Keith Phipps

The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.

A remarkable film that towers over the endless clones that followed.

Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the silent era.

To Be Or Not To Be works as both comedy and thriller, ratcheting up the tension and humor as the actors’ scheme threatens to fall apart, and the gags build on one another.

It's all presented in a detached style that's ultimately much more moving and truthful than any heartstring-slashing weeper. This may be Egoyan's best work yet, and it's surely one of the best films of the year.

A funny, touching, nearly cliché-free, and thoroughly considered evocation of a time, place, and state of mind. Released just 11 years after the events it depicts (it usually takes about 20 years for nostalgia to set in), the film both captures the enormous societal changes between the early '60s and early '70s and winningly dramatizes the lives of its characters.

Tati's most elaborate film, Playtime stands as his masterpiece, an awe-inspiring work of intricate choreography with a heart to match its technical expertise.

Frankenstein works as a fast-moving thriller and, even now, a stylish, frighteningly atmospheric horror film, but also as a sad outcast parable. Frankenstein's creature may be a monstrosity, but he's also instantly sympathetic to anyone who's ever felt like a misfit.

A film of fatally flawed heroes, oversized passions, nation-building, and, inevitably, violence, America follows its characters from childhood to old age by way of the kind of grand-scale filmmaking that wouldn't be seen again until Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. [2014 re-release]

A bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier by focusing on two strikingly different men who help one town choose law and order over the chaos of the open range.

It's hard to film icons like Young as anything BUT icons, but Demme's film gets past the legend, zooming in on Young's aged, heroic face and finding an artist as human as the rest of us.

The film finds a surprising amount of tenderness and humor beneath the brutality. The laughs may catch in the throat, but that's only a byproduct of City Of God's power to leave viewers breathless.

Its social conscience and deep concern with what it means to be human remains unspoiled.

To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.

It's not only one of the best classic-era Disney features, but also one of the best animated films from any studio at any time.

An excellent movie, as effective in battle scenes as it is in that of soldiers ruminating on an Edith Piaf song.

Weir builds atmosphere one detail and lingering shot at a time. The cluttered, shadowy interiors of the school contrast with the open spaces and welcoming light of Hanging Rock, but the film makes neither feel like a safe place. Every moment feels designed to be unsettling, but the film also creates a sense of inevitability, that whatever is happening can’t be avoided, and should perhaps be embraced.

The ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again.

It's a heartbreaking, bullet-strewn valentine to what keeps us human.

At once a devastating condemnation of war and an exciting action film...The additional running time only adds to Petersen's masterfully bleak, claustrophobic atmosphere. Das Boot is by no means a pleasant experience, but it's an intelligent and emotionally gripping one that you won't forget. [Director's Cut]

Rio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian.

Burton brings his signature visual style, and a pair of stock players for his stars, into this film adaptation, but he wisely follows Sondheim's lead, letting the music and spirit of the original piece show the way.

A rousing, reverent, often brilliant re-creation of a seminal comics character, Batman Begins proves Batman is at home in the 21st century as he was in the 20th.

Out Of The Past is undeniably a film noir, and rightly regarded as one of the genre’s best.

Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).

One of the best films of the year.

There's more going on in the film's mundane moments than the excitement its heroes imagine is waiting beyond the horizon. They never find the postcard America they were promised, but there's a lot of beauty, and a lot of America, in the way they keep searching for it, never quite saying what's on their mind as they go.

Hellman gives viewers plenty of time to study every detail, dwelling less on action than on quiet, small-town vistas, rundown diners, and forgotten stretches of Route 66.