Michael Phillips

It’s one of the most imaginative and provocative documentaries on any topic I’ve seen this year.

This is one of the finest achievements of the year, and while it's easy to lose your way in the labyrinth, I don't think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is most interesting for its narrative pretzels. Rather, it's about what this sort of life does to the average human soul.

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

Above all Saint Omer is a singularly moving courtroom drama.

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

The naked emotions, when they finally break loose, carry serious weight, akin to a John Cassavetes psychodrama.

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.

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]

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.

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.

In both theatrical environments and open-air ones, with Wenders paying close attention to the geometrics as well as the psychology of the movement, Pina is the best possible tribute to Bausch, and to adventurous image-making.

Trouble the Water is so much better and truer and deeper and more illuminating than either of them ("Bowling for Columbine"/"Fahrenheit 9/11").

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

The cave exists to provoke awe in mere mortals. The camera pauses at one point to take in a stalagmite reaching up to touch, nearly, a stalactite and the inevitable association is with Michelangelo's Adam and the hand of God.

Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.

It blends cinematic Americana with something grubbier and more interesting than Americana, and it does not look, act or behave like the usual perception of a Spielberg epic. It is smaller and quieter than that.

The characters in Gomorrah may lack an extra dramatic dimension: Garrone errs, if anything, on the side of detachment. Yet that detachment is also the key to the film's success. There's so little hooey and melodramatic head-banging here.

It's the best musical biopic in decades.

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.

The self-taught man behind the griddle, his wife, Eve, and their five seen-it-all kids emerge as the ensemble of the year.

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."

Heaven Knows What, will not appeal to the majority of casual moviegoers. Likewise, I have no doubts regarding the film's remarkable achievement.

May be the best and saddest film of the year so far.

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

Writer-director Robert Eggers' "New England folk tale" film isn't likely to go bonkers in the popular culture the way "Blair Witch" did. But it's an infinitely richer, more meticulous, more elegant and more unnerving horror film — the best since "The Babadook," and very likely a 21st century classic in its hardy yet malleable genre.

Extraordinary.

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.

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.