Critic consensus:The movie may be a downer, but it packs an emotional wallop. Some fine acting on display here.

Numbered reviews:1. Hypnotically dull, relentlessly downbeat, laughably predictable wail pitched to the cadence of a depressed fifteen-year-old's suicidal poetry.
2. Rarely does such high-profile talent serve such literate material.
3. A film whose cumulative emotional power takes viewers by surprise, capturing us unawares in its ability to move us as deeply as it does.
4. One of the best films of the year with its exquisite acting, inventive screenplay, mesmerizing music, and many inimitable scenes of tenderness, loss, discontent, and yearning.
5. Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.
6. For all the pervasive tone of sadness in 'The Hours,' it is an uplifting film. Daldry keeps the sentiment dry and avoids clichés.
7. For all of its weaknesses, The Hours remains a seductive, haunting drama.
8. Like the best literature, it stays with you long after its conclusion.
9. It's super slow-moving to be sure, but that just makes soaking it up all that much more enjoyable ... like, well, a good book.
10. Hare manages to 'open up' the book by dramatizing the characters' inner turmoil exactly as he would have to on stage.


Critic consensus:Still unnerving to this day, Frankenstein adroitly explores the fine line between genius and madness, and features Boris Karloff's legendary, frightening performance as the monster.

Numbered reviews:1. As much as the later movies diluted the character of the Frankenstein creature, nothing could blunt the impact made by Karloff in the role of the most memorable movie monster of all time.
2. Still a startling film about the borders between genius and madness, science and atrocity.
3. Nothing can detract from the power of the most influential monster movie ever made.
4. The classic and definitive monster/horror film.
5. The film is unique in Whale's work in that the horror is played absolutely straight, and it has a weird fairytale beauty not matched until Cocteau made La Belle et la Bęte.
6. Now a classic part of scream culture.
7. A classic.
8. One of the most deservedly famous and chilling horror films of all time.
9. Frankenstein's psychological inquiries remain both striking and potent, its morality-lined narrative brimming with existential hurdles on both ends of the scale.
10. Absolutely essential.


Critic consensus:It's undeniably uneven, but Vincent Cassel's electrifying performance makes Mesrine: Killer Instinct a gangster biopic worth seeking out.

Numbered reviews:
1. Killer Instinct is generally fast-paced but the need to cram about 15 years of Mesrine's life into less than two hours results in uneven patches.
2. Despite the graphic violence, Cassell creates a memorable character, perhaps as memorable as the real man he portrays. Elena Anaya stands out as his mistreated wife.
3. Richet's film is an engaging one, even if it often plays like a re-enacted, high-episodic documentary.
4. ...a stylish gangster flick with lots of action and a super cool, larger-than-life anti-hero at the center...
5. An exhilarating old-school crime pic.
6. Quite engrossing, very much like a cross between Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and a French 'Godfather'
7. The events may be accurate, but Mesrine is so episodic that it's slightly maddening to watch.
8. Mesrine: Killer Instinct is a true-life French gangster film so in awe of its subject that it can't fit the entire story into one film.
9. Cassel is handsome yet ratlike, charming yet brutal.
10. It's director Jean-Francois Richet's aim to demystify, and deromanticize Mesrine, perhaps the criminal life in general, and he succeeds.