Charles Taylor

The director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves -- extraordinary.

The General may be the most intimate and matter-of-fact of Boorman’s films. Movies like Deliverance and Excalibur revealed Boorman as a master of scope. The General, which is one of his masterpieces, proves the depth at which he’s working.

What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.

Unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.

The triumph of the movie isn't just Huston's realization of a longtime dream to bring the Kipling story to the screen but the way he both honors classical movie tradition and brings it forward into a new era.

Jim Sheridan's miraculous In America, a generous but never sentimental fable of Irish immigrants in '80s New York, may be the great movie of 2003.

One of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.

The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, Trainspotting is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.

If Some Like It Hot isn’t the funniest movie ever made, you can’t blame it for not trying. The first time you see Billy Wilder’s 1959 farce, you might not believe that anything can make you laugh so hard for so long. Where most comedies wear out their audience after an hour and a half, “Some Like It Hot” goes on for 122 minutes and leaves you ebullient.

Quietly overwhelming.

One of the most joyous movies I've ever seen, and one of the handful of great erotic films the movies have given us.

This has to be one of the most completely realized comedies ever made, and, in its odd way, one of the most civilized.

The movie haunts you like a ballad whose tune you remember but whose words hang just beyond reach. And like listening to a ballad, we know the outcome of the events we're watching was foretold long ago, but we're helpless to do anything but surrender to the tale.

Walking out of the theater, I felt so bereft that I couldn't speak. And it doesn't hurt any less thinking about the movie now, as I write this.

The 1996 kidnap drama Ransom traverses the parameters of public life in America, from the image public figures present to us to the image they never intended us to see. Neither one tells the whole truth. Luckily, Ransom isn't content with surfaces..

This heart-wrenching documentary about a French village schoolteacher at work offers the comedy and pathos of great drama and the visual magnificence of painting.

This long shot pays off -- in spades. Not only has Jordan made a movie that's looser, hipper, freer and -- abetted by his great cinematographer, Chris Menges -- more sheerly beautiful to look at, he's also made the best movie of his career.

Director Brian De Palma is having too much fun zipping around curves and hitting the accelerator to slow down. He's a supremely confident engineer, and if you're game enough to make a jump for it and hold on, he offers the giddy excitement of watching the ground rush by beneath your dangling feet.

The story they are telling here is still in the process of being written. It's as good a sign as any of how absorbing Morning Sun is that the film's sudden ending makes you greedy for more.

Shot in sumptuous black-and-white by Dreujou, Girl on the Bridge might just be the most beautiful-looking movie of the year.

Claire Denis' baffling and exhilarating "Billy Budd" smolders with heat-blasted rhythms and supercharged acting.

A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama.

What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit.

One of those rare literary adaptations that finds its fidelity in freedom, that stands as both a fitting version of its source material and as its own creation.

It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex.

It's a wholly amoral movie, but it's honestly amoral. And that's a relief for the audience.

A giddy madcap classic, one of the wildest and funniest American comedies in years.

Something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.