It's a showcase for Nicholson in an astounding performance as the dim but lovable hit man, Charley Partanna. [14 June 1985, p.27]

You can hear the silence, the palpable quiet in director Randa Haines' skillful adaptation of stage's "Children of a Lesser God." The polemic drama of deaf rights translates into a heart-pounding love story -- the most passionately performed since "Officer and a Gentleman."

Arguably one of the two or three best musical films ever made, and, along with Singin' in the Rain, the wittiest and most sophisticated of the '50s Technicolor musicals. [25 June 1987, p.B7]

Quintessential film noir. [20 Mar 2005, p.N03]

An absorbing, intelligent and suspense-filled film... It's streamlined and rich at the same time -- like the best of the James Bond films, but serious.

The movie is a stunning example of collaborative fidelity and artistry directed by Karel Reisz, and its impact may be heightened if one is in the dark as to the plot of its literary source, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Suddenly you find yourself in the grip of an overwhelming cinemate and melodramatic undertow, at once thrilled, astonished and dreadfully uncertain of where it may set you down. [09 Aug 1978, p.B1]

When was the last time you were really surprised in a movie? These days, it seems, most movies are homogenized and safely predictable in order to appeal to the widest possible audience without disturbing anyone. Surprise! Here's "The Freshman," a quirky sleeper with something truly unexpected around every corner.

It's a stunning experience that leaves the viewer disoriented, maybe even confused, but certainly entertained and somehow hopeful.

Imaginative, slightly creepy, but tremendously appealing to all ages. It's ripe to bursting with visual effects a heady combination of stop-motion and computer-generated imagery. And it has a delightful cast of personable bugs and larvae, all bound for New York City via floating fruit.

The new Dracula is a dazzler, a classic retelling of a classic text. From opening wolf howls through ominous, ambiguous concluding images, it sustains an exciting, witty, erotically compelling illusion of supernatural mystery and terror. [13 Jul 1979, p.E1]

Lumet and his inspired collaborators have succeeded in fabricating and navigating one majectic, rabble-rousing Mother Ship of a musical, a sublimely happy moviegoing experience. [27 Oct 1978, p.D1]

John Boorman's childhood and the London Blitz happened to coincide. Which is great for the movie Hope and Glory, because he turns both events into exquisite myth.

Not just another youth movie, but a deft dramatization of a Joyce Carol Oates story adapted by a couple of documentary filmmakers in their feature debut.

The chemistry between the actors, particularly between Anton and Kinnaman, is sometimes magical.

Trouble in Mind, a striking comic confection, is like nothing we've seen before: "Casablanca" meets "Blade Runner" in post-post-modern terms. [25 Apr 1986, p.27]

The Brother From Another Planet is brilliant science-fiction with a social conscience. It goes to worlds where men, some of them anyway, have never gone before. And all they really ever had to do was take the A-Train. [16 Nov 1984, p.21]

Hoskins and costar Cathy Tyson of the Royal Shakespeare Company are an electric couple, with their disparate colors and shapes. She's class; he's crass. Their turbulent teamwork is augmented with sure supporting performances by Michael Caine, as the flesh-peddling villain Mortwell; and British comedian Robbie Coltrane, as George's teddy bear of a best friend, Thomas. [18 July 1986, p.31]

Salvador, Oliver Stone's drama based on the recent strife in that country, has an irresistible brassiness, a swing-at-the-moon quality -- it's big and loud and bold, all primary colors, and it has more energy than any 10 films this year. [4 Apr 1986, p.D1]

Arguably the best movie of the Astaire-Rogers series, Swing Time is the most consistently entertaining, most imaginatively plotted of their films. [25 Jun 1987, p.B7]

You don't have to be young or old to enjoy it this lovely, engaging film, just open-minded, or at least bighearted. At once funny, sad, moving, inspirational and revealing, The Boy Who Could Fly suspends the law of emotional gravity, soaring at just the right moments.

It's an exhausting and exhilarating movie about the birth of "the daily miracle." Thanks to a caffeinated cast and hyperactive script, director Ron Howard delivers The Paper with a bang.

Woodstock captures the spirit of itself quite well, and much of what we take for granted now in music videos and stage performance was shaped not only by the festival but by Wadleigh's film. [17 Aug 1989, p.C7]

Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants is more than his wartime memoir; it is an epitaph to innocence.

Although The Go-Go’s works marvelously as a scrapbook that will surely delight the viewer who wants to remember the catchy songs and saucy attitudes, it’s also the first time that the band’s story has been rendered as a cultural triumph instead of a cautionary tale.

The nearest thing to pandemonium ever seen on film and every minute of it is sublime. [27 Aug 1987, p.D7]

The Russia House doesn't sweep you off your feet; it works more insidiously than that, flying in under your radar. If it is like any of its characters, it's like Katya. It's reserved, careful to declare itself but full of potent surprises. It's one of the year's best films.

An exemplary lesson in how to make a revealing rockumentary, “The Bee Gees” (premiering Saturday) will satisfy lifelong skeptics and loyal fans. It’s less of the usual tract (we had them all wrong!) and more of a reckoning with the profound degree of artistry and accomplishment that should be the last word on any Bee Gees story. The movie is also a unique consideration of the phenomenon of rise and fall, and how one learns to live with it.

It's tremendous fun. The movie -- directed by Rob Cohen -- switches pleasingly from exciting fights to moments of magic playfulness. It's doubly touching to experience Bruce Lee's fleeting life and, in the brief depictions of little son Brandon, to fatefully anticipate the tragedy to come.

The movie, when it finally gets going, is funny. At times it's hysterical. The great discovery about Noises Off is how tried and tested Frayn's basic formula is. The physical, verbal and situation comedy is universal, no matter who the performers. What counts in this ensemble production is the collective choreography, the great farce machine. In the movie, everyone, Reeve included, more than plays his part.

As Juliet, Winslet is a bright-eyed ball of fire, lighting up every scene she’s in. She’s offset perfectly by Lynskey, whose quietly smoldering Pauline completes the delicate, dangerous partnership.

Happily, director/star/co-producer Gary Sinise has approached it not with the awe of an English professor, but with the practical eye of a craftsman: Here are solid characters, a taut and emotional story, a beginning, a middle and a wrenching end.

Realized beautifully by director Bille August, Intentions is a moving, profound requiem to all human relationships.

Director Howard Hawks’s movie is a film noir touchstone, and features one of Bogart’s best good-man-in-a-tough-spot performances, alongside the irresistible Lauren Bacall.

They don't come any cuter than The Adventures of Milo and Otis, a heartwarming, tail-thumping story about a curious kitten and his pug-nosed puppy pal. It's totally awwwwww-some.

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the film is its fluid, unhurried pace. Rich and his team aren't interested in roller-coaster effects or sledgehammer manipulations. They have a lush, original sense of color, even a flair for the poetic. The score -- by lyricist David Zippel and composer Lex de Azevedo -- isn't terribly distinctive (it's probably the movie's weakest link), but there is a merciful absence of the hard sell in that area as well.

Watching Claire Denis' Chocolat, you feel as if your senses have been quickened, reawakened. The movie is like sex for the eyes -- it's ravishing in a way that goes straight into your blood.

What makes My Mom Jayne remarkable is how Hargitay manages to move forward from the big reveals. This isn’t just a fact-finding mission for her, but a long-overdue reckoning.

In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

The romantic comedy about a divorced couple having an affair manages to be both light on its feet and heavy enough to deliver something of a message.

Red Cliff is a dichotomous beast: The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of it possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art portions, but the results occasionally border on the cartoonish. At the same time, Red Cliff is a classic tale that gets a classicist's treatment.

If the movie is any indication, Chevron would have the public believe there was no Amazon at all -- something people might be willing to believe, were Berlinger not sticking Crude in their faces.

Audiard delivers on and exceeds the promise he evinced in that earlier film, drawing viewers into the densely layered, ruthless ecology of a French prison and, against all odds, making them not mind staying there awhile.

Inception is that rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels, a feat that uncannily mimics the mind-bending journey its protagonist takes.

Manages to be both engrossing history and astonishingly germane to present-day political debates.

Not so much a slice of life as the whole pie, the highs and lows of twilight living, all found and filmed in a terminal at an airport in Maine. What a country.

In this story, everyone, man or woman, is a walled fortress of paranoia, secrecy, unsatisfied yearnings and anger-at-low-tide, all of which will rise and collapse over the course of what is a very funny film, and one that operates at the sea level of humanity. Quaint. Slightly peculiar.

Holofcener has accrued a rabid, loyal following for her singular brand of observant wit and aching tenderness. Both pour forth in abundance in Please Give, a wry, wistful portrait of contemporary urban manners.

Equal parts playful, sophisticated and engrossing, The Adjustment Bureau is like the first songbird of spring, signaling that the winter of our collective brain-freeze is over and it's safe to go back to the multiplex.

It's as soothing and pure as the sweetest water from the deepest well.

While the title alone may send people into a tizzy, this actually isn't a movie about which side is right or wrong.

Emerges as the summer's first true must-see film, required viewing for everyone, but especially audiences in Washington.

Megamind has presentation in spades. But it also has something even rarer than that. It's got heart.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim's scathing, moving critique of American public education, makes you actually want to do something after you dry your eyes.

If you think you've absorbed all you could about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the arcana of elaborate derivatives, think again. Inside Job traces the history of the crisis and its implications with exceptional lucidity, rigor and righteous indignation.

Although Ralston's act of desperation is admittedly difficult to watch, viewers who might avoid the film out of squeamishness would be depriving themselves of one of the year's most exhilarating cinematic experiences.

A near-masterpiece of a film set in the hothouse world of New York ballet.

It's the kind of absorbing, attractive, unfailingly tasteful enterprise that a critic can recommend without caveat.

If you think "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" define the alpha and omega of boxing movies, think again. David O. Russell's The Fighter proves there's still punch in the genre, especially when a filmmaker tells a familiar story in a brand-new way.

The Way Back diligently catalogs the outrages through which extreme cold, hunger and thirst put the body, and Weir's camera finds the terrible beauty in his actors' chapped lips, windburned cheeks and tenderized feet.

Spalding Gray himself has the last word on his life, something this exacting storyteller would surely have demanded.

Does Guinness World Records have an entry for longest on-screen fight? If it doesn't, Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins just set it. And if a record actually exists, Miike's film just broke it.

The Muppets is both a delightful family film about the Muppets and a winking, self-referential satire about how lame the Muppets are.

Telling an old story in a new way and infusing what might have been a dry political polemic with poetry, passion and unlikely warmth.

Chandor's film goes a long way toward making understandable - in vivid, cinematic terms - what exactly happened to make that first big domino fall over.

Considering that any one of those elements could have scuttled its fragile mix of drama, comedy and life-and-death stakes, 50/50 beats the odds with modest, utterly winning ease.