Gorgeously photographed, and with a minimalist score by Fred Frith, Leaning Into the Wind offers viewers a welcome chance to consider the work of an artist who defies the recent commodification cult to embrace the ephemeral and the nominally “worthless.”

Amid all this dazzling artifice, the film's most authentic source of power comes from its star.

That's the movie: It's taking us inside the burqa to the woman.

My Beautiful Laundrette is quirky and fresh and ambitious and pretty much everything a movie should be, except good.

As admirable as Moors’s oblique style is, though, Blue Caprice doesn’t offer the sense of catharsis or closure, let alone new information, that makes it more than a cold, if disciplined, directorial exercise.

Maggie’s Plan exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.

That's the problem with The Sure Thing. All the good lines are given to Cusack -- he's always "on," narrating his own life in the revved-up spiel of a sports announcer. For Cusack's Gib, life is performance -- his long quill of a nose even seems to look for his audience's ticklish spots. But why would he bother with Alison? Screenwriters Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts have sketched her as an annoying scold, leaving Zuniga little to do but bray disapproval at everything. [4 Mar 1985, p.B3]

Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor.

A thoroughly engrossing documentary.

Vikander never goes for the easy emotion, though, choosing instead to play against what conventional melodrama would dictate her reaction should be. This understatedness is always the right choice, and it makes for a far more effective — and affecting — film.

The lines are drawn early on in "Beats," which is surprisingly tense and combative given the overwhelmingly positive and playful music in the band's catalogue. But that makes what could have been a sappy, fanboy loveletter a compelling look at the group's inner workings.

The fact that Guy-Blaché isn’t a household name — even after making nearly 1,000 films — is due pure and simply to sexism, and literally being written out of history, either through animus or laziness. Thank goodness “Be Natural” is here to set a brilliant, distinguished, invaluable record straight.

Though dark and harrowing, explicit and unsparing, the movie proves a riveting biography of these burnt-out icons and their iconoclastic half-decade. Symbolism aside, Sid & Nancy is an indelible drama of undying love and meaningless decline.

Oldroyd’s brilliance (and Pugh’s) is to probe this age-old archetype — the Gothic antiheroine, the adulteress — and find pathos and cruelty. It’s also to uncover the complex web of hierarchies — of race and class, as well as gender — that ensnare and empower her.

A deft, tense, pure thriller, the movie has great star turns and is brilliantly directed, but it began as an extremely well-crated screenplay by Russell Gewirtz. It's professionally entertaining.

Shayda could have been a horror story. Instead, it’s a survivor’s tale, and it’s suffused with gratitude and love.

Like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” this is a movie rooted in the scruffy but golden days of the 1970s, populated by strivers and schemers and would-be stars whose breakthrough is as much a function of willpower as raw talent.

It manages the trick of being both an unironic sci-fi action-adventure flick and a zippy parody of one. It’s exciting, funny, self-aware, beautiful to watch and even, for a flickering instant or two, almost touching.

Ewing joins a generation of filmmakers who are using every piece of cinematic grammar available to communicate the emotional core of their stories and characters, fusing the impressionistic liberties of drama with more visceral truths to startling and potent effect.

It's a movie that walks on air.

Crudup gives a performance that is by turns scary, heartbreaking, grotesque and funny as hell.

In Sheridan's warm and glowing treatment, the moral of the story feels less like a reheated fable than like something utterly, indescribably original.

Still, for all its attractively appointed torpor, Corsage offers a provocative retort to the fetishistic depictions of Elisabeth that have become commodified in Austria over the past 125 years. It tears open the candy box to reveal something poisonous at its center.

It's a half-baked stopover in the big house, relying on Eastwood, rather than a particular prison theme, for focus and continuity. For better and worse, Eastwood's peculiarly intimidating personality - solitary, sarcastic, fearless - has become its own predominant, suggestive theme. Escape From Alcatraz is poorly orchestrated, but the Eastwood melody still comes through, laconic and clear. [22 June 1979, p.C1]

The film is a documentary, pure and simple. But the movie, by director Rick Rowley, plays out like something of a murder mystery.

A hilarious new addition to the wonderfully warped Generation X-Files.

Engaging entertainment and a great work of art.

With its energetic cast and insistent street score, it still manages to be poignant without becoming bathetic, and violent without being exploitative.

Whatever your familiarity with [Liza's] indelible performances, the amount of deep cuts and candid behind-the-scenes material is an archivist’s dream.

Choose Me holds up the mirror, not only to its own characters, but to the conundrums of '80s life.

The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.

The remake adds 24 minutes and subtracts most of the suspense.

While qualifying as the most gorgeously appointed and finely detailed version of the novel so far, still lacks the element of essential fire to make it come fully, even subversively, to life.

Using a cockeyed, surreal style harking back to Monty Python-ism, writer- director Peter Duncan illuminates the tragedy of all true believers whose faith depends upon keeping ears and eyes firmly shut.

The whole endeavor runs a high risk of drowning in melodrama. But the movie avoids that pitfall, because nothing about the story or characters is easy or straightforward.

You don't have to be a horse nut to fall for Buck, one of those rare documentaries whose subject is so inherently fascinating that a fictional character could hardly compete.

If the zombie genre steadfastly refuses to die, we can be grateful to Shaun of the Dead for breathing fresh, diverting life into the form, with subtle visual humor and a smart, impish sense of fun.

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

As he demonstrated with the recession-themed “99 Homes,” Bahrani is a cynical observer of the forces underling cultural upheaval; the story of “Tiger,” at times, feels more schematic and archetypal than wholly lived by real people. But its ominous message — watch out for the person whose back you’re stepping on — has never been more timely.

What's so powerful about the film is the rich stories it tells and how it leads them like so many human tributaries to one black, bubbling source.

As directed by Rob Reiner, Stand by Me has a quality of seriousness, and of relaxation, that you hardly ever see in movies made about kids. It's at its best when its characters are just hanging out, razzing each other, feeling the summertime -- when it's like "Diner" for 12-year-olds. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

On screen, Reds evolves into an earnestly muddled mishmash of Romance and History. An intriguing, ambitious disappointment, it launches the Christmas movie season on a note of droopy-spirited seriousness...It isn't the running time alone that makes Reds a tough sell and a discouraging endurance test; it's the lack of an emotional payoff strong enough to justify an epic trek down the corridors of history. [4 Dec 1981, p.D1]

Seems propelled by a doomed sense of inevitability and is all the more gripping for it.

Retrograde is a handsome film, ironically, conveying a sense of the country that is at stake, and its people. And Heineman is smart to frame the story around a single individual, as he did in his fact-based drama about war correspondent Marie Colvin, “A Private War.”

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

The film documents how Dion has remained a pop culture fixture in the past decade, from appearances on late night shows to a music video with Deadpool.

Using home movies, photos, a brilliant soundtrack and candid, articulate interviews, director Stacy Peralta (one of the original Z-boys) details the birth of a pop culture phenomenon.

Zappa gives its subject his well-earned due within the rock firmament. But even more valuable, Winter gives Zappa pride of place among the most important composers of the 20th century, sharing some extraordinary performances of his little-known classical work.

Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

Director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill, the team responsible for "Halloween" and "The Fog," have come up with another B-movie thriller whose ambitions get exceeded by respectable results. [10 July 1981, p.17]

Just in time for the holiday travel season, Flight brings audiences perhaps the most harrowing scenes of a troubled airplane ever committed to film.

Tucker came up with a classic, but poor Coppola has turned a great American tragedy into a gas-guzzling human comedy

99 Homes isn’t just a straightforward drama. It’s a suspense movie.

Super/Man is a weeper, to be sure, for the reminder it brings to fans that this Man of Steel was only flesh and blood.

Briskly paced, bristling with Sorkin’s distinctive verbal fusillades, seamlessly blending conventional courtroom procedural with protest reenactments and documentary footage (including Wexler’s), The Trial of the Chicago 7 offers an absorbing primer in a chapter of American history that was both bizarre and ruefully meaningful.

A sneaky tale of savagery in the dehumanizing digital age, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud” is as bleak a warning as you’ll find in theaters this year, cautioning against the corrosive combination of late capitalism, the internet and human nature.

Propelled by a funny, charismatic turn by Hewson (who infused such unpredictable energy in the terrific Apple TV Plus series “Bad Sisters”), Flora and Son is a feel-good movie that largely earns its sentimental uplift, one sick burn and soaring musical number at a time.

It's an updated Capra fantasy that goes for the sweet rather than the tart.

Vibrant and engaging documentary.

May just be the best in its genre… Entertainment and radical street preaching, all rolled into one. If it tells black kids not to try this at home, it also revels cinematically in blam-blam-you're-dead. This is what makes the movie maddening -- and what gives it strength.

A provocative and uncomfortable comedy.

Certainly no feel-good flick of the summer. But it's always tough and honest.

Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.

Cartel Land reveals a culture that spans the border, full of death and dismaying behavior on both sides, but thriving all the same.

Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes.

Explodes in a burst of energy, musical chops and an eerie political prescience that makes it feel like something beamed from some past-is-future time warp.

It’s a simple, gentle tale that’s told beautifully but feels hollow — like a eulogy for an acquaintance.

In the end, An Honest Liar becomes a far more layered tale than it starts out to be.

Overlong and repetitious, the film doesn't live up to the high expectations set by its charming opening scene, but the musical numbers, which often feature the original wigs and trashy Ikettes gear, are handily directed by Brian Gibson of the HBO movie The Josephine Baker Story. The mitigating factor is that Bassett overcomes the limitations of the role to become more than a punching bag.

As a history lesson every bit as clarifying as it is cockeyed, Hail Satan? possesses unarguable value. But it also serves as a reminder of why we embrace nonconformity, pluralism and tolerance.

Fans of the director may be a little mystified by what at first seems like something of a commercial sellout, by a director known for more challenging material. And indeed, The Whistlers has more than enough sex and violence to satisfy the average action movie fan. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find a mother lode of meaning just below the surface.

In addition to “pervert” — which Wojtowicz makes sound like a badge of honor — the film offers many other seemingly contradictory assessments of Wojtowicz, mainly from his own mouth: troll, Goldwater Republican, McCarthy peacenik, crazy man, crook, romantic. He was all of those things and more, as The Dog makes vividly obvious.

Despite its unconventional source material, it turns out to be surprisingly well-crafted, elevated by breathtaking central performances and the stylish, slyly knowing sensibility of director Janicza Bravo.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the premise of naive idiots attempting to get closer to death. (See: “Flatliners”). But it’s the ingenious combination of horror and human connection that makes Talk to Me, well, something to talk about.

Nichols establishes such a grounded sense of atmosphere and such superb control of mood and pacing, that the odd hiccup barely matters.

As if love triangles aren't complicated enough, the bittersweet Peruvian film Undertow offers a couple of twists on the archetype.

The story is so nasty, so depraved and troubling, that viewers may well wonder at its value beyond prurient interest.

There's such a sense of overall intensity, you know you have been though something powerful.

At its best, The Last Station vividly illustrates the enduring Russian gift for iconography, whether spiritual, secular or something in between.

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.

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

Listen Up Philip makes literary talent seem less like a blessing than a curse.

Structurally, The Wonders suffers from awkward bulges and sags, especially toward the end. Still, it’s a beautiful, richly imagined ride that doesn’t end as much as evaporate into a dreamlike puff of smoke.

Seen now, the movie seems as timely as it is outdated, its themes contemporary even if its clothing and hairdos are anything but.

Wonder Woman may not cure all the ills of pop culture’s superhero-saturation syndrome; in fact, in many ways it succumbs to some of its worst excesses. But at least it brings an exhilarating, vicarious kick to the sagging, bagging table.

Amalric is low-key and immensely likable, but what makes his Paul a worthwhile companion on a three-hour voyage is his utter sincerity, coupled with self-aware irony. He's not a phony, a user, a Romeo or a slut. His earnestness is his best quality; he tries so hard to do the right thing, sometimes only failing by a little. [10 Oct 1997, p.N48]

If the metaphor of xenophobia and nationalism is obvious — and it is, to the point of eye-rolling — the telling of the tale has a certain poetry.

And what makes this autopsy of a love affair funny is Tom's ironic, morose commentary as he revisits what happened.

A wise, funny film about the little leaps of faith it takes to just get through the day.

For better and for worse, Spencer conveys one thing quite powerfully: the feeling of living in a rarefied, indifferent world that doesn’t seem to value independent women, much less people.

Roundly entertaining.

Despite the literal and figurative pains it takes to persuade viewers of its own importance, The Revenant can’t escape the clutches of crippling self-regard.

The film is nowhere near the level of Pontecorvo's masterpiece, or even his subsequent flawed allegory on Vietnam, "Burn!," but is clearly the work of a natural coming into the full range of his powers.

The Kingmaker chills the soul by presenting shantytown residents and school kids who extol the Marcos regime and even endorse its eight-year period of martial law.

All this sporting entertainment turns out to be an unexpectedly mellow affair of the heart, with Bernal completely winning you over.

House Party isn't a great movie, but it's heartfelt and enormously winning. In its own modest, ramshackle way, it manages to seem innocent even when it's profane. And maybe a party that demonstrates that those two qualities aren't necessarily opposed is exactly the kind we need.

No Sudden Move could also refer to the snail’s pace of social change. But race is just a subtext — albeit an enriching one — in a piece of entertainment that feels like watching, say, Ocean’s 11, but with a social conscience.

This spooky film's ostensible subject—an environmental illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity—is merely a starting place for this mesmerizing horror movie, feminist tract and medical mystery.