"Peace is a process, not an event," one unnamed activist says toward the end. Amen, sister.

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.

Trouble in Mind is something of a jumble, but never less than an intriguing one. It's an off-center romance, as unnerving as a half-remembered nightmare. [25 Apr 1986, p.D1]

Dern's dirtball performance gives After Dark, My Sweet a desperately needed quality of slugged-out authenticity -- he gives the movie its edge. If anything, though, Foley makes Thompson's killing universe too inviting, too sunny and comfortable. He's missed the essence of Thompson, but all in all, there are worse ways of failing.

The usual complement of classy Brits and a host of Indian extras add the final touches to this vastly enjoyable, sprawling entertainment. Lean truly catches the sunset over the British Empire. [18 Jan 1985, p.25]

I, Daniel Blake is about human value: disposable and abstract in one context; eternal, inviolable and sacred in another. They might underline the point a bit too thickly, but Loach and Laverty count on their audience to discern the difference, and to act accordingly.

Though swiftly paced, The Counterfeiters convincingly examines the complex nature of humanity under inhuman conditions

Wedding has enough coincidences, screamfests, drunken rants and shock revelations to fill a season of "Desperate Housewives," but it comes across as finely textured drama, thanks to the performers, who make their characters so persuasive and three-dimensional, we're too mesmerized to care about the story's more overwrought or histrionic passages.

Most important, does The Dark Knight Rises achieve the impossible, which is to bring a cherished cinematic chapter to a close, yet manage to leave fans feeling not desolate but cheered? To that all-important question, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

In an effort to make Fawcett a logical, upstanding guy, the story never fully convinces us of his obsession with returning to find the lost city.

Few films are more assured in their storytelling or build more forcefully, irrevocably toward their resolution.

If “Infinity War” was about failure, “Endgame” is, ironically, all about acceptance and moving on. After 11 long years, the Infinity Saga is finally, fulfillingly over. There is no post-credit scene. But oh, what a going-away party these old friends have thrown for themselves.

Slow going, but it provides an absorbing glimpse of a rarely seen side of Chinese life.

Hip, lurid and improbably lovable, The Guard is easily the best guy-love comedy of the summer, with Cheadle and Gleeson's riffs and repartee tumbling back and forth as if they've been trading lies over Guinness forever.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale that packs a more poignant punch than most entries in the superpowered canon.

With Ex Machina, Garland makes an impressive debut as a director, spinning an unsettling futuristic thriller with the expertise and exquisite taste of a seasoned veteran.

Its magnificence is that it takes itself dead serious. It's not entertainment, but it's sure a piece of toughness.

What makes The Tribe unforgettable is the filmmaker’s attention to composition and staging, with camera work by cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych that goes from implacable stasis to poetic fluidity with seamless, expressive ease.

As Morvern, Morton is disconcertingly enigmatic, often bordering on catatonic. But she carries the movie effortlessly. And even though we're on the outside looking in, she carries us along, too.

This is Audiard’s first English-language film, and he evinces sure instincts with both the visual and spoken vernaculars. The Sisters Brothers looks terrific and, propelled by Desplat’s beautiful music, ambles along with pleasing, if routinely episodic, ease until its unexpectedly touching conclusion.

The most obvious problem occurs between Snipes and Sciorra. Lee's so interested in the ripple effect they cause, he almost forgets the affair itself. We see anger all over Harlem and Bensonhurst, but we're barely allowed into the main bedroom, where the real hell must be taking place.

The movie does not demystify a rarefied world, or paint an emotionally accessible portrait of the artist, but rather assembles a somewhat stuffy compendium of literary references and insider-y bons mots aimed at tickling theater aficionados.

The three leads, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Emma Watson (Hermione), give their most charming performances to date.

The genius of Zootopia is that it works on two levels: It’s a timely and clever examination of the prejudices endemic to society, and also an entertaining, funny adventure about furry creatures engaged in solving a mystery.

Paul Thomas Anderson shows off the same sort of quirky smarts that Joel and Ethan Coen did in "Blood Simple."

A touching documentary on the immigrant experience -- or at least one very tough slice of it.

Just isn't as fresh, focused or uniformly funny as "Waiting for Guffman."

Expertly acted, Chariots is an undeniable rouser. However, there's also something a trifle much about its very wholesomeness and likability.

The wacky incongruity works when debuting director Mamet has tongue in cheek. But all too often he's rechewing film noir, Hitchcock twists and MacGuffins, as well as the Freudian mumbo-jumbo already masticated tasteless by so many cine-kids.

It’s a heady dramedy, albeit without terribly many tears or laughs, except those that arise, perhaps unintentionally, from the incongruity of Stevens being repellent.

There’s plenty to look at while we’re waiting for the titular Queen, and it’s often quite pretty: Shots of rabbits, sheep, deer, yaks, foxes, pikas, bears, other big cats and a miscellaneous assortment of birds abound. But this is not your typical Animal Planet or National Geographic film.

Like silent meditation, “A Love Song” isn’t for everyone. The movie requires its audience to both remain still and stay engaged. Those are skills many directors no longer value, so they’re skills many moviegoers no longer possess. But for those who will do the work, “A Love Song” is a special film that will stay with you long after the clamor of real life rushes back in around you.

Undeniably, the picture now and again supplies that edge-of-the-seat sensation; yet, by action-adventure standards, Speed is leaden and strangely poky. It never seems to shift into overdrive and let fly.

This is a handsome, hugely enjoyable movie that invites the spectators to reflect on precisely what they value, both on screen and off. “Is it good?” is a question repeatedly asked throughout Non-Fiction. When it comes to the myriad subjects at hand, the debate rages on. As for the movie itself, the answer is a resounding yes.

There are gray hairs on some of the people in this fascinating film: Jimmy Buffett, Tom Jones (yes, that Tom Jones — he played the 2019 show) and others. But the energy that the film puts out is vital and full of sap.

First and best, it's got a rip-roaring story. It sweeps you along, borne effortlessly by believable if flawed characters, as it flows toward the inevitable tragedy. But it's also got a heart: It watches as a child harsh of judgment learns that judgment is too easy a posture for the world, and it's best to love with compassion. [07Nov1997 Pg G.01]

This screwball comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck isn't as well regarded as others in the genre, but even if it's not exactly top-drawer, it's still jazzy fun. [24 Dec 1987, p.D7]

It may be longwinded here and there, but Mississippi Masala jumps with life. There's an ebullient, lusty mood to it. The characters have a crazy, eccentric rhythm of their own. It's fun to watch them be.

With Much Ado About Nothing, Whedon has crafted an endearing bagatelle, made with equal parts brio and love, ambition and pared-down modesty.

The resulting film offers a unique and revealing — but fundamentally incomplete — perspective on the ongoing war in Gaza.

Visually captivating even when it’s narratively uneven.

Ruthless People has an enchanting comic premise -- everyone in the film is either an S.O.B. or wants to become one. But ultimately, the black comedy is not pursued very far -- the movie's too good-natured for its own good. And the elaborately worked-out farce structure, involving a victim who may be either kidnaped or dead, is mostly wasted on a style of humor that, by comparison, makes Buddy Hackett seem the very soul of sophistication. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Haunting little film, whose chaotic universe is churned up by the conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

Tinged with madness and heartbreak, Endless Poetry is the unmistakable byproduct of, as the character of Alejandro puts it, “a heart capable of loving the entire world.”

This very thinly sliced character study of beautiful if benighted adolescence is more a pre-coming-of-age tale, one that takes us close to, but not through, the transformative acquisition of good judgment.

A pretty dry cracker.

Argento and Aattou deliver appropriately outsize performances to fit the movie's sense of extravagant escapism, and Claude Sarraute delivers a slyly witty performance as the elderly lady carried away by Ryno's Scheherazade-like tale.

A vivid portrait of a society in the midst of wrenching change, but it transcends its immediate context to become a thoughtful, even unforgettable, chamber piece, performed with exquisite subtlety by two fine actresses.

You're left, as with certain vivid dreams, filled with memorable images but not completely able to account for what you just experienced.

It's the most exaggerated example yet of the abiding imbalance in modernist filmmaking, where an abundance of texture fails to conceal a minimum of substance, although it frequently makes the act of concealment pictorially exciting. [27 Mar 1981, p.C1]

Writer-director Zach Cregger’s script takes these various paint-by-number horror elements — a vulnerable debutante, an unfamiliar house, a hidden room — and colors outside the lines.

For all its simplicity, Tracks the movie is a poignant, deeply emotional story.

At times, "Princess" resembles a widescreen Hollywood western, with exhilarating Steadicam shots of horsemen galloping across broad plains and corpse-strewn fields.

Steve Rash directs the firm in a clean, observant and confidently transparent style - making an impressive debut after several years of TV pop-music specials - and demonstrates a flair for expressing Holly's appeal. [18 Aug 1978, p.B1]

As intoxicating as the flower it's named for, and its characters, most of them as flawed and fascinating as the film itself, seem intoxicated by the overpowering scent.

It’s a bold, claustrophobic movie that wouldn’t work without Byrne.

Ultimately, as is made overwhelmingly clear, this is a film about forgiveness. So allow us to extend the same grace to some clunky writing.

This is a movie of myriad worthy, even urgently necessary, ideas; when it reaches its climax, it goes completely haywire in a preposterous, increasingly scattershot sci-fi pastiche.

A sprawling yet engrossing documentary.

Too routinely formulaic to be anything more than modestly diverting. But as modest diversions go it cruises along at a reasonably brisk pace and, in the smaller details -- the off-in-the-margins doodling -- it has its rewards. [20 July 1988]

Incisive and possibly a bit melodramatic as it lays out the reasons and the results of the violent campaign and marshals indignation on behalf of the victims while crying out for Western engagement.

As the title of the film suggests, it tells a story involving as much human drama as geopolitical maneuvering. It’s a story of personalities and, at times, the fragile male ego.

1917 is impressive but oddly distancing; ultimately stirring but too often gimmicky.

The movie is often poignant but leavened with humor.

Though pleasant to watch, Torun’s feature debut feels more like a meandering montage than a structured narrative, and it could easily be half as long.

Spend some time there, thanks to the documentary Waste Land, and you start to get the sense that, amid the trash, something really is blooming.

It is not a story of justice, but of a kind of standoff between good and evil. Initially, there seems precious little of the former.

With wit, style and ruthlessness, Fargeat has made a movie that’s an example of the soulless pop-culture object she’s spoofing.

Troubling and powerful film, lingering on screen well into the final credits and in the minds of its audience long after the house lights have come on.

Extraordinary documentary.

The movie's pace is unhurried by Hollywood standards, but it's all the richer in character detail.

Afghan Star goes much deeper, eloquently conveying the tensions, small victories and shattering setbacks of a fragile democracy struggling to regain a once-flourishing culture.

As lighthearted, late-summer escapism goes, Logan Lucky is an amusing if convoluted and undisciplined bagatelle. As a hotly anticipated comeback, it feels like a slightly dippy, ultimately disposable warm-up of a director whose brains, chops and judicious taste we need more than ever.

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.

As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, The Starling Girl plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s “Women Talking."

Even ardent Pattinson fandom won’t be enough to convert mainstream American audiences to the art-house director’s dark outlook and elliptical style.

“Nosferatu” haunts as you watch it and vanishes when the lights come up, leaving a viewer shaken but not stirred. Still: Fangs for the memories.

This is a movie with an admittedly leftist slant. Some of the scenes are gruesome and powerful. But its politics are distracting, making the film less an artistic undertaking and more a political statement. [12 Feb 1982, p.11]

It takes what could be called the Chinese equivalent of chutzpah to make a movie with three of the world's most beautiful and talented women -- Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- and to be more interested in the male character.

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.

Davies is a master of the slow build, lyrically evoking the dreaminess and gravity of his subject and her verse.

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

The lean and efficient screenplay, based on the book "Lost Moon," by Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, is full of the terse poetry and dry humor of people in crisis.

If ever a match were made in cine-literary heaven it would be Charles Dickens and Armando Iannucci, each a master of probing social criticism, slashing wit and floridly besotted love of language.

The first Latina actress to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — the “EGOT” superfecta — Moreno doesn’t just seem to keep getting better and better, but more and more interesting.

Clemency, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, isn’t really a death row drama in the same way that “Just Mercy” is. Rather, it’s a character study of a witness who, vicariously, is a stand-in for each of us.

Far from being a historical cautionary tale, Command and Control looks forward, not backward. Kenner’s unsettling film casts its worried gaze not at the accidents that already have taken place, but at the ones yet to happen.

Anyone interested in serious film should absolutely not miss it.

Van Sant's sensibility is wholly original, wholly fresh. "My Own Private Idaho" adds a new ingredient: a kind of boho sweetness. I loved it.

We may enjoy watching the spectacles, but we don't much care for, or even have a feeling for, the guy in the cockpit.

Propelled by Deadwyler’s unforgettable portrayal, Till leaves us with a sense of an indictment still unanswered in 2022.

Though 45 minutes longer than the original release, still feels thinner, less complex, more mythic and far less compelling.

The film is ultimately too self-regarding, too smug to be transcendent itself.

Like "After Tiller" a few years ago, Trapped is lucid and illuminating about the issue of abortion as a constitutional right. But in addition to being instructive, it brims with compassion, leaving viewers with haunting images of women we never even got to see in the first place.

Its juiciest bits, which include Uncle Liu musing on meat buns as a childhood friend of his is beaten to a pulp for sleeping with the mobster’s wife, are reminiscent of early Quentin Tarantino. But here, scenes unspool at a far more meditative clip.

Few will emerge from its story of intelligence tradecraft and egregious lapses in oversight without feeling seriously freaked out.

The horror auteur’s third film is a sci-fi epic that feels both comfortably familiar and fresh.