Patient and plodding -- but as realized by John Malkovich, in his directorial debut, utterly absorbing.

A solemn, subtly structured, beautifully acted and ultimately hypnotic movie.

Japanese Story is a simple, austerely told tale. But there is something memorable, even haunting, about it.

[Darabont] makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it.

Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.

Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness. [22 July 1996, p.95]

Results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.

Maybe these lives are, objectively speaking, inconsequential. But they have a resonance that big, sappy "relationship" pictures ought to envy.

[Salles]'s imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting.

Comic, suspenseful, romantic.

All the actors in No Man's Land are wonderfully alive, fractious and unpredictable. Their performances also help break down the schematics and turn this into an emotionally potent, powerfully thoughtful and finally tragic experience.

It is a measure of its complexity--and of the forces Penn and Sarandon have held in reserve during their hypnotic struggle for his soul--that its final moments leave us awash in emotion.

It is the hilarious business of Shrek, a delightful new animated feature based on the William Steig book, to subvert all the well-worn expectations of its genre.

They bring their characters to good, slightly surprising, quite satisfying places. And leave us beaming happily.

A true movie rarity: a brutally honest romance. If you loved "Sleepless in Seattle," you'll just hate it.

Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this excellent adventure.

A brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism.

Seems to encompass all the humor, sadness and weirdness of ordinary life in an utterly winning, morally acute way.

A formally elegant, subtly savage and powerfully affecting film.

Two cheers, at least, for permitting the past to appear not as a stern lesson but as a delicious irrelevance. [10 Mar 1986]

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

What we come to care most about in writer-director Joshua Marston's film is how his heroine achieves the state promised by his title, Maria Full of Grace. Our emotional investment in her derives primarily from the astonishing performance of Moreno, 23.

It proposes that you can make an extraordinarily satisfying comedy without writing a joke. Subtly played and elegantly directed, this is an Adults Only movie in the best sense of the term.

There's something old-fashioned and dauntless about the way the film pushes past our initial resistance to its setting and subject matter, past pain, past defeat, to make this point. Because it rejects easy victories, this may be one of the few inspirational movies that could actually inspire someone, somewhere, sometime.

It is a powerful portrait of a slightly befuddled man who, when inhuman demands were placed on him, found within himself an unexpected response.

Beautiful Girls is always in touch with reality but never drowned in it. [19 February 1996, p.64]

More important, we should take into account the fact that this is really quite a good movie--a character-driven (as opposed to whammy-driven) suspense drama--dark, fatalistic and, within its melodramatically stretched terms, emotionally plausible.

Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.