Keith Phipps

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It's funny, too, though marked by an uneasy humor that's usually difficult to achieve. Anderson handles it with expert ease: At this point in his career, he moves the camera like a skilled dance partner, investing the smallest gesture with significance.

Like the best sports films, The Hustler makes the game look exciting even to outsiders, but Rossen's film is ultimately about a more universal subject than impossible breaks and the heavy spin of masse shots. Adapting Walter Tevis' novel, Rossen made a morality tale without the moralizing.

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.

What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling that Pixar continues to meet by locating both humor and emotional depth in worlds created out of lines of code.

While not a masterpiece on par with Kurosawa's best work, High And Low is a fine example of his craft, and further proof that it's not a few masterpieces but the overall scope of a career that defines a great director.

The film is unfortunately about little more than its potentially mind-boggling plot and structure.

We all lived through this not so long ago; it's an odd thing to make a film whose most striking effect is its ability to bring the feelings of Sept. 11 flooding back, then close on a profoundly disturbing note. A crasser film would have been easier to digest and dismiss. It's hard to do either with United 93, and that's either its genius or its folly.

Though [Guinness's] performance may not immediately announce itself as his best, it's certainly one of his most representative, a thoroughly recognizable character of unseen depths and unexpected capabilities.

It’s both unfailingly exciting and overly familiar, a restless but risk-averse film that’s a little too content to borrow from what’s worked before.

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.

Choreographed to the last beat, the action scenes have a depth that the film's thinly sketched characters never quite develop.

As specific as the film is to Italy at the turn of the turbulent 1970s, it’s also a film about how power first corrupts, then makes mad those who possess it.

The Hidden Fortress is, above all, a roaring piece of entertainment, a Western-like samurai adventure set against the chaos of 16th-century Japan.

Alternating interviews, observational passages, and conversations with past students, Hawke’s low-key film never pushes too hard for effect and lets any drama emerge slowly.

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.

Despite years of imitators, sequels (some great, some not so), and edited-for-television broadcasts, Alien has lost none of its power, and the big screen only intensifies its impact.

It’s such an entertaining film that it’s almost possible to forget its didactic agenda, which is certainly part of the point.

Falk and Rowlands—in performances of almost indescribable intensity—detail a marriage anchored by love, but tossed by the expectations of others and the unpredictable swell of madness.

Even with material as strong as Show Boat, Whale recognizes he’s making a film, not just a record of a stage production.

An important act of historical preservation, a focused and effective film that brings back a dark, important moment in history with startling clarity.

Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror.

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.

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.