David Ansen

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.