As Finders Keepers gets weirder, it also gets better and deeper. Somehow, Carberry and Tweel have managed to fashion an inspirational tale out of what one local newscaster calls a “freak show.”

The film “The Beast” is a Russian nesting doll of genres: a belle epoque romance set inside a contemporary serial-killer thriller set inside a dystopian sci-fi drama.

Director Pascale Ferran makes this a sort of opera of two bodies, as the characters discover not only each other but themselves. And the French filmmaker cannily turns their corporeal discoveries into a moral mission, two desperately lonely souls crying for spiritual freedom in a world of moral constriction.

In an era that seems fatally mired in fear, anger and mistrust, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood arrives as something more than a movie. It feels like an answered prayer.

It's a foregone conclusion that The Forty-Year-Old Version will be compared with films by Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Judd Apatow, the latter of whom is referenced in the title and the steady stream of vulgar humor that courses through Blank’s dialogue. But even with those obvious references, she’s crafted something all her own.

Kuosmanen has given us another affair to remember, this time about love as something for which you’d not just go to the ends of the Earth, but to the beginning of time.

What starts out trivial gradually turns into a drama about big ideas: mortality and the meaning of life; the value of relationships and the vulnerability they require.

7 Prisoners is an angry film, but Moratto, crucially, reserves his most intense judgment for an inhumane system, not the characters who are trapped by it, each in different ways.

Smart, subtle, deceptively simple little.

What this intelligent, balanced, devastating movie puts before us is nothing less than a contest between good and evil.

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.