A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), a sworn enemy of cliché.

A wicked delight. Adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoe Heller's acclaimed novel, it's at once a comedy of cluelessness and class, a melodrama of two women in the grips of wildly inappropriate obsessions, and a "Fatal Attraction"-style thriller.

Loach hurls us into the fracas, circa 1920, and creates such a vivid sense of the nuts and bolts of guerilla war you almost forget you are watching a period piece. Unlike the epic sweep of Neil Jordan's "Billy Collins," which spoke in a syntax closer to Hollywood's, "The Wind" doesn't paint over its political arguments with a patina of nostalgia.

Comedy and suspense, satire and shame are all mashed together--with breezy confidence.

Thanks to everyone involved, the movie radiates a hundred pleasures.

Summer hasn't arrived, but the funniest riff on a summer movie genre has already landed.

For anyone who grew up worshiping at the shrine of Julie Christie, the notion that she could be playing a white-haired woman drifting into senility is a jolt to the system. But her radiance, beauty and talent are undiminished: she's hauntingly, heartbreakingly good.

It happens to be one of the most wildly (and disturbingly) inventive animated films I've seen.

It has the feel of a classic coming-of-age story. It's the sleeper of the summer.

As a "Revenge of the Nerds" redux, Superbad isn't perfect. But it's super close.

Brilliantly strange, often funny and ultimately heartbreaking film.

It sounds grimmer than it plays, thanks to Jenkins's sardonic, deadpan humor and the superb cast, who invest these damaged characters with rich, flawed, hilarious humanity. This bittersweet X-ray of American family dynamics may not be a Hallmark-card notion of a holiday movie, but it's one any son or daughter can take to heart.

A great horror movie is like a good shrink--and a lot cheaper, too. It purges us through petrification. That horror movie, thankfully, has arrived. It's called The Orphanage," and it is seriously scary.

Schygulla's heartbreaking performance--like the movie itself--will stay with you long after the film's quietly devastating final frame.

Tropic Thunder is the funniest movie of the summer--so funny, in fact, that you start laughing before the film itself has begun.

Most of the time, Demme's deliberately unstable mixture of moods and genres produces electric results. Rachel Getting Married takes a familiar subject--the raw nerves of American family life with--and draws fresh blood.

Eastwood tells his haunting, sorrowful saga with such a sure, steady hand, only a very hardened cynic could fail to be moved.

Desplechin is an inspired impurist. His Christmas Tale is untidy, overstuffed and delicious: a genuine holiday feast.

Lyrical, original, misshapen and deeply felt, this is one flawed beauty of a movie.

The images of war that Folman and his chief illustrator, David Polonsky, conjure up have a feverish, infernal beauty. Dreams and reality jumble together.

An extraordinary documentary.

There hasn't been a studio movie as unapologetically adult, sophisticated, and nuanced as Up in the Air in some time.

Crazy Heart gets to you like a good country song--not because it tells you something new, but because it tells it well. It's the singer, not the song.

Rabbit Hole deftly sidesteps sentimentality and still wrenches your heart.

Urgent, gritty, sometimes weirdly funny, The Fighter might be considered his first feel-good movie. But Russell's too honest and acute an observer to serve up affirmation without leaving a subversive aftertaste of ambivalence and unease.

If the film has a problem, it's a kind of excess of goodness at the expense of imaginative excitement. The real hero is the psychiatrist, played with a riffing Jewish beat by Hirsch as a counterpoint to the tight Wasp rhythms of Conrad's family. There's a feeling of therapy more than revelation, but perhaps for our multifariously sick society therapy has become revelation. This seems to have been a major point in Guest's novel, and Redford has dramatized it with integrity, honor and compassion. [22 Sept 1980, p.76]

[Stillman] has a keen sense of group dynamics and a fine comic ear.

It is an intense study of the human condition, and man's relationship with God, aka the Big Kahuna.