Jonathan Rosenbaum

The adroit mixture of pantheism and sentimentality continues to be sufficiently timeless to allow Disney's heirs to recycle this picture endlessly.

What seems most striking today, in spite of the many moments of comedy and elation, is how painfully candid and personal it is in its despair and disillusionment.

Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Essential viewing.

Mesmerizing.

Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory.

Throughout the film cause and effect, the mainspring of most narratives, is replaced by a sense of spiritual synchronicity.

Like much of Verhoeven's best work, it's shamelessly melodramatic, but in its dark moral complexities it puts "Schindler's List" to shame. Van Houten and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) are only two of the standouts in an exceptional cast.

Hou's best film since "The Puppetmaster" (1993). It's also his most minimalist effort to date, slow to reveal its depths and beauties, and it marks a rejuvenation of his art.

Alain Resnais' 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, "Smoking/No Smoking"; that film tried to be as "English" as possible. But this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British culture, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy "Muriel" and "Providence."

Elliptical, full of subtle inner rhymes...and profoundly moving, this is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since "Dr. Strangelove," as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what "The Shining" failed to do.

Wong Kar-wai's idiosyncratic style first became apparent in this gorgeously moody second feature.

A masterpiece of some kind, though clearly destined to be controversial and contested everywhere it shows—not only for the sexist, racist, and homophobic rage it exposes but also for its brilliant confrontational style.

Probably the most influential of all silent films after The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films. And in the use of crosscutting and action to generate suspense, the film's climax hasn't been surpassed.

It’s a historical marker in a way that few other films are — not only the nail in the coffin of the French New Wave and one of the strongest statements about the aftermath of the failed French revolution of May 1968, but also a definitive expression of the closing in of Western culture after the end of the era generally known as the 60s.

In this landscape everyone is a tourist, but Tati suggests that once we can find one another, we all belong.

Combines live-action and animation with breathtaking wizardry... Alternately hilarious, frightening, and awesome.

Along with Dumbo, which immediately followed it, this 1940 classic, the second of the Disney animated features, is probably the best in terms of visual detail and overall imagination as well as narrative sweep.

In all, the most pleasure-filled Hollywood movie of 1994.

This 1985 film's absolute freedom from cliches is genuinely refreshing; looking at it again after Van Sant's subsequent "Drugstore Cowboy," I found it every bit as good and in some ways even more impressive than the later film. It shouldn't be missed.

Masterfully charted and acted.

Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout.

Shot on a shoestring and none the worse for it, Jean-Luc Godard’s gritty and engaging first feature had an almost revolutionary impact when first released in 1960.

Jarmusch has said that the film's odd, generally slow rhythm -- hypnotic if you're captivated by it, as I am, and probably unendurable if you're not--was influenced by classical Japanese period movies by Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa.

The best documentary to date about the military occupation of Iraq.

For the most part, this is a very close adaptation of Booth Tarkington's underrated novel about the relentless decline of a wealthy midwestern family through the rise of industrialization, though Welles makes the story even more powerful through his extraordinary mise en scene and some of the finest acting to be found in American movies.

Banned in France for 18 years, this masterpiece still packs a wallop, though nothing in it is as simple as it may first appear; audiences are still arguing about the final sequence, which has been characterized as everything from a sentimental cop-out to the ultimate cynical twist.

Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock's greatest movie.

David Lynch's first digital video, almost three hours long, resists synopsizing more than anything else he's done. Some viewers have complained, understandably, that it's incomprehensible, but it's never boring, and the emotions Lynch is expressing are never in doubt.

One of the most perfect endings of any film that comes to mind.

Masterpiece.

A lush piece of romanticism.

A smashing piece of entertainment.

The period details and performances are uniformly superb (Bob Hoskins is especially good as MGM executive Eddie Mannix), and the major characters are even more complex than those in "Chinatown."

All-expert cast.

The talentless but irrepressibly trendy Luc Besson ("Subway," "The Big Blue") dreamed up this idiotic story that seems vaguely inspired by Kubrick's (not Anthony Burgess's) "A Clockwork Orange."

Riveting cinematic essay.

It's hard to think of many more galvanizing definitions of what it means to be an American than Cho's volcanic self-assessments.

A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace.

There’s no denying that Cyclo is a visionary piece of work, shot through with passion and poetry.

A clarion call for freedom and collective action both hopeful and energizing, it qualifies as a generational statement as Rebel Without a Cause did in the 50s, but without the defeatism and masochism. Not to be missed.

Tarantino's mock-tough narrative--which derives most of its titillation from farcical mayhem, drugs, deadpan macho monologues, evocations of anal penetration, and terms of racial abuse--resembles a wet dream for 14-year-old male closet queens (or, perhaps more accurately, the 14-year-old male closet queen in each of us), and his command of this smart-alecky mode is so sure that this nervy movie sparkles throughout with canny twists and turns.

Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional... This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he's already clearly a master.

Three Times, one of the peaks of his (Hou Hsiao-hsien) career, may be your last chance to see his work inside a movie theater.

The three lead actors all manage to be terrific without showing off—Leigh, in the course of an exquisite performance, does one of the best impersonations of a country southern accent I've ever heard—and the use of Miami locations is a consistent delight. The late Willeford wrote four Hoke Moseley novels, and this crisp, funny, grisly, and perfectly balanced adaptation makes me yearn for Armitage to film a few more of them.

This is a masterwork by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old father of African cinema and one of Senegal's greatest novelists.

A knockout thriller that succeeds brilliantly at just about everything Scorsese's Cape Fear didn't.

A grand-style, idiosyncratic war epic, with wonderful poetic ideas, intense emotions, and haunting images rich in metaphysical portent.

Writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk collaborated on the formidable "Up and Down" (2004), and this 2006 feature, which takes its title from a Robert Graves poem, is equally impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters.

Filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newhman do a superb job of telling this neglected story in vivid detail.

Beautifully composed and deftly delivered, it becomes the libretto to Potter's visual music, creating a remarkable lyricism and emotional directness.

A Chayefsky movie isn't hard to identify, but I think it's safe to say that these days a Charlie Kaufman movie is even more recognizable.

Its special effects are used so seamlessly as part of an overall artistic strategy that, as critic Annette Michelson has pointed out, they don't even register as such, and thus are almost impossible to trivialize, a feat unmatched in movies.

This is truly a great film, recently celebrated at length in "My Voyage to Italy," Martin Scorsese's documentary about Italian cinema.

Haggis's dialogue is worthy of Hemingway, and the three leads border on perfection.

The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor.

Shot on a year's worth of weekends on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work--conceivably the best single feature about ghetto life that we have--was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema, an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that has had virtually no distribution. It shouldn't be missed.

The juxtaposition of liberal Jewish attorney Dershowitz (Silver) and von Bulow working together on the latter's defense makes for some engagingly offbeat drama, with some interesting insights into the legal process.

This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary.

Conceivably the best picture Sam Goldwyn ever produced.

A great film but also one of the most upsetting films I know.

The movie's dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll.

Stylistically fresh and full of sweetness that never cloys, this is contemporary Hollywood filmmaking at its near best.

It's one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling.

Watts and Harring even turn out to be the hottest Hollywood couple of 2001. The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing stretches--but that's what Lynch is famous for. It looks great too.

All this edginess, combined with the grandeur and sweep of a classic western, demonstrates that Jones clearly knows how to tell a story -- and how to confound us at the same time.

A heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don't do.

An exquisite, haunting movie for grown-ups about love and family ties.

With a shamelessly cliched script by Amy Holden Jones (based on a novel by Jack Engelhard) that includes a speech plagiarized from Citizen Kane, the results are only for those who can take fare like "Valley of the Dolls" with a straight face and want to see Redford play Jay Gatsby again.

Orson Welles was so taken with this film that after seeing it he declared Kubrick could do no wrong; not to be missed.

An early voice-over segment about the Casbah itself, before Gabin makes an appearance, is so pungent you can almost taste the place, even though the filming was clearly done in a studio.

Duvall’s direction of a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, especially in the extended church sessions, is never less than masterful.

So accessible and entertaining.

The effect is riveting and telling--not always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening.

"Heathers" may view teenagers more caustically, but this movie, incomparably better, actually delivers the goods.

Whether the title refers to the baby or the thief remains an open question, and the viewer is left to decide whether the theme of redemption should be perceived in Christian terms. This builds to a suspenseful climax, and as in Hitchcock's best work, that suspense is morally inflected.

The grafting of 40s hard-boiled detective story with SF thriller creates some dysfunctional overlaps, and the movie loses some force whenever violence takes over, yet this remains a truly extraordinary, densely imagined version of both the future and the present, with a look and taste all its own.

Frightening, funny, profound, and mysterious.

A dedicated, charismatic, crack-addicted history teacher is the most believable protagonist in an American movie this year.

The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking.

The best American movie about returning soldiers I've ever seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did.

It has few stars familiar to Americans, and it shares with "Pan's Labyrinth" the rare distinction of being a mainstream commercial movie with subtitles.

A film that might make you cry watching it is just as likely to give you the creeps thinking about it afterward, which is as it should be.

This masterpiece, an art film deftly masquerading as a thriller, seems to celebrate small-town pastoralism and critique big-city violence, but this position turns out to be double-edged.

Traffic is a masterpiece in its own right—not only for the sharp picture of the frenetic and gimmick-crazy civilization that worships cars, but also for many remarkable formal qualities: an extraordinary use of sound (always one of Tati’s strong points), a complex interplay of chance and control in the observations of everyday behavior, and, in some spots, a development of the use of multiple focal points to articulate some of the funniest gags.

This unexpected masterpiece was assembled so quickly that it has an improvisational feel and a surrealist capacity to access its own unconscious—traits it shares with Feuillade's work.

Unlike most horror movies, this chiller gives equal prominence to reality and fantasy, though the reality is far more frightening. The only precedent that comes to mind in terms of a lyrical treatment of a child's experience of terror is "The Night of the Hunter."

One reason Bamako feels like a blast of sanity is that the theoretical debates about the state of the world, particularly Africa and more particularly Mali, are only half of its agenda. The other half, broadly speaking, is the life of everyday Africans.

This is one of the most powerful and influential American films of the 60s.

A dense and subtle masterpiece.

Maddin takes on his first commissioned feature--an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula--and succeeds brilliantly, making it his own while offering what may be the most faithful screen version to date of Bram Stoker's novel.

One of the craftiest and most satisfying pieces about gender politics to come along in ages.

A highly emotional epic about what it means to be both Chinese and American.

Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.

A veritable salad of mixed genres and emotional textures, this exciting black-and-white cold war thriller runs more than two hours and never flags for an instant...A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.

An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson.

Arguably Woody Allen's funniest movie. A riotous object lesson in how much dialogue can transform visuals, and Allen works wonders with it.

The results are masterful, admirably unsentimental, and never boring, if also a little stodgy.

Better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified.

Powerful and haunting.

First-rate agitprop about the ruthlessness of South African apartheid, directed by Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) and adapted from Andre Brink's novel by Palcy and Colin Welland. The relentless plot is effectively set up and expertly pursued, and Hugh Masekela makes some striking contributions to Dave Grusin's musical score.

To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life -- but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.

While it's easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this 1992 movie turns out to be wonderful—broad and low character comedy that's solidly imagined and beautifully played.

A quantum leap in ambition from "Hard Eight" and "Boogie Nights" and is, to my mind, much more interesting.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is Thornton's nuanced performance, but the film has other rare virtues: all the characters are fully and richly fleshed out (with some unexpected turns by John Ritter and singer Dwight Yoakam), and the story's construction is carefully measured.

Neil LaBute delivers his most interesting and powerful film to date, though it's also his most unpleasant and disturbing.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse of the Iranian urban middle class, and though it eschews most of the pleasures of composition and landscape found in other Kiarostami films, it's never less than riveting.

The first Ang Lee film I've seen that I've liked without qualification.

The overall effect is disturbing yet mesmerizing.

Stylistically captivating, subtly nuanced, and structurally unpredictable.

Unprecedented in its intellectual ambition, this is endlessly stimulating; it probably tries for too much, but it shames many other contemporary essays that try for too little.

In its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction. If any movie of recent years deserves to be called inspirational--a much-abused term that one hesitates to revive apart from exceptional circumstances--this one certainly does.

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 81-minute masterpiece manages to be many things at once.

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

Sweet and warm as well as manic, this is full of loopy surprises, and the supporting cast (including Penelope Ann Miller, Bruno Kirby, Steve Bushak, Maximilian Schell, and Bert Parks, playing himself in his film debut) is uniformly fine.

Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.

By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.

Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.

The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationships -- between birds, between people, and between birds and people.

Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.

Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends.

This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.

A witty, canny meditation on the power of pop culture in general and the rationalizations of cinephilia and film criticism in particular.

Caine has already been cited as a likely Oscar nominee for his performance, which is clearly one of the most nuanced to date from this first-rate actor, and Fraser is funny and effective as a foil to the old pro.

This remarkable British silent (1929) is special in many ways.

One hell of a movie.

Under the thoughtful direction of Guy Ferland - what emerges is solid and affecting.

This is a powerful story and a splendid spectacle.

There are even more characters of interest here than in "Nashville."

A compellingly watchable, suspenseful, and often funny treatment of a grim subject--the hatred that can build up in a long-term marriage--that also becomes an indirect commentary on yuppie materialism.

Not only Waters's best movie, but a crossover gesture that expands his appeal without compromising his vision one iota; Ricki Lake as the hefty young heroine is especially delightful.

Exciting and innovative feature.

Their calm assurance -- Hallyday as a grizzled icon, Rochefort as a melancholy mensch -- is a pleasure to behold.

This offbeat and unpredictable comedy-thriller throws so many curveballs, one right after another, that I doubt I've had more fun at an American movie this year.

A postnoir melodrama with metaphysical trimmings, it does remarkable things with mood and pacing, and the two matches with Gleason as Minnesota Fats are indelible.

Powerful.

This 1964 entry is the most enjoyable of the James Bond thrillers starring Sean Connery—perhaps because it's the most comic and cartoony in look as well as conception. Still, it's every bit as imperialist and misogynistic as the other screen adventures based on Ian Fleming's books.

This is a highly personal and even religious expression of Hitchcock concerning the vicissitudes of fate, predicated on his lifelong fear that anyone can be wrongly accused of a crime and placed behind bars.

The cast as a whole is astonishing--especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest role to date.

It's Tykwer's most assured picture to date, and like much of Kieslowski's best work it qualifies simultaneously as engrossing narrative and philosophical parable.

A brilliant satirical diagnosis of what's most screwed up about life in this country, especially when it comes to sexual frustration and kiddie porn.

Gripping...compelling.

This is the least well-known of the madcap satirical comedies of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), and by all counts the weirdest. But the richness of its ideas makes it my favorite. The plot combines the rock musical with the spy thriller (not to mention assorted other genres), and the comic invention is fairly constant.

As absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale, this chilling, nocturnal black-and-white masterpiece was originally released in this country dubbed and under the title "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus," but it's much too elegant to warrant the usual "psychotronic" treatment.

I'm not prone to like socially deterministic films of this kind, yet Loach is so masterful at squeezing nuance and truth out of the form that I was completely won over.

Yang seems to miss nothing as he interweaves shifting viewpoints and poignant emotional refrains.

I would nominate this authoritative 1962 adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel The King’s Ransom as Akira Kurosawa’s best nonperiod picture, though Ikiru and Rhapsody in August are tough competitors.

Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work.

It's virtually guaranteed to make us squirm.

This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."

Warren Beatty sounds off angrily and shrewdly about politics, delivering what is possibly his best film and certainly his funniest and livliest.

This pared-away comedy-drama, which concentrates exclusively on the three characters, has plenty of old-fashioned virtues: deft acting, a nice sense of scale that makes the drama agreeably life-size, a good use of Seattle locations, fluid camera work (by Michael Ballhaus), a kind of burnished romanticism about the music, and a genuine feeling for the characters and their various means of coping. And Pfeiffer turns out to be a terrific singer.

Much of the film's potency derives from its personal edge -- the passion for precise period decor, the title dedicating the film to Leigh's parents (a doctor and midwife), and even the childlike classification of many characters as either good souls or villains.

This may be the most literate of all the spectacles set in antiquity.

Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much better known.

Film is still an impressive piece of work, visually and rhythmically masterful.

The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements.

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

Warmly recommended to viewers who like their romantic comedies small-scale but life-size.

His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one.

Not to be hyperbolic, but Richard Linklater's first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch.

The results are skillful, highly affecting, and ultimately more than a little pernicious.

Clint Eastwood's ambitious 1988 feature about the great Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) is the most serious, conscientious, and accomplished jazz biopic ever made, and almost certainly Eastwood's best picture as well.

Impressive for its lean and unblemished storytelling, but even more so for its performances.

Exciting not as ethnography but as storytelling, as drama, and as filmmaking.

I was floored by Cronenberg's mastery of the material. Fiennes gives one of his finest performances; Miranda Richardson, playing at least three characters in the protagonist's twisted vision, is no less impressive.

Action-adventure pictures have a lamentable tendency toward mindlessness, but Edward Zwick's epic story has numerous virtues apart from suspense and spectacle.

It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did—certainly more fun than anything he made after it.

Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.

A lot more imaginative and entertaining than one might have thought possible, a feast for the eye and mind.

An astonishing tour de force--especially for Irons, whose sense of nuance is so refined that one can tell in a matter of seconds which twin he is playing in a particular scene.

Richard Linklater goes Hollywood (1995) -- triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock.

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.

Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy.

This may not have gotten much publicity, but it's a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable.

He doesn't lose his stylistic identity either: in addition to the very Mamet-like delivery of unfinished sentences, his command of rhythm and flow remains flawless throughout.

The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.

The movie evokes Howard Hawks (in spirit if not to the letter) with its tight focus on a snug, obsessive world of insiders and camp followers where the exchanges between buddies and sexes have a euphoric stylishness and a giddy sense of ritual.

A fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery.

Genuinely frightening...it's nice for a change to see some of the virtues of old-fashioned horror films—moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show—rather than the usual splatter shocks and special effects (far from absent, but employed with relative economy).

A genuine rarity: a sex comedy with brains.

This deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward's exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance as India Bridge, a frustrated, well-to-do WASP Kansas City housewife and mother during the 30s and 40s; and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the books.

This is absorbing throughout--not just a history lesson but, as always with Rohmer, a story about individuals

This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it's an amazing and beautiful work just the same.

Magical, visually exciting, affecting even in its sincere hokeyness, and extremely provocative.

Despite a few narrative confusions, I found it pure magic.

One regrets the pounding Muzak of Tangerine Dream, but this is on the whole a striking directorial debut, at once scary and erotic, with lots of sidelong touches in the casting, direction, and script .

The tragic tale that emerges is full of powerful lessons and impenetrable mysteries

You feel it in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaning.

Based on a true story, Ken Loach’s powerful and disturbing British drama (1994) about a single working-class mother with four children from four different fathers is made unforgettable by stand-up comedian Crissy Rock’s lead performance and by the filmmakers’ determination to make the story as messy and as complex as life itself.

A lot of claims have been made for this campy bloodbath concerto (1989) by Hong Kong director John Woo, and I must admit that he's even better than Brian De Palma at delivering emotional and visceral excess with staccato relentlessness.

Pedro Almodovar's 1995 comic melodrama seems in many ways his most mature work, in theme as well as execution.... Almodovar's control over the material and his affection for his characters never falter.

Cronenberg's follow-up to "A History of Violence" -- starring the same lead, Viggo Mortensen, in a very different part -- lacks the theoretical dimension of its predecessor, but it's no less masterful in its fluid storytelling and shocking choreography of violence.

Waters builds to a didactic message that he underlines with Disney-esque dream dust (in various colors), as if to protect his sincerity with the disclaimer of self-mockery.

Day-Lewis's performance is necessarily a bit showy—one has to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the character's contorted features—but he puts on a terrific drunk scene, and for all his character's travails the film as a whole winds up surprisingly upbeat.

Compared with the novel, the movie might seem predictable. But compared with other movies, it stands alone.

This sharp, convincing, and utterly contemporary political film calls to mind some of Ken Loach's work, full of passion as well as precision.

Underrated when it came out and unjustly neglected since, it’s not only the major French New Wave film made by a woman, but a key work of that exciting period—moving, lyrical, and mysterious.

If, like me, you've been wondering how Terry Zwigoff, the brilliant documentary filmmaker who made "Crumb," would negotiate his shift to fiction filmmaking, here's your answer: brilliantly.

The film persuades us to think long and hard about what prison means, and Lee has shaped it like a poem that builds into an epic lament, especially in a beautiful and tragic closing that risks absurdity to achieve the sublime.

In one sense, this seemingly melodramatic plot premise is contrived, registering more as myth than as real possibility. Yet thanks to what the movie has in mind and especially what the actors bring to it, it's a lovely myth, one that has the ring of deeply felt truth.

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.