Marjorie Baumgarten

Frenzy is one of the great latter-day Hitchcocks; great technique, great suspense, and very black humor drive this tale of an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex murders.

Household Saints restores one's faith in miracles while teaching us how to invent them ourselves. That, and also teaching us not to worry about getting stigmata on the carpet when Jesus comes to visit.

One of Disney’s best and most popular live-action movies, this one is a favorite among those who grew up in the Seventies

Not only is it a film about a poet, Paterson transcends its story to become a work of poetry itself.

Winter's Bone never hits a false note.

Repulsion's depiction of a young woman's dissolution into madness is one of the most harrowing mental descents ever depicted onscreen. (Reviewed 11/24/97)

This modern cult classic is a triumphantly dark comedy directed by one of the film world's truly original visionaries, Terry Gilliam. "Imagination" is this futuristic film’s middle name.

Tennessee Williams’ study of a crumbling Southern patriarchy is riveting stuff. Although the word homosexuality is never uttered, this Hollywood reworking brings a certain understanding of the son’s latent “immaturity” and his wife’s childlessness. Bolstered by extraordinary performances, this tale’s a summer sizzler.

A movie that amply delivers on the epic promise of its title, entertaining, enlightening, and emboldening viewers with its deceptively simple premise and execution.

I can think of no other movie that has dared to analyze grief and its aftermath with such naked honesty and precision.

Taylor, Burton, and Harrison are sublime in this sweeping epic of love and nations.

The story is one of those great mad scientist tales in which the potion invented with the best intentions for its enhancement of human life becomes instead an evil force bent on its destruction. The visual effects here are pretty great - and at first comedic - as the Invisible Man smokes and brawls and rocks in a chair. Oh, but then the horror happens.

There is no better way to while away a Sunday afternoon than with this sprawling saga about the growth of Texas and the families that matured along with the state. If Texas had a state movie, then Giant would be it.

For my money, this Freudian tale about a beautiful kleptomaniac and liar is one of Hitchcock's best accomplishments, certainly one of his most perverse.

More lethal than a nuclear waste dump, Kubrick's komedy at least kills us with laughter... It's one of the greatest - and undoubtably the most hilarious - antiwar statements ever put to film.

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl.

One of the cinema’s very best car-chase sequences – set amid the hilly, windy San Francisco streets – caps this quintessential Steve McQueen policier.

Just about as great as a movie's ever gonna be... As for the storytellng, The Godfather is an intricately constructed gem that simultaneously kicks ass.

An additional treat is seeing Hollywood good guy Henry Fonda playing one of the nastiest curs in the West. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great films in cinema history. (8/30/2000 Review)

Talk about your baby boys – Cagney takes the cake here as a psychopathic gangster with a seriously perverse mother complex. A gangster classic.

Bergman and Grant sizzle in this espionage tale written by Ben Hecht.

One of the all-time great action movies, The Great Escape also features an all-star international cast. The first half of the movie sets up all the various characters who have to drop their prickly differences and unite to outwit their German captors. Steve McQueen as the Cooler King is a genuine classic.

In this enduringly transcendent love story, Truffaut traces the relationships between three lovers and friends over the years. Moreau dominates every fragment of the movie with her magisterial eroticism. The film works in ways that touch the heart more than the mind.

This sentimental perennial is a holiday chestnut.

Michèle is a daring, complicated character – one that Isabelle Huppert brilliantly creates in concert with the director, Paul Verhoeven.

One of the sharpest prison dramas ever, although it's graced with some very humorous portions as well.

Based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, this is one of Hitchcock's finest moments, full of subtle humor and nasty black turns, not to mention a wonderful score by Franz Waxman and gorgeous cinematography from longtime Hitchcock director of photography Robert Burks.

[A] prescient and sharply drawn comedy about the depths to which one unscrupulous station will sink.

A marvelous achievement that refuses to avert its gaze from the poetry and the insane savagery of the hopeless.

Due more to how it makes you think rather than to what it shows, Night of the Living Dead gets under your skin and burrows into your blood and psyche.

Arguably, the best John Ford film ever, certainly one the very best, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an American classic. Ford addresses the complexity of heroism in a poetic manner.

Michael Mann is in top form here helming this bone-chilling thriller.

One of Hitchcock's very best comic thrillers, North by Northwest features scene after unforgettable scene.

Kubrick’s film vividly depicts the harsh realities of war and remains a great anti-war drama.

Everything about its scale is epic.

The peerless actors match and elevate Lonergan’s artistry beat for beat. And the film’s greatest gift of all may be that it declines to tidy up after itself, prettifying life’s messiness with a finishing bow. In the end, it’s the package that counts, not the wrapping.

Melodrama mixes with light-hearted touches, moral dilemmas, and historical reckoning in Almodóvar’s latest.

Amy Heckerling’s portrait of high school/shopping mall life in Southern California is still just about as good as it gets...The panoply of teen types and turmoils is dead-on accurate.

The spoof that launched a thousand parodies – this is the one that's 100% funny.

An epic biopic, over three hours in length, Gandhi captures the spirit of the man and his struggles.

Ingenious in its simplicity.

With Bad Education, the great Almodóvar delivers the finest movie of his career.

Hands down, this is the best Astaire-Rogers musical ever. Nothing more needs to be said.

Linklater’s newest film, a true masterwork, eschews this big-bang theory of dramatics in favor of the million-and-one little things that accumulate daily and help shape who we are, and who we will become.

Raimunda believes that dirty linen should be washed at home: Thank goodness Almodóvar hangs some of it up on the screen to dry.

This multi-Oscar-winner nails its characters, time period, and locale so perfectly that it becomes even more compelling as time goes by. Fueled by two riveting character studies and its exposure of New York City's seamy underbelly, the movie screams “contemporary” and “eternal” at once...It's one of those rare movies that comes together just about perfectly, so check out this theatrical release while you can.

As disturbing as it is well-made, this low-budget indie is a thoroughly original piece of work.

Streetcar is always a wonderful screen drama and now, also, a study in film archeology. [Director's Cut]

If Billy Wilder achieved nothing else in his entire career, he would still rank as one of the great masters of cinema for pulling off this comic tour de force.

The story winds its way over the material, forcing the characters and the viewers to constantly reassess everything they have seen and heard.

As sad and poignant and potentially hopeful as it is amusing. The movie is our story as much as it is Schmidt's, no matter if it's viewed as a self-reflection or cautionary tale

One of Chaplin’s sweetest and most humble movies.

Very satisfying. Classic storytelling, modern techniques. And the images: This movie has embedded so many strange and new mental pictures in my head that I'm not able to shake free. Yet, neither would I want to be free.

Peter Weir made this unsettling, atmospheric film early in his career, and it is still one of his most successful projects to date.

A concept executed with bravura style, intelligent curiosity, and playful wit.

A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.

Nabokov’s satire is sensationally cast, with Winters and Sellers delivering some of their best work ever.

Kubrick’s gladiator film is the pinnacle of sword-and-sandal epics, and who isn’t a sucker for stories about rebellious slaves? This is the kind of movie the Paramount’s screen was made for.

Beautifully made, courageously edited, and swift-moving, this challenging, provocative film is a work that is both humanist and revolutionary.

Edwards' crowning achievement. It is a wickedly funny, impeccably cast, ingeniously subversive satire of the Hollywood film industry.

The film is an intensely personal record, yet also a universal contemplation. Faces Places leaves the viewer with a sense of the glories of images and communication – sometimes random, sometimes specific, always continual and cumulative.

So definitive in so many ways, Bonnie and Clyde has become a 20th-century touchstone.

Virtually flawless performances and directorial execution render The Fighter one of the most thrilling movies of 2010.

This is the way this ground-breaking monument was meant to be seen: in mind-boggling 70mm.

This essential Billy Wilder film smoothly combines trenchant social observation with hilarious comedy.

It was written by military-horror storyteller David Rabe (Sticks and Bones, Streamers), and features outstanding performances by this ensemble ñ especially Fox and Penn.

Boasts a smart screenplay by Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman, striking cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (especially in the Smallville sequence), bright comic turns by Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman, and of course, that winning performance by Christopher Reeve in the title role. Believe a man can fly? You bet!

Disturbing and grim in its portraits, Wise Blood is nevertheless marvelous storytelling and its performances are virtually divine.

Although made in 1969, this French masterpiece is receiving its first stateside release with a new print struck for the occasion.

In the end, The Fog of War offers a couple of hours of brilliant clarity amid the noise and chaos.

The film's sense of family values will make your head hurt and the chase scenes will set your noggin spinning.

An amazing work, a film that seems to gurgle up from the American heartland, resonant and fully formed, ripe with possibilities.

It's paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.

Kidman inhabits the lead character of Suzanne Stone (yes, Suzanne Stone) with such sly and delicious zest that we can only wonder why this aspect of her acting has been buried under blonde dramatic ambitions.

A smart, creepy, violent, funny, and modern vampire movie that benefits from some wonderful performances, a stunning visual texture, and music by Tangerine Dream.

A chilling classic, the movie is a scabrous satire about human deviance, brutality, and social conditioning that has remained a visible part of the ongoing public debate about violence and the movies.

Hepburn brings Truman Capote's Holly Golightly to vivid life. [Review of re-release]

Director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd (both of whom co-wrote the script) demonstrate their storytelling virtuosity.

Certainly one of the very best films in each of Donen and Hepburn's careers, this devastatingly lovely remnant of Hollywood's anything-goes Sixties (with a script by Frederic Raphael) tells the story of a marriage by showing a couple over the course of successive trips to the south of France.

Before Midnight surpasses the two previous films in this trilogy in terms of its intelligence, narrative design, and vivacity. It’s a grand accomplishment, and I feel greedy about wanting to see this film series continue.

Barry Sonnenfeld's stunning cinematography and the sharply etched characterizations make this film one for the ages.

Ghost World resists convenient closures and summaries and some may take issue with its open-endedness. But anything else would have been phony, and Enid would never have stood for it.

It's been 40 years since James Dean essayed his quintessential role in as a troubled American teen and, along with co-stars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, established an iconography of adolescence whose potency extends into the present.

Nic Roeg here offers one of the most disconcerting portraits of otherworldliness ever seen on the screen.

This is a movie to love, that touches you in places you never suspected, that shows you that the road less traveled is the road to your dreams.

A Prophet is the kind of film that makes you remember why going to the movies can be a thrilling experience.

As masterful as the character it portrays, TÁR is a textured, finely calibrated, stunningly composed, and thoroughly contemporary study. Its chords reverberate long after the music fades.

Divorce severs this marriage like the dull blade of a knife cutting through the tiers of a wedding cake.

This 1964 film, featuring an enduring Lerner and Loewe score, is a classic.

There Will Be Blood is not a movie that disappears quietly.

A wildly inventive, unrelenting thrill that amazes us with its visual and intellectual treats and dazzles us with its ongoing ingenuity.

By the end of the movie, it’s no longer possible to know anything with certainty -– so convoluted, contradictory, pathological, and long ago have the events become. It’s a movie that will have you talking and thinking for hours.

These creatures of the underworld are the fervid fabrications of del Toro's imagination: More than once they will catch you by surprise and make you gasp.

Fonda and Hopper’s now-classic film hit the old guard with the force of a rifle shot to the head. [Review of re-release]

In Carol, all the elements dovetail perfectly to create a movie that is as irresistible as its title character.

Angela Lansbury's frighteningly in-check performance is alone worth the trip.

One of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It's smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed.