Michael Sragow

With a surgical saw instead of a hatchet, del Toro takes apart patriarchy and opportunistic religion as well as fascism.

It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

Without a single gunshot (and just one flick of a switchblade), it turns into an existential suspense film with the highest stakes imaginable: the survival of the human spirit.

A visual masterpiece about a scared little girl's breathtaking journey of self-discovery. All of the fun is getting there.

Killer of Sheep is a miracle movie because it's receiving its first theatrical release 30 years after it was made and because, as a movie, it's miraculous.

Samson Raphaelson's marvel of a script unfolds in six sequences that rise and fall with the surprising weight of mini-lifetimes; under Lubitsch's tart-tender direction, the emotionally transparent Stewart and the electric, conflicted Sullivan create an immortal comic courtship. [13 Feb 2004]

The movie is a marvel - bold, lucid and succinct (even at 123 minutes). It's also harrowing and moving in its depiction of noncombatant men, women and children caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism.

The movie is impressive both as a celebration of the Old West and a tough, ambivalent depiction of a ruthless pioneer. [04 Jun 2004]

Ratatouille is a sublime dish of a movie, and the company's piece de resistance.

A funny, touching mood piece.

The Hurt Locker redefines war-film electricity.

The movie does work, spectacularly.

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

This movie has its own emotional sorcery. In a raw, humorous way, it grasps how hope and desperation spur magical thinking and, sometimes, real magic.

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

The overarching joke, of course, is that most movies are so lousy they might as well have been made by blind men anyway. Hollywood Ending is only mediocre, but you may leave wondering, what's Allen's excuse?

The movie is emotionally tumultuous and evenhanded and serene. It celebrates the odd pockets of imagination and individuality that can be nurtured in middle-class suburbia. [2002 re-release]

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

A movie masterpiece -- thrilling, passionate and wise.

The most appealing aspect of the movie is that the guys and gal at the center of it don't just love the Star Wars saga for its own sake. They love the way they feel about each other when they're escaping into its universe and sharing all the wonder and the trivia.

By all means, buy a ticket to The Fast Runner, but don't go expecting a masterpiece; actually, in its first hour, the dramaturgy and staging of scenes set in igloos are cramped and amateurish.

This movie registers like a pop song that enters the mind only in fragments because, as a whole, it lacks the style or substance to be memorable.

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

It's still the Holy Grail of crazy comedy.

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

In his first fiction feature, Zwigoff doesn't forget to bring the funny. But he doesn't bring enough poetry.

A vibrant emotional epic.

Mirren brings intellect, humor and romance to the role of Elizabeth II.

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

What a relief to see a movie in which an audience responds with peals of laughter to subtle facial shifts as well as punch lines.

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.

No one could seethe better than Mifune, but what gives the movie equal shares of exhilaration and heartbreak is the feeling that pours out of him when his son finds happiness in his own marriage.

There's no cheap uplift to their victory, no pop catharsis. What's great about United 93 is that you never feel it's just a movie - even though, as a movie, it's terrific.

A spellbinder of the rarest kind and quality. It opens audiences up to an infinite variety of emotional and intellectual nuances.

Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

By turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

A great, lusty movie in the tradition of Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

If any movie can rid Americans of "Iraq war fatigue," it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentary No End in Sight.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

A gorgeous flirt of a murder movie.

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

Just when you might give up on young American film directors making art the way Bergman and Kurosawa did, along comes Bennett Miller's quiet, tumultuous Capote.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

Thanks to Kerr's eloquent tremor of a performance, when the heroine witnesses apparitions, they're immediately credible to the audience. [29 May 2009, p.1C]

Everything about Up is an up, in the most visceral and poetic ways.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

The result is harrowing and inspiring. As escapist entertainment, it's the movie of the year.

Except for the Mozart music and Tharp movements around the edges, Amadeus plays like a monument to mediocrity. The movie belongs to Salieri.

Sokurov, for all his accomplishment, is less a bold innovator than a raider of lost art.

For Americans, Gomorrah will play like every other Mafia epic - and no other Mafia epic.

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.

Park's imagination is as fecund as the bunnies that bob up and down from their rabbit holes in every corner of the Tottington garden.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes.

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]

Romanticism fights stoicism to a draw, and the movie grows ever more static, too. Down to the quasi-ambiguous hate-crime finish, Brokeback Mountain comes as close to being a still life as you can get with human characters.

Cache is the feel-guilty movie of the new millennium.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

Rampling's authority over splintered emotions has the force of revelation.

This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.

In a boxing soap-opera way, Eastwood is trying to do for himself as a performer what Sergio Leone did for him in a spaghetti-western way: douse his rough-hewn banality with reflected emotional coloration.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

The movie's cinematography is sumptuous, in its own intimate way. But all that's glorious about this film is the flesh tones. There isn't enough flesh and blood.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adventure, from 1984, is a magnificent anomaly—a rousing vision of scorched earth.

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

Best of all, Ponyo never ceases to be a genuine odyssey in short pants.

Hawks weaves brawny romance and humor and a man’s-man sort of heartbreak into his tribute to the ideal of vocation.

Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.

This movie is as wrenching as it is eruptive. Hitchcock never went further beyond pop than he did with Sabotage.

A beautiful display of celluloid bungee-jumping.

Few films combine a dense and tingling atmosphere with the headlong pacing and adventure of The Bourne Ultimatum.

Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia.

Though I love McCarthy's movie, The Edge of Heaven - with its virtuoso narrative and frames packed to bursting with unruly life - has the potency of "The Visitor" squared.

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

A great adventure.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

The film has a steady, hypnotic momentum; the director, Masaki Kobayashi, wrings as much drama out of facial twitches as he does out of sword fights. He’s helped immensely by Nakadai’s molten performance and Toru Takemitsu’s spare, disquieting music.

The movie lives in its small details.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

Under its leathery hide is a genuine compulsion to de-romanticize Western gunfighting. Every bullet in this movie matters, and by the end Munny's alcohol-fuelled, satanic purposefulness is shocking: in the climax, even his choice of victims has a crazy excess. [10 Aug 1992, p.70]