David Ansen

There's neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain--just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.

Brings history to life with an uncanny sense of realism.

Once again, the Pixar wizards have pushed the animation envelope in unexpected directions and come up with a winner. Wondrously inventive, funny and poignant, WALL*E is part sci-fi adventure, part cautionary fable, part satire and part love story, which may be the best and most improbable part of all.

As he did in “The English Patient,” Minghella artfully weds movie-movie romanticism with a dark historical vision. The man knows how to cast a spell.

In Sideways, Payne has created four of the most lived-in, indelible characters in recent American movies. This deliciously bittersweet movie makes magic out of the quotidian.

This is comedy from the danger zone, and it will genuinely offend some folks who feel certain subjects are not to be laughed at. They'd best stay at home. Fans should be warned as well: Borat can make you laugh so hard it hurts.

At its best, Magnolia towers over most Hollywood films this year.

At once elegant and sublimely silly, contemplative and gung-ho, balletic and bubble-gum, a rousing action film and an epic love story, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one bursting-at-the-seams holiday gift, beautifully wrapped by the ever-surprising Ang Lee.

It's one of the richest movie experiences of the year, a spellbinding American epic that holds you firmly in its grip for nearly three hours.

Few films have explored the complicated bonds of love and resentment between brother and sister with such delightful honesty.

Urgently, without sentimentality, "La Promesse" shows us the birth of a conscience, and its cost. This fleet, powerful movie may prove to be a classic. [30 June 1997, p.79]

The superrealist images beguile us with their bold wit, and the storytelling is so tight, urgent and inventive there doesn't seem to be a wasted moment. Which makes you wonder -- why can't scripts this clever be written for human beings?

The compositions, the editing, the lighting, the sound, the music: everything seems meticulously considered, conjuring up a hushed intimacy that instantly sucks you in.

The Movie Works. It has real passion, real emotion, real terror, and a tactile sense of evil that is missing in that other current movie dealing with wizards, wonders and wickedness.

The Departed is Scorsese's most purely enjoyable movie in years. But it's not for the faint of heart. It's rude, bleak, violent and defiantly un-PC. But if you doubt that it's also OK to laugh throughout this rat's nest of paranoia, deceit and bloodshed, keep your eyes on the final frames. Scorsese's parting shot is an uncharacteristic, but well-earned, wink.

If history is a battlefield, JFK has to be seen as a bold attempt to seize the turf for future debate. It is also "just" a movie, and one that for three hours and eight minutes of dense, almost dizzying detail, is capable of holding the audience rapt in its grip. [23 Dec 1991, p.50]

You could trust that Miller would not shoot this tale in the sentimental style of a TV movie of the week, and he hasn't. He has made an impassioned medical thriller as energized as an action movie, as emotionally and stylistically flamboyant as the operas heard on the soundtrack. [04 Jan 1993, p.50]

An inspired flight of fancy, an oddly poignant examination of the creative process, a rumination on adaptation (orchids to their environment, books to the screen and misfits like Charlie to life) and, in its ultimate irony, a story in which our hero learns a life-altering lesson.

Lucky for us there are no ordinary circumstances in this smart, tasty adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel and it gets quirkier, funnier and sexier as it goes.

Hilarious and captivating.

It's a passionate, serious, impeccably crafted movie tackling a subject Clooney cares about deeply: the duty of journalism to speak truth to power. It also happens to be the most compelling American movie of the year so far.

A hugely entertaining thriller shot through with dark shards of agony and paranoia. It takes nothing away from the original while delivering pleasures all its own.

A spectacular sequel. [21 July 1986, p.64]

A piece of spectacular silliness, but that's not meant with disrespect. The key word is spectacular.

An excruciatingly entertaining portrait of the filmmaking process that no Hollywood studio would ever allow to be shown. But Gilliam, bless his impish, obsessive heart, is anything but a Hollywood type.

The second installment was better than the first, and this one is best of all. It has spectacular action scenes and imaginary creatures, and it’s by far the most moving chapter. The performances have deepened.

The great Spanish director's fourth triumph in a row--following "All About My Mother," "Talk to Her" and "Bad Education"--Volver (which means "coming back") flows effortlessly between peril and poignancy, the real and the surreal, even life and death.

Aided by Vladimir Cosma's haunting score (and that great Catalani aria) and by Philippe Rousselot's bravura cinematography, Beineix makes an utterly stunning debut. "Diva" demonstrates the depth of pleasure a shallow movie can provide. [18 Apr 1982, p.96]

Far from being a period piece, this love story/murder mystery/political thriller couldn’t seem more timely.

Blackly funny, unafraid to shift emotional gears from farce to horror, peppered with spectacular action.

A superbly taut and well-made thriller that jumps from Geneva to Rome, from Paris to Beirut, from Athens to Brooklyn, each lethal assignment staged with a mastery Hitchcock might envy.

This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride.

Judd Apatow is making the freshest, most honest mainstream comedies in Hollywood.

Courtney Love's performance as stripper Althea Leasure is an amazement. Funny, unfettered and almost scarily alive in front of a camera, she's the definition of a "natural."

Schnabel, screenwriter Ronald Harwood and Spielberg's great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have found a way to take us inside Bauby's mind--his memories, his fantasies, his loves and lusts--transforming a story of physical entrapment and spiritual renewal into exhilarating images.

It's a bravura, all-stops-out, inexhaustibly inventive performance. I don't know how much was improvised, and how much comes from White's sharp screenplay, but Black may never again get a part that displays his mad-dog comic ferocity to such brilliant effect. He, and the movie, kick ass.

Reiner has made a very hip, sophisticated sendup, but his affection and feel for life on the road keep the satire friendly. This is surely the funniest movie ever made about rock and roll, and one of the funniest things about it is that it may also be one of the most accurate. [5 March 1984, p.81]

The movie holds you in its grip from start to finish.

Leon Gast's remarkable film -- which is intercut with terrific recent interviews with eyewitnesses Norman Mailer and George Plimpton -- is about much more than one stupendous fight.

One of the year's best: a rich, funny, enormously humane portrait of a middle-class Taipei family in the throes of romantic, economic and spiritual upheaval.

Depp is such a soulful presence he gives you a glimpse of this maniac's pain and pathos. Bonham Carter is extraordinary. She reinvents Mrs. Lovett from the inside out.

Wonderful...Based on an autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson, My Life as a Dog captures the manic mood swings of a turbulent prepubescence with deft tonal swings of its own: under its sweet, puppy-dog surface, this movie has teeth. [25 May 1987, p.72]

This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas's life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists through his life.

Once again Disney has come up with a winning animated feature that has something for everyone on the age spectrum.

This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision. Haneke lets no one off the hook least of all the viewer.

Their (Murray/Johansson) brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this subtle, funny, melancholy film.

Eastwood takes the audience to raw, profoundly moving places. If you fear strong emotions, this is not for you. But if you want to see Hollywood filmmaking at its most potent, Eastwood has delivered the real deal.

The Wild Bunch still retains its sorrowful, fatal power because of the complexity of Peckinpah's attitudes about violence. He forces us to confront our own voyeuristic ambivalence; we're alternately horrified by the butchery and exhilarated by the orgiastic energy his balletic spectacles stir up.

Platoon is a ferociously compacted work, but the filmmaking rarely calls attention to itself; it never distracts from the dirty, horrific subject at hand..."Platoon" captures the crazy, adrenaline-rush chaos of battle better than any movie before. Stone is ruthless in his deglamorization of war, but not at the expense of the men who fought there. [5 Jan 1987, p.57]

Marvin's taciturn performance--a moving demonstration of masculine grace under pressure--may be his finest.

The eroticism in Cuaron's road movie (which broke all box-office records in Mexico) is the real deal: tactile, sexy, psychologically charged.

It's not to be missed in any language. In a year that has given us such marvelous animated movies as "Ratatouille" and "Paprika," this vibrant, sly and moving personal odyssey takes pride of place.

Constructing a work of implacably interlocking images, the 76-year-old director -- as clear-eyed, still and attentive as a beast of the forest observing human folly -- has produced an Olympian protest against the modern world. Yet his lucid mastery produces not despair, but an odd exhilaration. [16 April 1984, p.93]

Smart, generous, as subtle as it is expansive, this is storytelling of a rare order. Six hours may seem like a big investment, but the emotional pay-back is beyond price.

Time Bandits is at once sophisticated and childlike in its magical but emotionally cool logic, and this tone is perfectly captured in young Warnock's appealingly sensible performance. Cleese, Warner, Richardson, Holm and Connery are in great form, and the bandits (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon and Tiny Ross) are all gifted comic actors. Made on a modest budget, Time Bandits is a wonderful wild card in the fall movie season [09 Nov 1981, p.92]

Infused with the bleak romanticism of Melville's gangster movies ("Le Samouraï," "Bob le Flambeur"), and deepened by his own experiences in the Resistance, this hard-bitten tribute to freedom fighters makes most current movies look flabby and undisciplined. Don't miss it.

A technological triumph. [19 May 1980]

You have to pay close attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot, but the reward for your work is dark and dirty fun.

Singleton's powerhouse movie has the impact of a stun gun. [15 July 1991]

Unnerving because it forces us into uncharted waters: Solondz doesn't tell us how to feel but makes us thrash out our responses for ourselves. In doing so, he has made one of the few indelible movies of the year.

Mike Leigh's stunning, corrosive Naked is one of the best movies of the year, and one of the toughest... Its manic mix of tenderness and degradation, hilarity and scariness, keeps you dangerously off balance.

Howl's Moving Castle has the logic of a dream: behind every door lie multiple realities, one more astonishing than the next.

There Will Be Blood is ferocious, and it will be championed and attacked with an equal ferocity. When the dust settles, we may look back on it as some kind of obsessed classic.

Harrowingly intense odyssey.

It's unprecedented, a sorrowful and savagely beautiful elegy that can stand in the company of the greatest antiwar movies.

There are few movies around that take such huge risks: this is high-wire filmmaking, without a net of irony.

The movie belongs to Hudson as the proud, self-destructive Effie. When she's center stage, Dreamgirls transports you to movie musical heaven.

A painfully funny movie. There’s nothing in the history of movie courtship quite like the first meeting between Pekar and his future wife and fellow depressive, Joyce Brabner.

But the thing about Carol Reed's 1949 The Third Man was that no matter how many times I saw it over the years its magic never failed. Its sophisticated, world-weary glamour never lost its allure. The movie only got richer as my own experiences got richer. I kept discovering dark new delights, and the classic moments remained every bit as classic.

What's remarkable is how immediately, after a full year, The Two Towers seizes your attention, and how urgently it holds you through three seamless, action-packed hours.

Creepily beautiful, acted with relish, Barton Fink is a savagely original work. It lodges in your head like a hatchet. [26 Aug 1991]

No two-hour film could ever capture all the riches of McEwan's masterly novel. But Wright and Hampton's Atonement comes tantalizingly close, while adding sensual delights all its own.

By the end of this white-knuckle movie, you stand in awe at the depth of man's will to survive. Touching the Void leaves you emotionally and physically spent, and grateful it was only a movie, not a mountain, you had to endure.

Every character--not just the kids, but the teachers as well--comes alive with a complexity worthy of Jean Renoir. The lyricism of Wild Reeds doesn't cast a smoke screen of nostalgia, it brings us closer to the experience of adolescence.

A meticulous, spellbinding, provocative depiction of the final days of the Third Reich.

Why is this movie Hitchcock's masterpiece? Because no movie plunges us more deeply into the dizzying heart of erotic obsession...The older you get, and the m ore times you see it, the more strange, chillingly romantic thriller pierces your heart.

A haunted thriller of disturbing power.

A film as rich as a sauce béarnaise, as refreshing as a raspberry sorbet.

Shot in stunning color by a gifted cinematographer named Caleb Deschanel, beautifully scored by Carmine Coppola in moods ranging from Arabian Nights impressionism to Wagnerian exaltation, the first hour of The Black Stallion is a state-of-the-art demonstration of film as a purely visual medium, a formal exercise that is nonetheless suffused with feeling. [29 Oct 1979, p.105]

I don't know how a movie this original got made today, but thank God for wonderful aberrations.

Eastwood is at his effortless, slyboots best and the film is as preposterous as it is delightful.

This powerful, precision-made movie offers hope as well -- an act of kindness from a German officer that saves the pianist’s life, the music that sustains his soul.

For anyone who grew up worshiping at the shrine of Julie Christie, the notion that she could be playing a white-haired woman drifting into senility is a jolt to the system. But her radiance, beauty and talent are undiminished: she's hauntingly, heartbreakingly good.

It's a deliciously outrageous premise, and director Barry Levinson and writers David Mamet and Hilary Henkin know just how to spin it, savaging Washington and Hollywood with merciless wit. It's a hoot.

It's a tribute to Newell's seductive filmmaking, and to the delicious wit of the sterling cast, that this unlikely romantic idyll casts so potent a spell. A sweet pipe dream, Enchanted April won't bear much scrutiny; just bask in it indulgently like a spring sun.

Anyone who cares about ravishing filmmaking, superb acting and movies willing to dive into the mystery of unconditional love will leave this dark romance both shaken and invigorated.

Depp is subtly winning as a man-child oblivious to his own pent-up rage. But the performance that will take your breath away is DiCaprio's. A lot of actors have taken flashy stabs at playing retarded characters and no one, old or young, has ever done it better. He's exasperatingly, heartbreakingly real. This 19-year-old, who shone earlier this year in "This Boy's Life," seems to have a bottomless talent.

Traffic doesn’t quite come to a full emotional boil at the end. Soderbergh is too knowing to offer easy solutions. But what a journey it takes us on: disturbing, exciting, completely absorbing.

What sets Jerry Maguire above any other romantic comedy this year is Crowe's writing. He captures the venal, high-stakes world of pro sports with deadly wit and an ex-journalist's sense of detail.

A schlock horror movie made for a pittance by 30-year-old John Carpenter, which happens to be the most frightening flick in years. Halloween is a superb exercise in the art of suspense, and it has no socially redeeming value whatsoever. Nasty, voyeuristic, relentless, it aims at nothing but to scare the hell out of you. [4 Dec 1978, p.116]

The best movie of the last 20 years about young people in love is 1989’s.

With a mad doctor like Ken Russell at the helm, one happily follows this movie to hell and back. [29 Dec 1980, p.65]

Rabbit Hole deftly sidesteps sentimentality and still wrenches your heart.

Think of it as an epic poem, in which Scorsese's swirling, headlong baroque camera searches paradoxically for the stillness at the meditative heart of Buddhism. [22 December 1997, p. 86]

Urgent, gritty, sometimes weirdly funny, The Fighter might be considered his first feel-good movie. But Russell's too honest and acute an observer to serve up affirmation without leaving a subversive aftertaste of ambivalence and unease.

It's hard to believe this is von Donnersmarck's first feature. His storytelling gifts have the novelistic richness of a seasoned master. The accelerating plot twists are more than just clever surprises; they reverberate with deep and painful ironies, creating both suspense and an emotional impact all the more powerful because it creeps up so quietly.

A languorous, funny and lovingly detailed memory film.

A stunning crime drama that shares its protagonists' rabid attention to detail and love of adrenalin.