Jami Bernard

It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.

The movie elevated the basic gangster picture into what became known as the niche genre of poetic realism. And, aside from Garbo, never have key lights on a star's face caused so much swooning among fans.

It took the German restorers four years to ready this print using dupe negatives and old prints found in archives around the world. Their work speaks for itself. Each frame of this classic is drop-dead stunning, the more so now that the movie no longer hiccups its way across the screen.

The movie is set in a gloriously creepy and crumbling Venice. It's the off-season, and every deserted canal and alleyway reeks of bad vibes. Roeg plays masterfully with this menacing atmosphere, jangling the nerves with quick cuts and quixotic possibilities. [16 Oct 1998, p.72]

Handsome, passionate and fun. It's everything we go to the movies for.

The strangely mesmerizing dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" was born of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 New Wave classic Band of Outsiders.

A bouquet of snappy one-liners and disarming nuttiness.

Spielberg's direction and Melissa Mathison's script never lose sight of the realistic, low center of gravity world of childhood, in which such marvelous adventures happen every day that an alien knocking around the garage is not really such an unusual occurrence. [2002 re-release]

Yet another deceptively simple, supremely moving film from Iran.

It's a deceptively simple tale that tackles, serenely and with surprising humor, issues of gender, power, custom and change.

A juicy noir stew of amorality that's the best thing since "Chinatown."

An insanely delicious animated feature.

"Chocolat" was just a warmup for the stunning display of the male form against National Geographic settings in her new Beau Travail.

No matter which floor you're on, the huge cast is extraordinary, and Altman gives the actors free rein to bring their characters to life despite such close quarters.

This stirring children's movie about separation anxiety is swimming with comic references only adults will catch, thus greatly expanding the potential audience.

Gloriously inventive, delightfully nutty comic treasure is unlike anything you've ever seen. It's lunatic.

Clever, buoyant and surprisingly human.

A sunny-looking movie about the darkest paranoia.

This extraordinary film refracts truth through the prism of memory, until what you get is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, full of sacrifice and betrayal.

After all the observations on heartache, politics, art, commerce, passion, identity, mortality, even mental health, six hours begin to seem downright compact.

The most gorgeous movie of the year. This smashing martial-arts romance from Chinese director Zhang Yimou is stunning in other ways, too, like the eroticism that ripples just beneath the surface.

It's a romantic weepie.

Like watching an American teen-sex comedy through a glass darkly.

You can reexperience the humor and magic -- and the essence of Streisand -- in this William Wyler classic.

Pure, eye-popping pleasure.

With its agile, clever script and winning characters, Toy Story 2 is that rare thing -- an excellent children's movie with no upper age limit.

Excellent, troubling social commentary based on a true story.

Powerfully uplifting precisely because it's so horrifying.

A sublimely uplifting movie.

Niccol doesn't always get the mix right, and the tone here is inconsistent. But the movie remains compelling, largely because of Cage's dry, deadpan delivery.

For film buffs and Lynch fans, this is a glorious high.

A gentle comic stew of monster movies, adding dashes of Bugs Bunny irreverence and British gentility.

Accomplishes two great things on what was undoubtedly a minuscule budget. It breathes life into a small story that has larger ramifications. It also shows that America, as represented by Jackson Heights, is still the promised land for people about whom movies are rarely made.

Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.

Gently unfolds into an epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.

Tarnation represents a breakthrough in the possibilities of the personal film as a mix of poetry and journalism. It's also harrowing as hell.

Caché seems at first glance like a straightforward thriller - about a talk-show host being stalked by a technologically savvy blackmailer. But it's really a sly, subversive commentary on conscience, race, class and inequity.

Almodovar is adept at weaving together strands you'd never guess would match.

A brilliant if slow-paced movie about one man's unwitting journey into adulthood.

The already minimalist filmmaker has gone positively threadbare with Ten, a movie that feels as if there was no director on the set. For the most part, there wasn't.

It's sweet but not the least bit plausible that any kid in the mid-'80s would be surprised that along with rock 'n' roll come sex and drugs.

A fascinating movie that explores grief from an emotionally truthful angle rarely seen in movies.

Million Dollar Baby is a knockout. It is Clint Eastwood's baby in every respect — a movie that approaches the level of great boxing films, like "Raging Bull," by using sport as a metaphor for human nature.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has perfectly wedded form to function by filming Boogie Nights in a style suggesting the grainy texture of porn and the ambivalence of the era.

If there is any justice in the world, Farnsworth will be remembered at Oscar time.

Borderline brilliant. Tackles the war on drugs from a kaleidoscope of perspectives.

Exhaustingly manic but curiously unfunny movie.

Varda injects her sprightly personality into the film, a seasoning that sometimes overwhelms the stew.

Linklater's ravishing new movie represents a bold leap into the possibilities of technology.

It's a compassionate story about what makes people tick and what really matters.

The power of the arts to transcend cultural differences is presumably what moves the German to spare Szpilman, and, perhaps, is the key to Polanski's salvation as well.

The combination of the ancient tinted footage and Butler's crisp, sweeping vistas of the same areas provides a breathtaking recap of one of history's most stirring rescues.

Billy Bob Thornton wrote, directed and stars in this compassionate, occasionally funny, character-driven movie about a mentally unstable man who takes the best interests of children very seriously.

There's no refuge in this uncomfortably realistic movie, and that is its strength.

Amazing... There are only a finite number of filmmakers with the devotion, patience and ability to tease out these stories.

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition.

Wiseman's film is revealing. But it is also a silent rebuke to a society that tries to hide this pervasive problem behind a smug vision of itself.

As gorgeous and contemplative as it is, Hero is a genre picture and needs to deliver the action goods. To that end, there are plenty of clever, lovingly choreographed sequences.

The production is fantastically funny, high-energy camp, punctuated by Trask's infectious score and by Mitchell, dressing in a succession of wigs twice the size of his body.

Explores the comparatively enlightened Berlin culture that had allowed homosexuality to flourish in intellectual and social circles before the Nazis forcibly changed the national mind-set.

The real revelation of Sound and Fury is how it introduces hearing people to a culture they insist on ignoring.

How dangerous it is to be a woman in Iran, especially one going against the wishes of her menfolk, is brought home time after time in these related vignettes.

Smith's gleeful, touching documentary records the agony and the ecstasy of realizing your dream, and intangible ways that such dreams help keep people alive.

In addition to the strong script, the ensemble performances are topnotch, with no one hogging the limelight.

A tart, funny and tremendously sobering movie about the deepest recesses of personal unhappiness.

Writer-director Danis Tanovic, a Bosnian who spent years documenting his homeland's turmoil, makes a bold feature-film debut with this funny, sobering message movie.

The sunny, funny, toe-tapping Lagaan is the answer to those who ask why they don't make movies like they used to: They do, but in India.

It's enough to encourage the aspiring film makers in the audience, no matter how wee in age, to yell "Cut!"

It's not the best of von Trier, but the movie is shot in an unforgettable, haunting style that evokes both Bergman and the silent era.

An adorable, infectious work of true sophistication.

Once in a great while there's a movie that's so funny, infectious and welcoming - a movie that makes you feel so good about America and the people in it - you just want to climb inside the screen and live there. That's the case with Dave Chappelle's Block Party - part comedy, part concert film, part avant-garde experiment, and all of it a joy.

This powerful, compact trilogy speaks volumes about women in Iran.

The movie adds nothing to the political dialogue, and the love story is mood-killingly sad. The lure of the exotic can be deceptive, it says. The moody, murky atmosphere leaves nothing clear except that mixed intentions will always yield mixed results.

The white-knuckle center of the movie is Sean Penn, who gives an utterly raw performance as Jimmy, father of the dead girl. It's one of the few times that a parent's grief has felt real on the screen through all its ugly permutations.

Funny gem.

Mismatch of tone and material.

A droll gem that celebrates movie love with feeling and deadpan humor.

Streep is perfect, as per usual, but the showy orchid role goes to Cage in an Oscar-worthy tour de force. He pours his body into Charlie's slumped frame of mind and creates a character churning with endearing contradictions -- the unforgettable nebbish.

And still the dialogue is astonishingly feeble, the acting unforgivably wooden. To paraphrase Yoda, the only creature with ­truly human dimensions ever since Harrison Ford's cowboy-mechanic Han Solo departed the galaxy: Bored I am.

Rough around the edges, but effectively presents the quandary of women during the repressive religious regime.

There's something uniquely gratifying about watching nonprofessionals deliver totally natural performances.

A perfect blend of summer action, a big movie with a deeply personal story.

A cat's cradle of creepy childhood memory oozing unreliably from the mind of an aging, desiccated, paranoid schizophrenic, played quite amazingly by a mumbling, stooped, shifty-eyed Ralph Fiennes.

Not since Cary Grant offered Joan Fontaine a gleaming glass of milk has a bedtime toddy looked as suspicious as it does in Claude Chabrol's wittily enigmatic Merci pour le chocolat.

All this frenzy, all these "quotes" from other movies, and yet Vol. 2 is strangely static - a dulling experience that can safely be admired from afar without it ever engaging the senses.

A marvel of character-driven drama that no serious filmgoer should miss.

For devout fans of the greenish monster and for those looking to shoot fish in a barrel.

Seeing the splendid new version of Pride & Prejudice can be hazardous to your health: There's a very real danger of swooning.

A lyrical, subtle, chaste and nearly wordless romance.

Is a movie worthwhile if it makes you sick? Absolutely, in the case of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

The same audience that loves "March of the Penguins" will eat up this beautifully told, gorgeously shot story of a grieving boy trying to return his pet cheetah to the wilds of South Africa.

Don't let the slow, deliberate pace fool you. A lot is going on in David Cronenberg's masterful A History of Violence, and you'll miss it if you blink.

A great divorce movie. It's also one of the canniest comedies ever made about a certain kind of literary pretension.

A richly inventive, slightly eerie animated movie from Japan.

Another excellent example of how Iranian cinema uses deceptively simple techniques to decode devastating truths about human nature.

An entrancing experience for Potter fans. It's a carefully crafted, dreamy immersion in a world that feels snugly familiar even when evil intrudes.

La Promesse believes that decency is an innate human quality that can surface from any rubble. [16 May 1997, p.47]

A haunting, melancholy work.