Critic consensus:Characterized by strong performances and the director's trademark feel for the nuances of everyday life, Another Year marks another solid entry in Mike Leigh's career of kitchen-sink English drama.

Numbered reviews:1. The kind of film that makes you want to go out and hug old people.
2. Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.
3. The final scene around the dinner table is a masterwork in cinematography.
4. Leigh has made another must-see for art house film goers. He simply does every time he gets behind the camera.
5. Year's success rests heavily on its cast's and director's shoulders. And the performers, most stage veterans and Leigh alums, don't disappoint.
6. It's been a long time since we've been treated to such a simple and wonderful film.
7. Few characters experience anything interesting; this family clearly has a history, but it needs more present.
8. Another Year continues in the vein of Leigh's last feature, Happy-Go-Lucky, considering characters who've made peace with their lives and others who are still at war (and losing).
9. It illuminates profoundly in matters of class, age, family, friendship, economics and even nationality.
10. Leigh engages with those questions, and even bigger bogglers -- What is love? What is happiness? When did they both escape me? -- by arranging long, lingering scenes of closely observed behavior of the most ordinary sort.


Critic consensus:The Patriot can be entertaining to watch, but it relies too much on formula and melodrama.

Numbered reviews:1. It's never boring, and it'll sweep you up in its momentum if you give it a chance.
2. Whether protecting his brood or his nation, Gibson is the quintessential American stoic.
3. A riveting, slick, graphically violent piece of entertainment.
4. The Patriot delivers what it promises.
5. A spectacle that could cause its audience to rise up against the dull treatment of this marvelous episode from history teachers.
6. A rip-snorting good flick that breaks the cinematic jinx against Revolutionary War stories.
7. The fight scenes are careful, powerful, stunning, and quite realistic.
8. The Patriot delivers, for the most part, effective, populist entertainment.
9. Having fought the British centuries before in Braveheart, Gibson brings the same intensity to The Patriot.
10. It wisely focuses upon common folk rather than prominent figures.


Critic consensus:Sophisticated visual effects fail to offset awkward performances and an uneven script.

Numbered reviews:
1. The best reason to see The Haunting is the sheer sumptuousness of its creepy-crawly set designs.
2. Has an unseen enchantment, so aptly sets spinning like a huge magnificent gyroscope on a string
3. In The Haunting, the moviemakers succeed in something very difficult: creating a haunted house with real personality and terror.
4. All the stops are pulled out to provide a state-of-the-art, slam-bang movie experience.
5. Looking terrified and screaming is really all that's required in David Self's inane script.
6. Director Jan de Bont, known for the razzle he put into the exciting movie Speed and the subsequent dud Twister, proves himself unable to break away from depending on dazzle to substitute for substance.
7. To my surprise, I find myself recommending The Haunting on the basis of its locations, its sets, its art direction, its sound design, and the overall splendor of its visuals.
8. It's all hokum from beginning to end.
9. A flat, draggy exercise in cheesy special effects and grandiose art direction palming itself off as a horror film.
10. More hokey than haunting.