Amy Taubin

The most audacious debut feature of the year.

Unabashedly personal and uncool...but between you and me, dear reader, I love it to death.

Prince-Bythewood gives the film a style that's easy on the eye but also has muscle -- on and off the court.

Eccentric and thoroughly winning.

A spare, formally ingenious, journalistically acute piece of filmmaking.

A veritable Chekhov tragicomedy of provincial life.

Along with Raoul Coutard's radiant cinematography, what makes the film extraordinary is Karina, the pure curves of her face a contradiction to the marionette angularity of her body.

Downey, who radiates more energy doing nothing discernible than most other actors do when they let it all hang out, takes the film to another level.

A pop culture document for a mass audience.

What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.

Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first.

A film of rare tenderness and mystery.

As ethereal, moving, and uncompromising as its subject.

It seems like a more witty, wise, and succinct "Magnolia."

A magisterial film, but not quite a great one.

It could be described as the most gripping political thriller to hit the big screen in many years, although given the events it depicts through interviews, photographs, and news footage, the words "gripping" and "thriller" have inappropriately frivolous and commercial associations.

There are big crowd scenes, intimate close-ups, and lots of bug’s-eye point-of-view shots. Call me gullible: I believed every second of it.

A tender and hilarious vision of female adolescence.

This is one scary movie, not because we see ghosts or monsters, but because Kidman makes us feel her fear as our own.

There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.

The 7Up series is thus one of the rare documentaries to have had a positive practical effect on the life of at least one of its subjects.

A smart, realist drama -- I wouldn't be surprised if this one winds up on my 10-best list for '99.

As smooth and powerfully packed as its protagonist.

Probably more terse than it needs to be, but the dramatic line has an elegance and drive that reinforces the unexpected turns of the story.

Primary story line is clumsy and badly acted. But he (Lee) reminds you that movies have power, that they matter, and for a few brilliant moments, Bamboozled matters more than any other American movie this year.

This is the Julia Roberts performance her fans have been waiting for.

Filled with vivid and likable characters, The Opportunists could be the basis for a TV series as captivating as "The Sopranos."

Time has tamed some of the terror and eroticism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but it’s still a haunting thriller about guilt and the supernatural. What’s notable (more notable even than the much celebrated bedroom scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in which sex is displaced into memory even as it’s taking place) is that Roeg’s use of the death of a child as the focus of a horror film never feels exploitative.