Michael Phillips

This is one of the real finds of 2008.

A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.

David Lowery's film A Ghost Story is best seen a second time, though obeying the customary rules of time and cinema, you'll have the mysterious pleasure of seeing it a first time to get there.

No succeeds, wonderfully, because it knows how to sell itself. It is cool, witty, technically dazzling in a low-key and convincing way.

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

A kinetic delight, Reprise comes from director Joachim Trier, born in Denmark but raised in Oslo, Norway, and it’s a highlight of the filmgoing year so far.

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.

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

"All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.

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 word masterpiece costs nothing to write and means less than nothing in an age when every third picture and each new Clint Eastwood project is proclaimed as such. After two viewings, however, Letters From Iwo Jima strikes me as the peak achievement in Eastwood's hallowed career.

It’s beautiful work, and not just because it’s beautiful.

Extremely moving, exceedingly droll, flawlessly voice-acted.

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.

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."

This one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.

A lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned Passing into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional.

It's Chekhovian screwball, a perfect little tale of love (or thereabouts) in bloom among the weeds of an ordinary life. It feels like a classic already.

I love it, not simply because I love Chekhov or because I've loved so much of Ceylan's earlier work. I love it because the director, having come into his own as a master international filmmaker years ago, gives us so much to see and think about, so many astringent observations about life's compromises and longings.

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.

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

An indelible portrait of an American family at its most blithely macabre.

Sensational, grandly sinister and not for the kids, The Dark Knight elevates pulp to a very high level.

Borat is a rarity: a comedy whose middle name is danger, or as the Kazakhs say, kauwip-kater.

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.

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

Much of the action takes place in the couple's haphazard apartment, but the movie really does feel like a movie, with Farhadi's camera unobtrusively energizing the close-quarters exchanges, both verbal and non-verbal. The acting is splendid.

An off-center but exceptional boxing film I prefer in every aspect, especially one: It feels like it comes from real life as well as the movies.