Bill Weber

The picture is hugely pleased with itself, but it’s too funny and expertly calibrated to mind in the least. Both Hitchcock and Grant raise relaxed confidence to masterpiece level here.

Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult - that is, demanding because they are three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs - might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker's most generously etched characters.

Alfred Hitchcock’s rich and strange masterwork.

A sibling drama of unsentimental urban grit and swooning lyricism, Nénette and Boni meditates on the myriad permutations of love and sensuality, from familial longings to food fetishes.

Likely the most influential film ever made.

Planet of the Apes became a blockbuster because it’s cannily crafted, in part, as a ripping adventure yarn, director Franklin Schaffner staging a long desert trek for survival by Taylor and his two surviving shipmates in the opening half-hour, a brilliant “hunt” sequence with gorillas pursuing the human brutes as targets and trophies (memorably enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s dissonant, percussive score), and a lengthy chase sequence where the escaped spaceman leaps and dodges past hairy denizens of church, museum, and marketplace.

Mitchum doesn’t remotely overshadow the film’s first-rate ensemble of character actors.

Underlying the occasionally harrowing, consistently mournful tone is a philosophy that, more than being explicitly anti-capital punishment, puts both family ties and the social contract at the center of people's self-worth.

A horn of cinematic plenty continuously spills from Sunrise, not only in its production design and Murnau’s dreamlike images (rendered by a pair of American cinematographers in the German émigré’s first Hollywood film), but in an unswerving commitment to the varied tones of screenwriter Carl Mayer’s scenario.

Released in the midst of the Korean War and the prime of McCarthy, the film achieved a unique relevance for a “spaceman” movie by unambiguously advocating for peace and grounding its pulp story in social reality.

If Playtime’s enormous scope was visionary, here Tati’s tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.

This impeccably plated set is as savory as the brains sucked out of a quail’s head by Jarl Kulle’s General Löwenhielm.

The beloved gang's sweet reunion will melt nostalgic adults into laughter and tears, and maybe kids won't mind drippy new Muppet Walter so much.

A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.

A solid, affecting artifact of the cruelty of late 1950s South Africa, in which music often makes despair and long-suppressed anger bearable.

The movie's big joke is that Sue Ann turns out to be the potent, sociopathic one; for once, Perkins is out-psychoed by an honor-roll student who worries she'll be late for hygiene class.

Confronting the concept of alienness in a California desert town, this modest tapestry finds equivalent dignity in history-conscious travelers and natives weighed down by roots or inertia.

Despite A Star Is Born’s musty jabs at movieland decadence in the wake of satires like Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful, it was the craft found in Cukor’s alternately splashy and shadowy mise-en-scène, and displayed by Mr. James Mason, that most greatly aided Mrs. Sid Luft.

Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film’s efforts to sentimentally humanize him by psychological revelation are clumsy.

This bio-documentary of a New Left godfather presents a formidable character simpatico with today's zeitgeist in his championing of "spontaneous uprising."

Godfrey Reggio's symphony of pristine 4K images doesn't add up to one grand epiphany, but an intermittent cluster of small ones.

This autumnal statement compensates for its fixed despair with bracing wit and a willingness to see acceptance of misery as the best of all possible options.

Fast on its feet, using 3D and motion-capture animation to kick its comedy-adventure into a superhuman gear, Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is a wittily kineticized adaptation of the internationally loved comic books.

The sizzle of the bon mot-tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film’s momentum, along with Crowley’s lacerating dialogue.

A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.

Lionizing a world-class architect without tipping into hagiography, this documentary performs a graceful cinematic dance around his works.

Huston’s Wise Blood is a sharp, busy canvas that, like a man with a good car, doesn’t need to be justified.

A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.