STARTLING & INVENTIVE...This is not a movie that lets go of you easily.

Those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

Not just a timely movie, a great one...Timbuktu feels at once timely and permanent, immediate and essential.

The camera has an uncanny ability to capture the world as it is, to seize events as they happen, and also to conjure visions of the future. But by the time the image reaches the eyes of the viewer, it belongs to the past, taking on the status of something retrieved.

My fellow critics and I may occasionally fault a movie for departing, in detail or in spirit, from its literary source, but the grousing of a few adult pedants is nothing compared to the wrath of several million bookish 10-year-olds. Their presumed demands, and the hovering spirit of Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, inhibit this movie as it did the first Potter film.

ADMIRABLY BOLD. There's something grand about the film's sincerity and the intensity of its emotions and something fresh and bold about the way director Gray uses the conventions of romantic melodrama.

STORIES WE TELL is one of the boldest and most exciting films I’ve seen in the last six months, and the kind of experience that has the power to alter your perception of the world.