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."

It's a riveting look at what goes on behind the scenes -- mainly pills, booze and shots. If you ever entertained any fantasies about America's autumnal rite's being good clean fun, this movie should set you straight...At the same time, North Dallas Forty is terrifically funny, done with enough humor and wit to offset any potential heavyhandedness -- a Burt Reynolds movie with bite. [3 Aug 1979, p.25]

At its best, Tokyo Sonata is a deft interweaving of seemingly dissonant ideas -- war and music, family and politics, authority and freedom.

Lorenzo's Oil, which is further encumbered by its funereal pacing and woebegone score, is definitely a remarkable story, but as told by Miller it isn't really an uplifting one.

It's pretty funny. You don't actually watch it so much as indulge it and admire its cleverness.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

Far from an amusing romp.

Famously prickly, Crosby never gets really angry in “Remember My Name,” although at one point he yells at Eaton about the filmmaker not being able to set up a good shot (Crosby comes by the expertise honestly: His father, Floyd Crosby, was an Oscar-winning cinematographer).

As startling as the crisp and, yes, dramatic images may be, a sense of slight monotony sometimes creeps in after so many shots of ice, calving glaciers, heaving waves, sea foam, rain, snow, fog, mist, etc. Despite these occasional moments of tedium, however, the film is at once chilling and likely to make your blood boil.

The Pearl Button may not answer all the questions it raises, yet it is an absorbing experience — at least for anyone with a taste for beauty over insight.

The movie leaves us with greater things to contemplate than a mere tragedy of errors.

While the Dardennes may be moralists, they are also makers of thrillers: The story within Lorna' Silence is built on tiny increments of tantalizing details, meted out in penurious droplets and with chest-tightening tension that suggests that what the brothers wanted to be when they grew up were boa constrictors -- Belgian boas, with degrees in Marxist theory.

Although many of its subjects are endearing characters, the film’s scattered approach undermines its point about the simple endurance of an artifact.

There’s a certain kind of French movie that’s a quintessentially French movie: stylish, intellectually engaged, alert to adult emotions and problems. Other People’s Children is that kind of movie — it tells a small-canvas story that loses none of its poignancy for refusing to overreach or give into fatal self-seriousness.

It is a remarkable, strange and politically potent first film.

Olivier Assayas’s drama is intriguingly ambiguous and strangely constructed, and there seems to be symbolism lurking in every shot. Yet, despite acting that dazzles and no shortage of artistry, the movie is more fun to ponder than to sit through.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

The victims are impossibly brave as they sit for interviews, revisiting the worst moments of their lives. Their stories are the strongest part of the documentary, making up for uneven pacing and some otherwise strange editing choices.

Demon is not a horror film, exactly, although it can prove disturbing. Wrona jumbles several genres together, including dark comedy, to illuminate larger, more ambitious themes.

Mostly it's just funny. Really, really funny.

The new movie — a sci-fi freakout that, like “Spring,” includes an “it,” but one that’s far less easy to define — is spooky, funny, touching and very, very well made.

It's a gorgeous and, believe it or not, riveting documentary . . . about sheep.

The Old Man and the Gun ambles along with such unhurried, folksy ease that it’s easy to overlook the people — mostly women — Tucker leaves in his wake, victims who may not be physically scarred, but often look as if they will bear unseen injuries into the future nonetheless.

Speaking of Jane, Minnie Driver gets the big banana for top off-screen performance. She brims over with prissiness and pep, tenderness and visionary appreciation.

Director DeVito, who never did know when to quit, manages to be as clever as he is vicious. His first movie, "Throw Momma From the Train," seems almost lyrical in comparison to the ruthlessness of this vehicle.

West of Memphis makes a lucid, absorbing contribution to an epic saga that Berlinger and Sinofsky first wrestled into an 18-year-long narrative that changed two lives and saved one. And it gives that epic an ending that's happy, sad, inspiring, infuriating, right and terribly wrong, all at the same time.

Neither the title nor the subject matter prepares you for the pure fun of Frost/Nixon.

Compelling, if sometimes grittily depressing, viewing.

Great picture? No. Cool picture? Oui. Not as good, I must say, as the sort of thing we moron yanks were doing on our own over here – "D.O.A." is much better.

Mulligan’s eccentric energy is her greatest strength, but it makes for a slightly wobbly — if just this side of wonderful — film.

The movie’s main appeal—beyond stomach yearnings caused by its cuisine—comes from the actors, who infuse their archetypal roles with comedic appeal.

Senna is what film critics might call a TMSI movie, as in: Trust me, see it.

A disconcertingly assured tango between tenderness and brutality.

The ultimate strength of The Lost Leonardo is its inspection of how society reveres and seeks out capital, the real driving force behind the pushes and pulls acted upon the Salvator Mundi.

This is one of the most exciting breakout films of the year, introducing Attanasio as a vibrant new voice in American cinema. More, please.

Marvels of animation abound in Monsters, Inc. -- when it comes to irreverent humor and real heart, Monsters doesn't quite measure up.

Time Bandits is a marvelous cinematic tonic, a sumptuous new classic in the tradition of time-travel and fairy-tale adventure. [06 Nov 1981, p.C1]

The filmmaker’s dedication to non-judgment occasionally militates against narrative drive: Beyond the Hills begins to sag in its middle sequences, when the repetitive monotony of Alina’s outbursts begins to yield diminishing returns. But he has made a film that’s worth even those wearying sequence.

I’ll Be Me is an elevating experience, inviting the audience to bear witness to Campbell’s courage, humor and spiritual strength. His story may make for a tough movie, but it’s an important and triumphant one, as well.

This story of workplace abuse and its fallout could just as well take place in New York, Istanbul, Mumbai — or any other city. Orna is Everywoman. Like many other women in her shoes, she emerges scarred, but stronger and wiser.

Thanks to Lewin's light but assured touch, The Sessions never wears its theological preoccupations heavily, instead allowing transcendence to creep up on the audience quietly.

A movie made for critics, cinephiles and deep-dive film historians.

It doesn't take a screenwriter, for example, to point out the uncanny fact that, when two parent penguins perform a neck-curving pas de deux above their tiny chick, they resemble nothing so much as a perfect heart.

Winter on Fire has all the immediacy and power of drama. If it lacks the dispassionate context of more balanced journalism, it makes up for it with a complex, contradictory emotional impact that is simultaneously demoralizing and hopeful.

It would be nice to report that director Stanley Nelson comes up with something new, some illumination, some revelation, some heretofore unglimpsed irony, but he doesn't.

You realize this is a story about the life beyond this movie, about the great changes in life we never give ourselves time to consider. And for a moviegoing experience, that's a lot of bang for your buck.

The story, which deals straightforwardly with racism, miscegenation, adultery and consumerism, is a fascinating combination: a movie with an almost Capraesque heart and pristine, almost stagey lighting schemes, that addresses uncomfortable moral issues with today's perspectives.

It’s when the dream of “Annihilation” collides so felicitously with lived reality that the film coalesces and takes hold. It may be broken eventually, but for a while the spell is a powerful one, and nearly irresistible.

One of the most startling, grittily brilliant films in recent years.

This invigoratingly fresh, optimistic film - which features the breathtaking debuts of director Dee Rees and leading lady Adepero Oduye - plunges the audience into a world that's both tough and tender, vivid and grim, drenched in poetry and music and pain and discovery.

Director John Dahl and his brother Rick Dahl co-wrote the intelligent and off-handedly witty script; they're like the Coen brothers, but with a sense of fun and a coherent, entertaining story to tell.

She's Gotta Have It is Spike Lee's impressive first feature, discursive, jazzy, vibrant with sex and funny as heck. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

Even when it skates recklessly close to shopworn cliches, Pride manages to navigate around them with vigor, as well as disarming, even wholesome, open-heartedness.

Architects who are already working to make architecture more sustainable and humane will roll their eyes at the last few minutes of commentary. But they won’t regret having seen “Architecton,” which is a raw, beautiful and demanding essay on the fate of our collective home.

It sweeps over you with blunt, unequivocal conviction.

The more interesting drama of Babygirl is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other.

The film's loveliness does much to modulate its often maddening pace.

It's overly long and it's overly melodramatic, but it's also a perfect example of the kind of film they just don't make anymore, because they can't.

A timely, essential film.

Although news reports presented police use of rubber bullets and tear gas as justifiable responses to increasingly volatile crowds, Whose Streets? offers a useful alternative view, with citizen journalists capturing what look like unprovoked attacks on demonstrators by law enforcement officers woefully unprepared or unwilling to de-escalate sensitive situations and engage.

This 138-minute film, comprising two thousand performers and a helluva lot of musketry, has several good scenes, including the well-known one in which Christian utters romantic praise to Roxanne from below her balcony, while de Bergerac feeds him lines. But it can't escape Rostand's structural shortcomings.

The insecurities that seem to feed Rivers's often angry humor -- and that have left her face looking like a mask frozen in horror -- are left unexamined.

Majidi has discovered a wonderful cast of players to bring this gentle allegory to life, especially Naji as the irascible but generous Memar, who displays nearly perfect comic timing.

Demonstrates that sometimes the simplest stories are the most profound, and certainly possess the most moral authority. It's a film that emphasizes loyalty and sacrifice, values that have become jokes in most other films these days.

A guaranteed pleasure for anyone who ever loved pop music, owned a record collection or suffered in love

If “The Black Panthers” has been designed to leave viewers outraged and energized in equal measure, it succeeds with admirable style. It counts both as essential history and a primer in making sense of how we live now.

Berra’s advice, of course, tends to be dizzyingly contradictory but deceptively simple. The same could be said of It Ain’t Over, which zips through Berra’s life without ever feeling rushed. When it comes to Mullin’s well-paced depiction of a misunderstood legend, Berra’s words put it best: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

Such stories of quiet malfeasance never get old. No matter how lovely and admired the neighborhood lawns may be, the idea that there’s a snake or two in the grass hasn’t lost its narrative potency — even now, in an era of constant, top-down deceit.

If A Most Violent Year has a weakness, it’s in that structural looseness.... Still, A Most Violent Year is an engrossing, often beautiful film, and a breakout opportunity for Isaac.

As a full-on celebration of beauty in all its forms, this gem of a contemporary melodrama invites viewers to plunge into a world of unerring taste and luxury, where even tragedy comes softly when it inevitably arrives.

Io Capitano takes a news story that’s mostly about numbers, and puts a human face on it.

Belushi also controls a wicked array of conspiratorial expressions with the audience. His smoldering pouts, crazed gleams, elevating eyebrows and erotically-contended smiles generate gleeful rabble-rousing excitement. And he can seem irresistibly funny in repose or invest minor slapstick opportunities with a streak of genius.

Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.

For all its explosive material, this is a fairly straightforward telling.

Sami Blood is a beautiful, haunting film, anchored by a startlingly accomplished lead performance.

Huppert and Greggory provide the emotional impact. They respond accordingly, imbuing their mutual suffering with an exacting and moving finesse.

The movie's devil-may-care freneticism is edgily amusing, almost liberating.

In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.

A great picture, 113 minutes of stirring stuff, set to the ironic lilt of Jean "Toots" Thielemans's harmonica and Harry Nilsson's theme tune, "Everybody's Talkin'."

It’s true that satire is the perfect weapon of reason, and Justin Simien deploys it with resourcefulness, cool assurance and eagle-eyed aim.

It’s all entertaining enough, in a shaggy way. But if the director can’t stay focused on his own subject, how are we expected to do so?

Herzog has nothing of lasting value to offer the vampire tradition. His Nosferatu is at best unintentional, fitfully risible camp.

Jarmusch manages to imbue banality with surprising beauty and humor.

Intimate, moving and superbly underplayed, Loving is every bit as soft-spoken and subtly implacable as its protagonists. It lives up to its title as a noun and a verb, with elegant, undeniable simplicity.

The morale of [Scorsese's] story is ultimately both tough and nuanced.

Their characters' desire (Scott Thomas and Zylberstein) -- no, need -- to repair their fragile bond feels as achingly real as the mother lode of hidden pain that gets exposed by the work of these two great actresses.

Hitchcock/Truffaut would be a stronger film had it spent more time with its title figures and less with the contemporary directors.

Gracefully explores Mobile's Mardi Gras celebrations and profiles the young people playing at royalty at these ceremonies' hearts.

Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.

Reprise says many cogent things about success, what it does to people and how they define it. But it also indicts the mechanics of the culture in a way that is neither Danish nor American but globalized and all the more poignant for it.

We are hooked into a low-tech but compelling dynamic -- between relatively static images and McElwee's sensitive, connective narrative.

The case is tried off-screen. Thank goodness for the maid (Sarah Flind), who runs home from her chores with tidings from the outside world -- we hear from the maid that Sir Bobby gave a helluva final argument. The jurors wept, the crowd went wild. Too bad we missed it.

The story that emerges has elements of romance, tragedy and even silent-movie comedy.

True to form for the horror-loving filmmaker behind Oscar winners “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water,” this is a dark affair, despite the occasional song. And yes, it’s a musical.

Sunrise feels more like an absorbing experiment than a supple success.

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy.

Smart, absorbing movie.

It’s all meticulously conceived and impressively staged, but becomes repetitive and monotonous, devolving for anyone not completely steeped in the “Dune” universe into a hazy orange-and-ocher soup of dust, smoke, flames and sand.