Carrie Rickey

If we approach the unfamiliar with fear and apprehension, we will be met with fear and apprehension. But if we approach with sympathy and curiosity, we will be rewarded with same. And our souls, not to mention our bicycles, will soar to the heavens. [2002 re-release]

Not only is it the best documentary in a vintage season for nonfiction films (see "American Splendor," "Capturing the Friedmans," and "Spellbound"), it's also one of the best films of the year. It's as lyrical about the particulars of Kahn as it is about the universals of fathers and sons.

It is with gravity and levity and incomparable grace that Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- by light years the best movie of 2000.

Spoofy and sweet... endearingly old-fashioned.

Exhilarating, edgy and wryly comic.

The most moving aspect of this indelible documentary is that it chronicles its subjects' growth from instinctively going for the goal to deciding which goals are worth shooting for.

Lives is a best-foreign-film nominee competing in a year that at least three movies in this category are stronger than Oscar's best-picture contenders.

The exhilarating film pays tribute to Buster Keaton's "The Balloonatic" by way of its slapstick, and to Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" by way of its watercolor palette and traveling domicile.

Most of all, it is the improbably entertaining story of how new media are altering the very nature of courtship and friendship.

Werner Herzog's magnificent tragedy, Grizzly Man, a Shakespearean character study that packs the sheer terror of "The Blair Witch Project."

Ryan may not be admirable, but Clooney makes him relatable. It's his deepest and nakedest performance.

Brilliant, blistering account of the many ways fame deforms a star, his family and his fans.

This psycho-thriller, a Golden Globe winner and presumptive favorite for the foreign-film Oscar, itself is revelatory.

A movie with the sweet soul of "Toy Story" and the boisterous spirit of "Spy Kids."

At the film's intimate best, it gives a guitar's perspective of the troubadour. He plucks his instrument as he plays our heartstrings. It's movie and music bliss.

Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society.

As lovingly written as it is beautifully rendered.

Washington blows you away. To say he gives the performance of his career is an understatement.

One of the rare rock films that produces the effect of a live concert: After each number, the audience erupts into applause.

A small, quiet film that walks tall and resonates long after.

The marvel of Brando's and Leigh's performances is that he is steely solidity and she airy evanescence, something frequently misinterpreted as his modern, realistic acting style and her quaint kind of theatrics. [Director's Cut; 18 March 1994, p.10]

An unforgettable and profoundly inspiring film. [05 Mar 1999, p.04]

As irresistible as Chan is irrepressible. In a movie season in which, it seems, all the blockbusters boast wheels, it's a treat to see a movie that has legs.

Throughout the film its makers pose the question of whether saving a work of art is as important as saving a human life. The question is not answered, and perhaps ultimately unanswerable. Yet Europa movingly shows how for many, art and artifacts are living things.

Intimate as a whisper, immediate as a blush, and universal as first love, the PG-rated film positively palpitates with the sensual and spiritual.

Courageous, shattering and exceptional documentary.

That rare thing, a Hollywood teen flick transfigured into something like pubescent scripture: In the beginning, there was lust; in the end, there is knowledge.

A captivating cine-memoir, impressionistic and surrealistic, surveying Varda's formidable career as a still photographer, filmmaker, documentarian, and life force.

Under Hooper's deft direction, it packs the suspense of a thriller.

Persepolis, the superb film based on Satrapi's graphic memoirs of the same name, is a riveting odyssey in pictures and words. It's unlike any journal you've read or any animated movie you've seen.

This year's must-see film.

It is the most influential movie you've never seen, deeply affecting many artists and experimental directors who saw it on the museum circuit in 1977 and 1978.

Piercingly funny and unexpectedly moving account of that odd couple, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and HRH Elizabeth II (majestic Helen Mirren) and their back-channels affair.

The film's climax involves a father and son reunion that is tense, tragic and, finally, as transcendent as Mohammad himself.

For two hours I felt like a kitten chasing an elusive ball of catnip that remained just beyond my paw.

A movie like Everlasting Moments comes along maybe once in a decade.

Sunnier and sillier than most of Allen's recent work, makes its belly laughs heartwarming. It's a most winning movie about losers.

A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.

An elusive and profoundly moving essay about the stages of amour and of age. Like the best of Godard's movies -- and I haven't been sucked into one since "Passion" (1982) -- it is visually ravishing, penetrating, impenetrable.

There is nothing sentimental or picturesque about the performances or imagery. The word that best describes both is elemental.

It is as breathtaking a moral thriller today as it was in 1949. [16 July 1999, p.10]

Because the filmmakers have framed this fame game so much like a conventional love story, the audience, like Goodwin, is seduced by Van Doren's pretty face. This is precisely what the film warns us to guard against, so the experience of watching Quiz Show is supercharged. As the wedge is driven in between what we think (lying is bad) and what we feel (that nice Van Doren boy can't have lied) - Redford and Attanasio make us aware of how readily we accept style divorced from substance. [16 Sept 1994, p.03]

This is the breakthrough work of one of world cinema's most visionary artists.

Isn't like the classic Japanese drama "Rashomon," which suggested that one person's perspective of an event gave him a different truth from the person standing elsewhere.

While its careful pace and seemingly opaque story may not satisfy every moviegoer's appetite, the film's final scene is soaringly, transparently moving.

Apart from its intriguing religious implications, the film is also a compelling look at the family, community and congregational pillars that support Lior.

A rocking, rollicking crowd-pleaser.

A human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace.

While Gyllenhaal has playful puppy eyes and energy, his performance as Jack is a blur of mustaches, sideburns and spurs that never achieves the weight of Ledger's.

You watch a Miyazaki film with the pie-eyed, gape-mouthed awe of a child being read the most fantastic story and suddenly transported to places previously beyond the limits of imagination. It's quite a trip.

Shrek 2 is a dream, a sequel as exhilarating and riotously funny as 2001's top-grossing original.

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.

A boisterous and improbably entertaining action comedy.

A heartbreaking elegy to mature love that honors the lovers and the long, neurodegenerative tango that is their last.

Forget its dubious ancestry as a popular TV show of the '50s. The combined charms of Maverick's genial cast, its sly script and its punchy direction make it the legitimate heir to escapist crowd-pleasers such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. [20 May 1994, p.03]

Acting-wise, the showstopper is Jason Bateman, with a diabolically entertaining turn as a smarmy PR man remarkably free with confidential information.

Although Angelopoulos' film is not for all viewers, it rewards the patient moviegoer with an incomparable emotional journey. [09 Jul 1999, p.04]

To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.

An unnerving and astonishing thriller.

Like this diabolically designed weapon of war, Tanovic's film is coil-sprung to explode on the unsuspecting.

Heartbreaking? Sometimes. Involving? You bet.

Boasts rich texture, sly vision and rueful humor.

The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

Where Denys Arcand's delightful 1986 comedy "The Decline of the American Empire" celebrated the good life, his profoundly funny sequel The Barbarian Invasions heartily toasts the good death.

The result is a film that deeply engages us on multiple levels. Not only do we wonder what Maisie knows and how she knows it, we want to get this seedling to a place where she won't have to be transplanted every day.

Featuring seasoned warriors reflecting on whether we can best fight violence with violence is enormously compelling.

Not only is Bossa Nova a lovely romance, but one can say, as one can about few films, that it is restorative as a vacation.

It's hard to know whether this is a function of the sympathetic screenplay or of Krieger's sympathetic direction - or both - but Celeste and Jesse are endearing even when they do unsympathetic things.

Rees tells Alike's story in vignettes that are sometimes slapstick, sometimes heartbreaking, always tender.

DuVernay, a low-key director sparing in her use of emotion and music, has made an existential drama that is European in its feel.

It's a testament to Cage's canny performance and Jonze's seamless use of special effects that you believe Charlie and Donald are two entirely different people.

Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

A far more trenchant - and funnier - satire of the fame-afflicted than Woody Allen's "Celebrity."

First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent.

A superb film that begins with death, ends in renewal, and finds almost as much to laugh about as to cry for.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

Macdonald's film brilliantly telescopes the '70s, an era when every physical action had its equal and opposite political reaction.

Corinne's journey begins with an act of blind faith. The movie ends, but you have a palpable sense that the journey does not.

Next to the cheerleader grunts and aerobic struts that pass for dance numbers on most music videos, the sequences in the compilation film That's Entertainment! III are like treasures from a highly evolved ancient civilization. [06 Jul 1994, p.E01]

A dynamic portrait of an artist by an artist, one as wry, audacious and erotically charged as its flamboyant subject.

For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

French movies are not so neatly resolved. In fact, the point of many French movies, such as this provocative one from director Laurent Cantet, is that some problems don't have satisfying solutions - or resolutions.

Until a final conflict that more resembles a monster-truck jam than a superhero showdown, Iron Man is solid gold.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

It is not to everyone's taste. But if you like the lush film operas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, or Luchino Visconti, this one's for you.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

Cholodenko takes us inside a bohemian hive where everyone buzzes around the Queen Bee. McDormand is superb. Likewise Bale and Nivola.

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

Bravo to Brooks for conceiving Mother and for giving Reynolds a role that required her to do something more than merely effervesce. Here Reynolds bubbles, she boils, she exhibits a complex geology of human emotions. Her Mrs. Henderson is the mother of all mothers, and Mother is the mother lode of all comedies. [10 Jan 1997, p.05]

This is more than a movie: It's Almodovar's design for living.

A gut-punch of a drama.

Pure, undiluted joy.

Urgent and stunning movie.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.