Jonathan Rosenbaum

The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works.

Dumont's film is unfinished in the sense that some paintings are.

Classic genre movies may be a scarce commodity, but this gutsy crime thriller and female buddy movie qualifies in spades.

Persuasive, intelligent, and provocative.

The film delivers old-fashioned star turns and glittering cameos (Jon Voight and Mickey Rourke are especially good, but Danny DeVito, Mary Kay Place, Danny Glover, Virginia Madsen, Roy Scheider, and Dean Stockwell--not to mention old-Hollywood icon Teresa Wright--also provide considerable pleasure).

Responsibility for the ensuing tragedy is so finely calibrated that neither can be comprehensively blamed or exculpated.

This is better than good, it's wonderful: if facial expressions can be compared to colors, Gedeck works with an unusually broad palette, constantly surprising us, and she helps her costars shine.

Its tact and intelligence, and also its reticence and detachment, make it a shocking and potent statement about our times.

The acting is so strong--with Spall a particular standout--that you're carried along as by a tidal wave.

Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified.

Something of a tour de force, this adaptation of Joe Simpson's nonfiction book about his climbing the 21,000-foot Siula Grande mountain in Peru, breaking a leg, and eventually making it back alive is remarkable simply because the story seems unfilmable.

There's plenty of wit on the surface, but the pain of paralysis comes through loud and clear.

What Brooks manages to do with them as they struggle mightily to connect with one another is funny, painful, beautiful, and basically truthful--a triumph for everyone involved.

Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout.

A finely crafted entertainment that works better than most current Hollywood movies.

It's a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star).

This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles).

James Whale’s brilliant and surprisingly delicate 1936 rendition of the Kern and Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is infinitely superior to the dull 1951 MGM Technicolor remake and, interestingly enough, less racist.

Roman Polanski's second British film is a mean little absurdist comedy set on a remote Northumberland island; it's also one of the best and purest of all his works.

Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction, and his wonderful cast never lets him down.

A prime contender for Otto Preminger's greatest film—a superb courtroom drama packed with humor and character that shows every actor at his or her best.

It's largely Kazan's authentic feeling for the locale, aided by Boris Kaufman's superb black-and-white cinematography, that makes this movie so special, combined with a first-rate ensemble.

This is the only Cassavetes film made without a full script (it grew out of acting improvs), and rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film.

This is arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his very best film.

Devoted to both the profound necessity and the sublime silliness of gratuitous social interchange, OHAYO is a rather subtler and grander work than might appear at first.

Lewis Milestone's powerful 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel, starring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim, deserves its reputation as a classic.

One of the earliest and best antiwesterns, made before the subgenre became self-conscious about critiquing the standard myths. Some that followed are merely contrary; this has the ring of truth.

Results are classy entertainment with little to interest women viewers but very shrewdly and cleverly put together, and probably more rewarding in long-range terms if you invest in Fox or Dreamworks than if you actually see the movie.

A strong, disturbing picture (1988) in which Meryl Streep’s beauty and talent and director Fred Schepisi’s intelligence are both shown to best advantage, without easy points or grandstanding.

This is a remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.

This is hilarious, deadly stuff, sparked by the cynical gusto of the two leads as well as the fascinating technical display of how TV "documentary evidence" can be digitally manufactured inside a studio.

Often seems more old-fashioned than modern.

I can't think of a better portrait of contemporary Paris or the zeitgeist of 2001-'04 than Chris Marker's wise and whimsical 58-minute 2004 video...no one can film people in the street better than Marker or combine images with more grace and finesse.

This rambling but beautiful feature by Theo Angelopoulos may seem like an anthology of 60s and 70s European art cinema: family nostalgia from Bergman and seaside frolics from Fellini; long, mesmerizing choreographed takes and camera movements from Jancso and Tarkovsky; haunting expressionist moods and visions from Antonioni.

This 1975 satire about a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves.

This brisk, free-falling fantasy about the famous collators of German fairy tales, played here as a kind of comedy act by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, is Terry Gilliam's most entertaining work since the glory days of "Time Bandits," "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," and "The Fisher King."

This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout all of its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don't have many complaints.

A highly entertaining form of ecological agitprop--radical but accessible.

Stylish and effective, if slightly overlong, thriller.

Gondry is a soft surrealist without much of a sociopolitical agenda, closer to Dr. Seuss than Luis Buñuel,

However one chooses to take its jaundiced view of history, it's probably the best film to date by the talented Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream), a triumph of mise en scene mated to a comic vision that keeps topping its own hyperbole.

It's hard to deny that Marlon Brando's performance as a dock worker and ex-fighter who finally decides to rat on his gangster brother (Rod Steiger) is pretty terrific.

This 1962 thriller is better than the Scorsese remake—above all for Robert Mitchum's chilling performance as a vengeful ex-con and an overall brute force in the crude story line—though it's arguably still some distance from deserving its reputation as a classic.

Nevertheless, the cast of mainly unknowns is so good, and Linklater is so adept at playing them off one another, that the two-hour running time never seems overextended.

Fresh and edgy; the images of a wasted London and the details of a paramilitary organization in the countryside are both creepy and persuasive.

This isn't the supreme masterpiece it might have been, but Nichols's direction is very polished and some of the lines and details are awfully funny.

If it speaks with a quieter voice than many of Bogdanovich's early pictures, what it has to say seems substantially more personal and thoughtful.

Don't expect any psychological depth here, but the cool wit and fun... are deftly maintained, and Sonnenfeld provides a bountiful supply of both fanciful beasties and ingenious visuals.

If you want to know what the Warhol scene was all about, this is even better than the documentaries.

The performances are strong (my favorite is Deborah Harry as an older waitress) and the sense of eroded as well as barely articulated lives is palpable.

Beautiful and challenging documentary.

Though it comes across as labored in spots, it also yields a good many beautiful and suggestive moments, and an overall film experience of striking originality.

The script runs out of ideas long before he does, and the film doesn't build dramatically as much as it could. But it's an impressive debut, full of bizarre imagination and visual flair—a must for fans of offbeat horror films.

David Mackenzie, who directed the remarkable Scottish drama "Young Adam" (2003), delivers another masterful, disturbing tale of illicit passion, erotic obsession, and sudden death set in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.

Despite the sudsy, overlit look of William A. Fraker's cinematography and Downey's varying success with sight gags, this is still a lot of fun. An additional kicker is provided by the picture's crazed doublethink morality, which implies that incest is OK as long as you've got amnesia.

Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you’ll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic of 1964, a Cuban-Russian production poorly received in both countries at the time (in Cuba it was often referred to as “I Am Not Cuba”).

Despite the flashback structure, this is a film in which mood matters more than plot, while the hero's heroic stature steadily shrinks.

What emerges is a powerhouse thriller full of surprises, original touches, and rare political lucidity, including an impressive performance by Jeff Goldblum as a Jewish yuppie gangster.

Roman Polanski's first film in English (1965, 105 min.) is still his scariest and most disturbing--not only for its evocations of sexual panic, but also because his masterful employment of sound puts the audience's imagination to work in numerous ways...As narrative this works only part of the time, and as case study it may occasionally seem too pat, but as subjective nightmare it's a stunning piece of filmmaking.

There's something almost wearying as well as exhilarating about the perpetual brilliance of Bosnian-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica.

Has the expressionistic simplicity of Kurosawa's other late films.

Volatile and sometimes daring performances by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi, and Lubna Azabal (as twins) contribute to the highly charged and novelistic experience.

Fascinating documentary.