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.

By the time of The Searchers, Wayne had toughened to match Ford's darker vision. Redemption is still out there, but it has to be fought for, and sometimes winning it doesn't make anyone happier.

It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]

For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.

Encounter remains the definition of timeless, a beautifully shot, heartbreakingly acted, minutely detailed illustration of thoroughly recognizable human frailty.

Working from a script by Edmund North (Patton), taken from a story by Harry Bates, Robert Wise directs the movie with a minimum of spectacle.

Newman picks up speed and symbolic baggage as the movie progresses, and much of the film’s brilliance lies in the way Sarafian balances the two elements.

In three short scenes, this otherwise linear film unexpectedly slips loose from time, portraying a joyous moment, a tragic revelation, and then a long, slow scene that holds both in the balance, letting viewers tip the scale in whichever direction their hearts incline. It's an effect that could only happen in cinema, and it's made all the more stunning by its appearance in a film taken from a by-all-logic-unfilmable book.

If Fury Road were only interested in action, it would still be a stunning achievement, but the film has more on its mind.

Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.

While it's very funny, Boogie Nights taps into something much deeper with its on-target depiction of the shifting political and social tides of the '70s and '80s and thoughtful relationships between characters. It's a deeply satisfying movie.

It plays like the work of a filmmaker operating at the highest level of his abilities.

Anderson has made a strange, entrancing, often darkly funny film that’s at once like nothing he’s ever made and one no one else could make.

A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level.

What makes Towers so staggering is the way it brings the full scope of Jackson's adaptation into focus. Without missing a beat in three hours, the film shifts from epic to lyrical and back.

Ozu lets the story of uneasy transitions play out against a Japan that's undergoing changes of its own.

Haneke’s latest is essentially an inquiry into the roots of a certain kind of evil.

The film plays just as easily as a stand-in for the mob mentality that let Joseph McCarthy run amok in his attempt to sniff out every last American with communist sympathies—past, present, and future—until all had conformed to a rigid definition of the right thinking.

Granik has no taste for noir archness, opting for a chilly, shot-on-decaying-locations naturalism that feels as lived-in as Lawrence's performance.

There’s not a wasted moment as The Post packs what could be an overwhelming amount of information into a story that ultimately reveals itself as a Capra-esque morality play with deep roots in recent history and a style that sometimes calls back to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s.

The liberal Ford and the conservative Wayne had nothing in common politically, but artistically, they're perfectly in sync.

The power to provoke may not always have a smoke-to-fire relationship with greatness but with Scorsese's film, a testament of faith that leaves in the question marks, it undeniably does.

Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.

There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.

It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.

Le Samouraï is a terrific film, at once a tense thriller and a fascinating character study, and only as cold as it looks until its unforgettable final scene.

Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.

As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.

Zuckerberg's story ends up feeling bigger than his own life.

It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.

Almodóvar is still one of the few directors worth watching just for how he uses color on the screen. But the pleasures have always run much deeper, and now they run deeper still.

The horror is fueled by sexual frustration, repressed passion, and the everyday anxieties of marriage and urban life, and it plays out in a noir-lit New York filled with everyday people. No fan of gothic castles, Lewton brought horror home with Cat People.

It’s breathtaking on two fronts: Reinert unearths stunning footage—far removed from the fuzzy copies used as B-roll in other documentaries—that captures the full scale of NASA’s accomplishment. But he keeps that footage grounded in the image and voices of the modest men and women who made it happen.

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes gets the series back on track, sending three apes back to the 20th century for a story that begins comically and ends in fear and loathing.

Working with a miniscule budget, Baron creates charged compositions out of found locations and makes a virtue out of the film's cheapness.

In both halves, Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution.

Set at the intersection of post-Vietnam paranoia and the myopic introspection that became hippiedom's most lasting cultural contribution, the Philip Kaufman-directed Invasion alternates social commentary with impeccably crafted scares. As much an echo of Don Siegel's 1956 original as a remake, it does little to change a formula that worked fine the first time around.

Deliverance is a film about finding the place where ideas mean less than instinct.

Kiki's slow pace and light-on-conflict plot may surprise kids used to American animation, but it's difficult not to be won over by the film's endearing characters and beautiful animation, as well as a storyline that stresses the values of independence and friendship.

Rabbit Hole is a tremendously sad movie, but it's also the furthest thing from a miserablist wallow.

As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.

Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.

Directing his first live-action film since 2000's "Cast Away," Robert Zemeckis paces it brilliantly, slowly ramping up the energy from hungover lethargy to coke-fueled confidence, while creating undercurrents of dread as Washington hits his stride.

Here was outer space as only the lavish production values of MGM could imagine it, a journey to an alien landscape painted in bold Eastmancolor and stretched across a CinemaScope frame.

It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.

The film captures a moment, playfully but without losing sight of the stakes, when the hot political temperatures of the late ’60s and early ’70s made change of one kind or another look inevitable.

I'd seen moments from that chase for years, held up as an example of what makes the film great. And it is a great sequence. But it's even better in context, arriving after many scenes of false starts, wrong turns, and frustrating dead ends, like a brilliantly staged cat-and-mouse game on the subway involving Doyle and Fernando Rey's smooth French gangster. The explosions have even more impact when you first get to see the fuses slowly burning down...It's also what most imitators don't get. You can put together the most exciting sequence ever filmed, and it won't matter—or at least won't matter beyond the seconds it takes to unfold—if the material around it isn't there.

Being There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance.

After establishing an atmosphere of nearly unbearable dread, Alfredson keeps thickening and chilling it.

Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.

Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes.

Considine directs with the confidence of a veteran, giving his actors room to work while letting an ominous, overcast mood hang over almost every scene.

Much of The Edge's success can be credited to Baldwin and Hopkins, who know just how far to push a performance without crossing too far into ham territory.

But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.

Well-crafted, star-driven entertainment doesn't come much better.

A florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame.

Their talk feels as unforced as it is intense, but even that’s an illusion piled on top of an illusion. The film keeps returning to questions about the nature of reality and the function of performance, whether in theater or in everyday life.

It’s a film of odd moments, dry humor, and restless characters, each of whom end the film by departing from Memphis, weighed down by what they’ve taken away from it, even if they can’t exactly define what that is.

Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.

The Coens direct True Grit with a light touch, but like Portis' stark, funny novel, their adventure tale shaves off none of the rough edges.

An almost literal slice of life, as its title suggests, Cléo allows Varda to illustrate beautifully the lost world surrounding those too stuck in their own heads—and, more pointedly, too caught up in the role-playing expected of women.

Cholodenko's casually observant style perfectly matches the cast's thoughtful work, though the film ultimately proves more successful at creating messy situations than trying to resolve them.

The generous, sharp performances, especially Garai's, deepen the story's emotional impact, as does Wright's assured, frequently astounding direction.

Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.

Innocence and corruption live together beneath the harmonious, hypocritical surface of an idyllic-seeming American town, and while that situation may seem familiar now, thanks to the films and TV shows Naked Kiss helped inspire—Blue Velvet comes immediately to mind—familiarity has dulled none of the film’s force.

Gordon's feature directorial debut mostly stops being about video-game obsession and turns into a film about what it takes to make it in America.

In The Loop floats above its chaotic world on wave after wave of beautifully profane dialogue.

It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?

There's not a weak performance in Secrets And Lies, a fact made more notable by the seeming ease with which the cast performs as an ensemble.

Nobody handles unvarnished interactions quite the way Kiarostami does, and for much of Ten, it's a kind of austere thrill to watch him focus so intently on one aspect of his craft.