Yet much of the movie's validity stems from time and place recreated with such authenticity that you can sense the wet chill in the morning air and the new wax pungent on the old gym floor. [27 Feb 1987, Weekend, p.n29]

Some sequences...depict gunplay that wouldn’t be out of place in a conventional crime film. But Jia offers a stark presentation (no music, few edits) that discourages vicarious thrills; the violence is startling, not cool.

On its own terms, The Beguiled is a finely crafted, gemlike exercise in surface tension and subterranean stirrings. Seen through the prism of history and culture, it’s difficult not to feel that some essential truth has been lost in translation.

Luckily, The Mustang overcomes its most predictable story beats thanks to de Clermont-Tonnerre’s intimate, unfussy style and a quietly captivating performance by Schoenaerts.

Engrossing and infectiously enthusiastic documentary.

Childishly simple, but extremely funny.

Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again

It’s a lovely tale, even if it’s not quite the Cinderella story you might expect. The documentary also brings up some interesting points about how the Internet — the land of vitriolic trolls — can draw two very different people together to create great art from odds and ends.

Feels like something I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I just couldn't stomach.

At its core, this clever, wrenching, profound story underscores the tenacity of faith in the face of unfathomable cruelty. Evil may be good, story-wise. But virtue, at its most tested and tempered, is even better.

First Love isn’t art, by any means, but it’s way more entertaining than it should be. One brief sequence, involving an airborne car, was probably too crazy — not to mention too expensive — to actually film, so Miike renders it as animation.

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

Like the Dustin Hoffman film Straight Time, Schrader's picture sustains a certain interest despite its faults. You stick with both movies because of the promise of something authentic and tragically revealing, even though the promise is never fulfilled. These films don't really work, but they're the sort of films that don't work in interesting ways. [24 Mar 1978, p.D1]

Gray directs this handsome and evocative film with emotional restraint, making its archetypal title character a living individual whose moral journey is never simple.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Never mind that Best Intentions, which was filmed both as a six-part TV miniseries and a three-hour movie, is occasionally uneven and sometimes confusing. It remains a rare August pleasure, a film for grown-up audiences that challenges and enriches.

Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.

Coupled with the fact that the plant and animal life (hoopoes, zorilles and ground squirrels, among other beasties) really look African, and that the film's original score is by the great contemporary Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour, Kirikou and the Sorceress's surprising honesty about the banality of evil makes the movie -- even with all its magic -- feel truly authentic.

Snarky and sensitive in just the right measure, what initially looks like a glib exercise in adolescent mortification has the nerve to dig a little deeper. And it winds up mining a little bit of wisdom and compassion in the process.

Enlightening, inspiring and expertly crafted documentary.

It has, simultaneously, the exhilarating feel of a departure and the finality of a full stop.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

Water, set in 1930s India, is something pretty rare in the world of movies: an artistic muckraker. It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.

Fascinating facts and testimony.

It's all done without special effects, soaring strings or manufactured sentiment. Now, that's entertainment.

About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.

Exploding on the screen in a riot of movement, music and color.

The real value of poetry - of the contest itself - is not revealed until the closing credits, when we see the impressive list of colleges that the movie's four subjects have gone on to.