question: Thanks to Emmy-worthy performances from a reputable cast, The Normal Heart is not only a powerful, heartbreaking drama, but also a vital document of events leading up to and through the early AIDS crisis.

numbered reviews: 1. There is less reporting on poverty in America than on any other major societal issue. So it is with AIDS. That alone makes The Normal Heart an important film.
2. Although The Normal Heart is a work of fiction, the stories it tells about the emerging AIDS crisis in America are honest and heartbreakingly real, thanks to deeply affecting performances.
3. Despite its flaws, this iteration of The Normal Heart also exhorts us to remember.
4. If anger and suffering were all there were to The Normal Heart, watching it would be torture. Luckily, it has heart to match its guts.
5. proves that, sometimes, art does a better job of understanding history than the actual record
6. Larry Kramer's blistering cri de coeur about the early days of the AIDS plague gets a solidly respectful but flawed treatment from Ryan Murphy.
7. It's an impressive, relevant, and moving ensemble drama that I can't recommend enough.
8. The collaboration between Murphy and Kramer seemed like a natural from the moment it was announced, and now we have the proof of that sensible decision -- in all its incendiary, heart-wrenching magnificence.
9. Buoyed by A-list star power, The Normal Heart beats erratically for more than two hours, yet delivers a gut punch in its climax.
10. Absolutely retains its significance, it's the execution from director Ryan Murphy that's worthy of dismissal, allowing a heavy-handedness to drive the provocative material into frustrating repetition.


question: Offering a unique look at modern fears and our fascination with film, The Wolfpack is a fascinating -- and ultimately haunting -- urban fable.

numbered reviews: 1. The sheltered world of the Angulos, informed by cinema more than the teeming city right outside their apartment windows, is a haunting and utterly unique one.
2. What a sad, strange, intoxicating movie.
3. At its best, The Wolfpack helps us to see the cinema in the world, and not the other way around.
4. [It] has to be seen to be believed.
5. [VIDEO ESSAY] You can't help but root for these highly articulate and reserved kids to make good in the real world. You just might be hearing more from the "Wolfpack" as filmmakers in their own right.
6. The dysfunctional Duggars of Arkansas have nothing on the Angulos of New York's Lower East Side.
7. It's a deeply strange success story, but it's self-aware and humorous, and full of frankly amazing revelations.
8. The Wolfpack is a reminder that much of the "crap" we decry has the potential to liberate, offering a bridge off the island of terror we call the nuclear family.
9. It's partially a story of the role cinema can play in helping connect viewers to the world, of helping people get find and hold hope, but it's also a capturing and catalyst for developing hope.
10. Tender, funny, heartbreaking and gloriously gritty, The Wolfpack is a must for any movie connoisseur, while it's also a reminder of just how powerful the medium can be.


question: Rob Reiner's touching, funny film set a new standard for romantic comedies, and he was ably abetted by the sharp interplay between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.

numbered reviews: 1. A sweet, cheerfully vulgar, and often very funny old-fashioned romantic comedy.
2. When Harry Met Sally... is a sweet, embraceable comedy, a moonstruck Manhattan romance that, like a Gershwin tune, turns the sighs and glances, the spats and reconciliations, all the cliches of the heart into infectious melody.
3. A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit.
4. The writing and direction plays with the [romantic comedy] form and your expectations alike throughout, and with such good performances the film makes for a deliciously prickly ride with laugh-out-loud moments and scenes that resonate through the story.
5. This film is pure fun from start to end, and it made me want to be in love again.
6. Provides plenty of material for a private seminar on the education of your sentiments about love, friendship, and sexuality.
7. The script is an excellent breakdown of timeless conversations between the sexes...witty repartee between the two leads, and a beautifully constructed love story that is carefully assembled over time, and gently eases you into the wonder of...love.
8. When Harry Met Sally is alright as a piece of entertainment for a little while, but it is by far Reiner's worst film.
9. takes its time in exploring the long, sometimes bumpy, and often comical process by which two people might discover they are in love
10. We have to give When Harry Met Sally... credit for what it did: Make one of the few romance films that bears any kind of truth without also being a dark comedy.


question: Kung Fu Hustle blends special effects, martial arts, and the Looney Toons to hilarious effect.

numbered reviews:
1. Part live action cartoon, part love letter to the cinema, Kung Fu Hustle is one of a kind.
2. I can only assume Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle is the first chop-socky extravaganza to lift entire passages of dialogue from Jean Renoir's Rules Of The Game.
3. You don't take any of this seriously for a minute, but you can't take your eyes off the screen.
4. Chow's aesthetic demands an appreciation of the absurd: The events are often silly even as the ideas and feeling behind them are not.
5. For all his cleverness and flights of fantasticated fancy, the director proves himself an unabashedly romantic filmmaker, and there aren't enough of those.
6. The heir apparent to Jackie Chan, [Stephen] Chow creates a world where kung fu comedy fuses with a Roadrunner cartoon and The Matrix ...
7. A film that is not only very entertaining, but also emotionally satisfying for a broad international audience.
8. As... Shawn of the Dead did for zombie pictures, Kung Fu Hustle does for chop sockey: both honor and spoof the genre that spawned it.
9. Not so much hustle, a lot of kung fu, and a surreal cartoon ride inbetween.
10. What makes Chow unique, perhaps even revolutionary, is that he is the first movie comedian to consistently make hilarious use of digital effects.