Chuck Bowen

The film is still one of the most glorious testaments to the frustrations and exhilarations of chasing an unvarnished truth.

Yet another ghost story that insists there's nothing more chilling than a professional woman charged with raising a child on her own.

Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.

There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.

Too many films these days trivialize poverty as an ironically, tastelessly over-produced pageant to earn kudos. The Grapes of Wrath is flawed, but it captures that shiver of panic that grips anyone for whom the money for the next meal is unknown. The film remains a vital document of the perversion and torment of the fantasy most commonly known as the American Dream.

One of the greatest and most mercenary of all American comedies.

It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.

Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.

In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty.

Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.

Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.

Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.

Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.

Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.

With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.

Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.

Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.

Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.

Martin Scorsese captures the exquisite agony and pleasure of passion that’s forced to remain theoretical.

Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.

Redford ultimately holds Downhill Racer together with the performance of his career.

A great horror film about a weak man who, gazing into a vibrant pool of freshly spilled blood, learns just how little he ultimately knows.

The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.

The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.

The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.

Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.

Strangers on a Train is also simply a great thriller, yet another illustration of Hitchcock’s awe-inspiring ability to convey more with a single image than most directors can with minutes upon minutes of belabored set pieces.

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.