Spike Lee generally refrains from stacking the deck in favor of one side or the other, presenting the evidence and the analysis and letting us make up our own minds.
Nanny McPhee Returns follows the honorable tradition of the best of England’s children’s literature.
As Akira tells a sympathetic cashier at the grocery store where he shops, “it was an awful mess.”
Soul Kitchen wants to be a light comedy about a good guy who gets a series of bad breaks.
A well-done character study can teach us a lot about how someone else thinks and experiences the world.
Gangster movies usually come in one of three flavors.
Who needs perfection when you’ve got this much sheer, joyful grace?
A story like this could easily get sticky-sweet.
This has been a good summer for something we haven’t seen much in the movies: the female midlife crisis.
The film is an upper, thanks to its inventive visuals, crisp editing, and constant stream of wry observational barbs.
Other movies may have done talk this well, but I’ve never seen one do it better.
At the film’s core is a real-life murder mystery that’s being investigated by the director of a women’s center.
Johnnie To’s trademark standoffs are the best thing about Vengeance.
Airplane! suggests a Marx Brothers farce wrapped around an Arthur Hailey melodrama and given a couple of whirls in the blender.
It’s hard to know what to see sometimes when you don’t read reviews in advance, since trailers can be so unreliable.
Things get interesting when filmmakers and actors reminisce about how their movies got made.
By the end of this majestically powerful film, we don’t just understand the need for art.
The film mixes documentary-style realism with fictional techniques to create a gripping story with an operatic sense of danger and dread.
It’s a pretty good B movie, but it would have been a better one if it hadn’t tried to be more.
The Gleaners and I is a lightfooted meditation from an aging master so comfortable with her medium that her work feels like play.