Sam Mendes

The top-billed actors deliver: Hanks with his resonant reserve and Newman in conveying Rooney's failed attempt to live up to his self-image as the ultimate just and loving patriarch.

Revolutionary Road’s existential dread of unspoken feelings bubbling to the surface perhaps better resembles Tennessee Williams, a towering explorer of authenticity and self-delusion.

Its dull colors and folk-rock soundtrack...attempt to achieve the oft-chased feel of '70s cinema--in this case, Hal Ashby or Mike Nichols. It's a game try, but the transparently schematic result too often gets under the skin in the wrong way.

Playful...the most conspicuously repeated word is 'game,' the most dangerous of which Bond typically is, pursues, or plays.

The Craig Bonds...continue...questioning the dark and destructive psychology of this masculine icon, this preternaturally skilled but insanely reckless secret agent—his greatest secrets being his own hurt and loss and loneliness.

Attempts to thread the needle of a moving anti-war film in that narrow space between...[war as] thrill ride and the filmic wizardry that, when examined too closely, rings as hollow as a war machine rapped with a wrench.