our way in a very long while.

What you take away from Anatomy of a Fall is largely up to you, but it’s a thoroughly engrossing case study.

Fallen Leaves, though no radical departure for its maker nor a landmark of its medium, reminds us of a singular artistic personality, still vibrant after all these years. In a world of disasters large and small, surely that counts as consolation.

What's extraordinary is what happens at the intersection of Mr. Payne's impeccable direction and Mr. Nelson's brilliant script. The odyssey combines, quite effortlessly, prickly combat between father and son.

As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.

It is thoughtful, unfashionable, measured, mostly honest, sometimes clumsy or remote, often exciting, occasionally moving and eventually surprising. It's correct.

What you call Mr. Shults’s first film is spectacular.

As a director, working with actors, she may have drawn on her own experience acting in features and TV; whatever her method, she has come up with a matched pair of terrific performances.

I was riveted by the performance of Paulina García, the great Chilean actress who plays Tony’s beleaguered mother. To watch her is to see exactly how less can be more. Instead of acting, she allows her character to reveal her thoughts in words that are all the more powerful for being few, far between and softly spoken.

A thrillingly funny and casually profound film.

Go underground with magic glasses on your nose and you won't regret it.

The extraordinary cast includes John Travolta, Amy Irving, William Katt and Nancy Allen. Mario Tosi did the elegant cinematography.

This exquisite animated feature, directed by Michael Dudok de Wit, has no dialogue, only the sounds of water, wind and birds, the occasional strains of Laurent Perez del Mar’s graceful score; and images of a young castaway living out the stages of his life on a desert island after giant storm waves hurl him onto a beach.

What's so remarkable about their decadeslong campaign, though, is how desperation led to inspiration - to the inspired notion that they, as nonscientists, could still take their fate in their own hands.

The kind of movie they don't make any more -- a seriously beautiful, deliberately paced drama that meanders for a while at the pace of a summer romance, then explodes with phenomenal force.

Mr. Luhrmann successfully makes Presley’s concerts fresh again.

More than anything, Of Gods and Men is a drama of character, and warm humanity.

Museo is in part a caper film, a heist film, and while it leans on such classics as “Topkapi” and “Rififi” the robbery has its own signature and is done in a visual style that’s hypnotic.

This is not a drama of shadings, but of ever-increasing intensity.

There’s an affected, self-mythologizing solemnity to the storytelling that can’t quite disguise some flaws in the fundamentals.

Deliver Us From Evil has its flaws. Certain passages are diffuse, others are argumentative, and there's a discomfiting staginess to the climax... Yet the film's concern for the victims, and their families, is one of its strengths.

Any five audience members might have five different takeaways, which tells you there is a lot going on here. I was left with this thought: How well do we really know anyone, even ourselves?

[Crowe] knows how to shape a scene and he's never cheap with characterization; adults are permitted to be as complex as their children; a rare event in pictures. [18 May 1989, p.A14(E)]

It’s an emotional investment with rich returns. Pedro Costa’s hypnotic drama, shot superbly by Leonardo Simões, follows its heroine through a dark night of the soul into the light of a new life in a new land.