Carrie Rickey

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.

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

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]

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.

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

Restoration moves from farce to spiritual parable to melodrama with such inconsistency that it could be a case study in 17th-century multiple personality disorder. [02 Feb 1996, p.05]

It may be the first meditative action movie.

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.

Exhilarating, edgy and wryly comic.

The film is more than laborious eye-blinking - it's also dazzling visually, its potent imagery conjured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But finally, Diving Bell is about something imperceptible: consciousness.

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.

It might not be good enough to make you laugh consistently, but Hollywood Ending looks good enough to eat.

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]

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 year's must-see film.

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

Like many graduate students, Love and Other Catastrophes is smart, droll and doesn't always know when to stop talking. [11 Apr 1997, p.03]

The result is a movie about the many forms of social and sexual abuse that does not make the abusee a victim but victor.

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 has the dog-eared look of a homemade valentine and the improvised sound of '60s jazz, courtesy of a score by Mark Suozzo and a spirited soundtrack including Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar," which might be the film's anthem.

Mr. Hulot's Holiday is concerned not with character, but with how the unreliability of nature, human nature, and mechanical objects makes human actions and interactions awkwardly funny. [05 Mar 2010, p.W12]

At its best it is one of the most dynamic movies from a most dynamic filmmaker, now 76.

Though not as great as "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc.," Pixar movies that are the gold standard for family movies, Finding Nemo is visually entrancing.

By no means is this a good movie, but it's warmed by the solar energy of its star, who surely deserves better than this formula empowerment flick.

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

Crowe is so good on mood and milieu that when Elton John's bubblegum ballad "Tiny Dancer" swells on the soundtrack, in this context it sounds like a hymn.

This simple story of a Guy and a Girl and their music is very appealing.

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.

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.

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.

He had the fearlessness of a 104-story man and something more than a daredevil's brass.

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.

Lucid, concise and devastating account of what went wrong in Iraq, patiently counts those 500 ways.

In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, The Machinist would have felt like a stunt. But Anderson, with a terrific assist from Bale, makes his character's plight achingly physical.

Director Manoel de Oliveira's minimalist, incomparably moving I'm Going Home ranks with John Huston's "The Dead" as one of the great works by a director at his twilight.

This unsettling, shaggy, surrealistic pillow of a movie - a mixed bag more funny-strange than ha-ha.

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.

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

The matchless Alberto Sordi - a contemporary of Peters Sellers and a progenitor of Steve Martin - stars as the buffoon Everyman, Antonio Badalamenti, a perfectly poised figure destined for the pratfall.

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

It is a damning indictment of the individuals and institutions who made money while customers lost their shirts.

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

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.

Jackson's superior sequel to last year's first installment in his Rings cycle - resurrects the beloved Gandalf (majestic Ian McKellen) and rejuvenates the audience, too.

L'Enfant begins with the birth of a child, but its real concern is the moral rebirth of a man.

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

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

The delightful G-rated film has a story line simple enough for pre-schoolers to follow and comic sensibility complex enough for adults to savor, with an emphasis on howlingly bad (by which I mean good) puns.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

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.

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

Was it just three years ago that Perry made his feature debut with "Diary of a Mad Black Woman?" Then his filmmaking was strictly amateur; now his sweeping pans and portentous closeups approach those of Pedro Almódovar.

Bar-Lev tells Tillman's story "Rashomon"-style, incorporating multiple perspectives on Tillman's politics (left-liberal), religion (atheist), and personal relations (he married Marie, his first and only girlfriend). Still, it is a documentary with more details of how he died than how he lived.

Here are five gifted actors at the top of their games as five characters in search of what makes a family.

Nobody's Fool boasts the kind of low-key realism on which Newman made his reputation but that, in these days of high-decibel, high-concept fantasy, has become a lost art. [13 Jan 1995, p.3]

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

Courageous, shattering and exceptional documentary.

The four women couldn't be better - or better matched. As always, Parker is the standout, cracking your heart and cracking you up with equal ease.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

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.

Fan's fly-on-the-wall perspective enables the viewer to empathize with all the players in the family drama, unlikely to have a happy ending.

Although not blessed with a cinematic eye, Yates, a sensitive director of actors, structures his movie like the final movement of a symphony. He reprises themes and characters from the previous films that swell in the epochal siege of Hogwarts and ends his films with an almost wordless coda that will wring tears even from Harry haters.

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

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.

Makes for the most thrilling action movie of the year.

A beguiling and subversively funny entertainment that considers art's worth from many angles, including that of guerrilla painters, gallerists, and seasoned collectors.

Exhilarating, exuberant and drolly funny.

Heigl, a double-dip of praline with caramel, is so beautiful that initially you don't notice her comic chops.

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

Few American directors drive this wedge between mind and gut as masterfully as Michael Mann.

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.

Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.

In the end, Atonement sorts truth from fiction as it delivers a shattering kick to the solar plexus.

Like Johnny's rants, Naked is a revelation, a parable of spiritual homelessness and the terror it engenders.

According to this courageous, you-are-there documentary, the platoon took enemy fire almost every day, perhaps the longest exposure to combat the U.S. has engaged in since World War II.

Jonathan Demme's superb rule-bending, heartrending and family-mending drama - ends with a wedding, it resists conventions as brazenly as does the bride's sister.

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

The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.

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

It's never entirely clear whether Borchardt is also an object of ridicule for documentarian Chris Smith.

Trueba's movie is nearly undone by its shapelessness. Because the filmmaker imposes little in the way of form (or drama) on his subject, his film is a good listen without being a particularly good watch.

Mendes nonetheless works this screenplay like a jazz virtuoso plays with a familiar theme such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

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

It is an exploitation picture disguised as a hipster comedy.

Insightful and involving.

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

This seriously funny group portrait of third-generation clam diggers (and their wives and sisters) is fresh as today's catch and about as tasty. Its '70s soundtrack positively swaggers.

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.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

It is a keenly observed movie about loss of identity and finding love, in which Brooks serves up funny-ouch humor with slapstick heartbreak.

A high-concept hostage drama of absolutely no value to anyone -- except maybe Bell Atlantic, whose titular street-corner pay phone is on screen for almost every agonizing frame.

A ridiculously entertaining romp based on the graphic novels of Bryan Lee O'Malley and directed, with mash-up mastery, by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead).

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.

A scabrously funny look at the cutthroat game of statecraft.

Though it's rife with unexpected scene-stealers, the movie belongs to Lemmon and Matthau, that perfect complement of treacle and acid. [02 July 1997, p.D01]