Marjorie Baumgarten

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.

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.

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

Vertigo stands as one of the thrill master's most psychologically dense and twisted works in which obsession, commitment, and dual identities all merge to create a voluptuous tale of thwarted love. [Restored version]

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

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.

Beauty and the Beast, one of Disney's latest animated features is even better than The Little Mermaid. At the same time, it's vaguely disappointing.

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

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

What the film excels at, however, is the anticipatory desire. It builds slowly, concluding with a stunning sequence that is all breathless remembrance and self-satisfaction that is both wordless and impalpable. The film will seem the height of romantic desire to some, but will be a slow burn for others.

Ideas and their visual illustrations come at the viewer in a cascading torrent. The editing by Alexandra Strauss deserves its own recognition for its painstaking exactness.

Love means being helpmates throughout all of life's stages. Death is part of love's bargain, and Haneke lays this fact bare.

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.

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

The movie's ending at the train station and the modern-day epilogue feel protracted and indulgent...Apart from the ending though, this is Spielberg's most articulate movie ever.

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

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.

Great effects and a nasty undercurrent drive this vehicle.

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.

Capturing the nuances of quotidian life may not be everyone's cup of tea.

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

There is little in the way of narrative eventfulness in the film, but Leigh luxuriates in the moments, and provides glimpses of what it takes to be an artist amid the fray.

A masterful synthesis of generic conventions and creative imagination, a sublime amalgam of some of the best tendencies and talent our times have to offer.

A smart and delightful romantic comedy, yet in the course of creating his new charmer Alexander Payne has sheared off some of the rambunctious edges that made his previous films, About Schmidt, Election, and Citizen Ruth, such marvelous studies in social parody.

Billy Wilder’s cynical edge is finely honed in this darkly amusing satire, which won three Academy Awards. It’s a film that is perennially ready for its close-up.

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

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.

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

In her first solo writing and directing effort, the hard-working indie film actress Greta Gerwig proves that she is her own muse. She takes the well-worn coming-of-age-dramedy format and fashions something fresh, funny, and artful from its familiar tropes. Also delivering the goods is a knockout cast of accomplished veterans and relative newcomers.

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.

More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.

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

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

So fascinating is Brother's Keeper that you almost don't quarrel with things like the biased portraits of the prosecuting team and the Deliverance-like banjo-shuffling soundtrack. Brother's Keeper intrigue factor is enormously high and, it could almost be said, that this movie is good enough to be fiction.

Though Crumb is packed with information and telling details, the movie's objective is hardly art history or a survey of Crumb's place in the world of comics. The movie aims for broader subject matter, to discover something about the role art plays in the life of the artist, and about how the release of art may, indeed, allow the artist to function as a stable human being.

Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.

The keen observations of The Class ultimately become a remedial education in themselves.

The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.

Secrets & Lies, despite my dwelling on its problems, is a really solid and enjoyable movie. It's just not what I would call "best of the fest."

Depending on your perspective, Moonee is either youth incarnate making the most of her circumstances, or Dennis the Menace determined to drive the oldsters stark-raving mad. Her escapades eventually take a turn from boisterously fun-loving to downright dangerous, which kicks the movie’s low simmer into full boil.

The film is a magnificent document of secular humanism.

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.

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

It comes as little surprise that Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, both masters of sly documentaries in which the subjects nail themselves with their own words, are the executive producers of Oppenheimer’s film.

The film's ideas are provocative, yet vague and unfully formed. It's much like Pulse itself, which is a bit too long, despite several great sequences.

The perfect antidote to the summer heat in Austin, more refreshing even than a dip in our chilly holy waters of Barton Springs.

At heart, White is a black comedy with intriguing characters and a plot that plays its cards close to the deck.

Contemplative, though riddled with humor, After Life reveals itself gradually.

The story is bizarre, unique, and thoroughly unpredictable, while its images resemble some kind of bastard offspring of the linear realism of George Grosz and the fantastic foreboding of Edward Gorey.

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)

As with her other films, when Sarah Polley takes it upon herself to tell us a story, you can bet it’s a tale well-told and one that you’ll want to hear.

There’s a definite austerity to the storytelling, which is enhanced by the crisp black-and-white cinematography by Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski.

A stunning work of beauty, mystery, contemplation, and grit -- and like sands through the desert hourglass, these are the days of our lives.

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

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.

Although the characters and their backstories are carefully thought out, Delpy and Hawke deliver their dialogue as if spontaneous and unmeditated.

Julie’s restlessness is anchored by a self-confidence that Reinsve conveys guilelessly and brilliantly.

One of the best movies I've seen this year and, consequently, the less said about it here the better. The beauty of this movie is in the way it twists and turns, thwarting expectations, confounding stereotypes and venturing into places you least anticipate.

The story builds to a feverish pitch and then never reaches a satisfactory conclusion. But while it’s onscreen, the film moves, incites, and jabs, all while reminding us how difficult it is to grow up female and sane in this world.

From its silent opening moments to its breathtaking double-cross conclusion, Le Samourai is the work of one of the film world's great directors working at his expressive peak.

Winter's Bone never hits a false note.

The Queen is palace intrigue at its finest.

Remarkably, the film is composed entirely of point-of-view shots. Although she’s in the room, Viviane is not even part of the image during the early minutes of the film.

Dingy atmosphere and great performances make this a standout.

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

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

Crowe has created a genuine love song for all those who've ever felt their lives to have been saved by rock & roll.

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

Fans of wartime romances like Casablanca and Doctor Zhivago are sure to swoon over the fate of Cold War’s divided lovers.

It's unusually provocative and challenging for a Hollywood movie and, surprisingly, allows the audience to piece things together without too much external direction.

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

One of Chaplin’s sweetest and most humble movies.

Instead of using actors, Greengrass employed many of the actual air traffic controllers and military commanders who were on the ground that day. Also aiding his film's universality is Greengrass' use of little known actors in the central roles, preventing stardom from affecting our ideas about heroism and patriotism.

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.

Though you might have a hard time discussing some of the film’s verbal descriptions of torture with young ones, Persepolis will prove a worthwhile movie for thoughtful teens.

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

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a story that sounds, on paper, like something that shouldn't succeed as a movie but when played out so remarkably by all the parties involved, it becomes an unexpected treat.

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

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

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.

So many follow-up questions are left unasked. The film is at its liveliest when the filmmaker and his subject discuss the twofold presence of human monstrosity and artistic gifts or the human propensity to value talent over craft.

Ryan O’Neal has never been better cast than as the shallow and opportunistic hero of Thackeray’s early 19th-century novel.

This folk tale about a magical child has even been cited by some scholars as an early and elegant work of science fiction. However, it’s also possible to bypass all this baggage and just approach The Tale of Princess Kaguya as the gorgeous and expressive film that it is.

This sentimental perennial is a holiday chestnut.

Columbus avoids a sense of film geekiness by keeping our attention on the plights of the two central characters. The city of Columbus may, indeed, be a locus for modernism, but the film named after it becomes a jumping-off point for postmodernism.

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.

Never gives us the nuts and bolts of mental illness and guilt, just the sight of cooped-up steam escaping from a valve that’s about to blow.

The wonder of The Piano is that such an outwardly simple story could emerge into such a complex swirl of lingering memories.

Movies about writers can be notorious slogs but, amazingly, The End of the Tour is not one of those films. In fact, it is so much better than any movie based primarily on conversations has any right to be.

The three-and-a-half-hour-long movie revels in talk as this man ponders life, philosophy, the sexual revolution, the workers' revolution, love, death, and so on. He smokes, drinks, flirts, and talks –­ and the movie is exquisitely of its time.