Michael Phillips

The closing shot of Charlie Chaplin's face in City Lights, his heart breaking: the highest form of screen acting, the most effective tear extraction exercise the medium has yet to offer.

The reason it's distinctive has less to do with raw emotion, or a relentless assault on your tear ducts, and more to do with the film medium's secret weapons: restraint, quiet honesty, fluid imagery and an observant, uncompromised way of imagining one outsider's world so that it becomes our own.

A triumph of disparate tones, colors and intentions. Like many, I have loved this thriller of conscience and betrayal most of my moviegoing life...Its brand of romantic fatalism is particularly seductive to teenage males, I think, and those who never fully recover from that moviegoing state of being.

The result is a mixture of unified atmosphere and lived-in character study, and while Vasiliu’s role is not as indelible as that of her co-stars, Marinca’s Otilia and Ivanov’s steely abortionist are just about perfect.

Like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” Bong’s Parasite expresses consequential ideas that matter to the filmmaker about the way we live today, and the prejudice and malice we create for ourselves and others. The best social satires, like this one, dwell in the underworld where the sinister, the sobering and the bitterly funny swirl in the same stream of consciousness.

Roma gives you so much to see in each new vignette, in every individual composition, in fact, that a second viewing becomes a pleasurable necessity rather than a filmgoing luxury.

Of all the memorable feature film debuts, Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” may be the freest from contrivance, disinterested to a lovely degree in conventional story machinery or in anything more than moments in time and the daily lives of people Burnett knew in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts.

While this is very much a McQueen picture, with visual flourishes and motifs unmistakably his, the historical urgency and staggering injustice of the events keep McQueen and company utterly honest in their approach and in their collective act of imagining Solomon Northup's odyssey to hell and back.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful.

Its sense of humor is more sly, more sophisticated and more interesting than most PG-13 or R-rated comedies at the moment. The film may be animated, and largely taken up with rats, but its pulse is gratifyingly human.

It's a nerve-wracking visual experience of unusual and paradoxical delicacy. And if your stomach can take it, it's truly something to see.

Is director David Fincher's film the stuff of greatness? Not quite. But the picture is very, very good.

Not much music finds its way on the soundtrack, but what’s there is crucial. Vivaldi’s “Violin Concerto in G Minor," heard twice and strategically, ends up crystallizing the love story in ways we don’t see coming.

This movie isn't just a tribute to Baldwin. It's a warning bell regarding leaders who, in Baldwin's words, care only about "their safety and their profits."

It is a bracing and chaotic and memorable experience.

Most films would take pains to spell out the answers, eventually. “Aftersun” works more obliquely and poetically, leaving prosaic touches to other filmmakers.

Small, sure and stunningly acted, this is a picture of exacting control.

Vivid, assured and extremely suspenseful.

The key American film of 2012 ... Its stance is extremely tricky. It's not a documentary. It's not a load of revenge nonsense. It's not '24.' I'm still arguing with myself over parts of it. And that's a sign that a movie will endure.

The film is a singular achievement, a piece of realist cinema with the pull of a suspense thriller.

Murnau's silent masterpiece about a troubled young country couple (Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien), a vamp from the city (Margaret Livingstone), murder plots, fate and redemption contains some of the most glorious visual set-pieces in the history of cinema. [01 Aug 2008, p.C8]

While I may argue with the little guy's taste in musicals, it's remarkable to see any film, in any genre, blend honest sentiment with genuine wit and a visual landscape unlike any other.

This excellent film works the way Blanchett's characterization of Carol works: It's meticulous about appearances, while fully aware that appearances can deceive.

Delpy has always challenged Hawke to find a simpler, more direct form of acting in Linklater's films, which gives them their unique suspense and rolling tension.

With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a unique waterboarding of a film experience.

It's more than a first-rate film showing up and doing its job. It's cathartic, and moving, without any of the usual obvious contrivances or manipulations.

Leigh's film — one of the year's best — honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

So, yes, it’s an epic of sorts. But many years have passed since a Scorsese movie found so much life in such small moments: at a bowling alley, around a dinner table, at a telephone in the room next to the dining room, where a killer stumbles through a sympathy call to the wife of Jimmy Hoffa, missing presumed dead.

It’s an unexpectedly emotional experience, seeing and hearing this luminous source of happiness again.

The life of Riley is not exotic; her troubles are not unique. But they are rendered with serious imagination by Docter and company.

It’s somewhat challenging and methodical in its pacing, but if you respond to it — as I did — this ghost from Iran’s 1970s New Wave is a reason to give thanks.

This movie, a diary of a freewheeling, far-flung installation art project, combines chance and intuition and a humane eye.

It’s a rare movie that settles, quietly, into some part of your own experiences and memories without a speck of narrative contrivance gumming up your response to the story on the screen. Past Lives is that rarity.

Chimes at Midnight is one of Welles' peak achievements. Its depth of feeling seems very real, very deep indeed.

Chalamet is excellent, saving his purest acting for the killer final shot several minutes in length, when we finally see what these weeks with Oliver have meant to him.

Beautiful, witty, sad and hopeful.

Stone is spectacular, and she's reason enough to see La La Land. Chazelle is a born filmmaker, and he doesn't settle for rehashing familiar bits from musicals we already love. He's too busy giving us reasons to fall for this one.

Watching Lady Bird is like flipping through a high school yearbook with an old friend, with each page leading to another anecdote, another sweet-and-sour memory. It’s a tonic to see any movie, especially in this late-Harvey Weinstein era, that does right by its female characters, that explores what it means to be a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, and that speaks the languages of sincerity and wit.

This is sublime work, with poetry and prose in unerring balance, thanks to writer-director Payal Kapadia.

It has found a considerable, gratefully discombobulated audience all around the world, and it deserves one here.

It’s a riveting and humane experience pulled from the rubble of a never-ending war.

The latest nerve-shredder from Josh and Benny Safdie is worth seeing, even if it’s not their finest two hours, and even if half of any given audience will resent the hell out of it. Adam Sandler’s excellent.

Folk standards such "500 Miles," "The Death of Queen Anne" and "Dink's Song" infuse the movie, and as in the Coens' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" T Bone Burnett has done first-rate work supervising the musical landscape. The film, I think, falls just a tick or two below the Coens' best work, which for me lies inside "A Serious Man" and "Fargo."

As written by Field and modulated, brilliantly, by Blanchett, Lydia becomes a rhapsody in contrasts, controlling, fastidious, witty, steely, imperious, hubristic. It’s a huge, showy role, and the beautiful paradox — one among many here — is that Blanchett has never been subtler.

The film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.

Day-Lewis... the role of a lifetime.

Nina Paley's delicious Sita Sings the Blues finds solace in autobiography and an animated gold mine in the caverns of an ancient Sanskrit epic.

Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy played a weasel of a journalist in "The Wire." Now he has made a meticulous, exacting procedural on real-life journalists who excelled at their job; had the resources to do it properly; and in early 2002, published the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of grim, carefully detailed stories of pedophile priests.

It is wonderful: a rhapsodic adaptation of a memoir, a visual marvel that wraps its subject in screen romanticism without romanticizing his affliction. It left me feeling euphoric.

The movie expresses so much, so delicately, about precarious young hearts, the storm clouds of nationalist politics and, most of all, the possibility and necessity of artistic freedom.

This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.

As pure craftsmanship, No Country for Old Men is as good as we’ve ever gotten from Joel and Ethan Coen. Only “Fargo” is more satisfying (it’s also a comedy, which this one isn’t).

A dazzling mosaic, alert to the ebb and flow of human resilience in the face of everyday crises.

It’s heartbreakingly good.

It's a small story set in a memorably desolate location. The actors, all quite magnificent, enlarge it, just as cinematographer Mikhail Krichman illuminates the vistas and roadways and even the furtive kitchen table glances between clandestine lovers.

A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."

Though uneven and less witty than the first two, Toy Story 3 delivers quite enough in two dimensions.

Painful and unforgettable — a serious and honorable form, perhaps the highest, of "gotcha" journalism imaginable.

A languorous, catlike psychological puzzle from one of the essential international masters, Lee Chang-dong.

For a century and more, film directors have explored crosscurrents between art and life, and how one informs the other. Hamaguchi makes that exploration a fully humanized one. His actors, one and all, are so good, you’re simply grateful for their screen company.

Above all Saint Omer is a singularly moving courtroom drama.

This is a small, tight, starkly claustrophobic film, closer in impact to Elie Wiesel's first-person account of the concentration camps, "Night," than to the artful, slightly suspect emotional catharsis of director Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

A delicate, droll masterwork, writer-director Spike Jonze's Her sticks its neck out, all the way out, asserting that what the world needs now and evermore is love, sweet love. Preferably between humans, but you can't have everything all the time.

I doubt Gerwig read the 1868 Tribune classifieds, but her film is, in fact, fresh, sparkling, natural and full of soul.

Much will be resolved by the final chapter of the trilogy, to be directed by Abrams. As much as I enjoy his brand of canny populism, I prefer Rian Johnson’s wilder, generous, far-flung imagination.

Nickel Boys is a subtly radical act of adaptation, with a striking intuitive and meticulous visual strategy, and the result is fully equal to Whitehead’s achievement but in a new direction.

From its initial first-person, behind-the-wheel viewpoint to its final implication of all-pervasive surveillance, Panahi creates a fascinating hybrid that becomes a microcosm of Tehran.

One of the year's gems.

The film is a gem — a supple, unpredictably structured and deeply personal portrait of its primary subject, the photographer, visual artist and activist Nan Goldin.

It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

The film works best in its most acutely observed details of daily life in the trenches.

It’s not perfect, but Anora is a touching comic and dramatic odyssey, driven by a terrific performance by Mikey Madison in the title role.

The result is a splendid black comedy that marks a stylistic leap for its director. Second only this year to the upcoming “Roma,” it’s a reminder of how the movies can imagine a highly specific yet deeply idiosyncratic vision of the past.

This is a great and necessary document in support of a two-state solution. Even those who don't believe in such a solution may find their minds changed by The Gatekeepers.

The Brutalist is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable.

It’s a beautiful film to soak up as a visual and musical memory of a place that remains, and a time long gone.

In Reichardt films ranging from “Wendy and Lucy” to “Meek’s Cutoff” to “Certain Women,” the lives of outsiders are defined by the natural world, economic circumstance and by their own dreams of connection. First Cow is one of her very best.

The creator of the original "Mad Max" trilogy has whipped up a gargantuan grunge symphony of vehicular mayhem that makes "Furious 7" look like "Curious George."

The film may be slight, but it is not stupid, and director Robert Cary keeps both stickiness and shtickiness at bay.

The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well … this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.

The film goes pretty easy on the royals in the end, and it's a flattering portrait of Blair. But it's not credulous. Frears may swim in the political mainstream with The Queen but he does so like a champion channel crosser.

All of Us Strangers is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal — though one key scene takes place around Christmastime — but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant.

Without playing with anyone’s life, A Photographic Memory makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries.

Even with its limitations it's one of the necessary films of 2013.

The movie feels both expansive and confining, depending on the story chapter. Anderson’s visual facility by now has become so intuitive, so fluid and effortlessly right, if you’re at all susceptible to the allure of a moving camera you’ll fall headlong into Phantom Thread.

A Prophet pushes its protagonist into circumstances he did not choose but in which he watches and learns and kills and eventually becomes all he can be, albeit criminally. Certainly Muslims living in France have embraced the movie and Malik, played by Rahim

The results are pretty gripping and occasionally brilliant; its peaks, particularly when Nolan suddenly changes gears, cuts out the sound and reveals the full weight of Oppenheimer’s tormented psyche, reach higher than anything this filmmaker has scaled to date.

Kulig comes with everything the role of this sullen, reckless siren demands, and then some.

It's a very small piece, working in a deceptively casual storytelling style. But it's my favorite music film since "Stop Making Sense," and it's more emotionally satisfying than any of the Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations made in the last 20 years.

As Assayas himself has pointed out, the passing years have magically transformed a movie made in 1994 into a seeming product of post-1968 cultural turbulence and unresolved matters of the heart. It feels honest, in other words.

The superb United 93, from the British writer-director Paul Greengrass, does not waste time defining the undefinable. Nor does it strain for poetry when, with this story, prose is enough.

The whole movie, a feast of ensemble wiles and stunning hair, is juicy, funny and alive.

A rich and troubling documentary highlight of the year.

Whiplash is true to its title. It throws you around with impunity, yet Chazelle exerts tight, exacting control over his increasingly feverish and often weirdly comic melodrama.

Minding the Gap is an exceptionally reflective examination of the 29-year-old filmmaker’s life, and surroundings, and it works because the movie concerns so much more.

As is, Cotillard (nominated for best actress) scrupulously avoids melodrama. There's enough without it, in watching a story of an ordinary woman argue for her dignity, her colleagues' better instincts and her own livelihood.

Scorsese has rendered a tragic, forlorn piece of American history, indebted equally to classical Hollywood craftsmanship and the director’s own obsessions with honor, guilt, family, criminal codes and America’s centuries of greedy bloodshed.

The film itself is perfectly poised between artistry and audacity. It's beautiful.