Carrie Rickey

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.