Michael Wilmington

Moore's best movie, and one of the most blisteringly effective polemics and documentaries ever.

One of the great samurai pictures, its darkly brilliant premise--the cynical mercenary/master swordsman or yojimbo (bodyguard) who walks into a town feud and plays both evil sides against each other--has been copied frequently, most notably in the Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood A Fistful of Dollars. But Kurosawa's treatment remains the most savage, thrilling, smart and hideously funny. [26 Jan 2007, p.C2]

Scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Hitchcock's first thriller and the film that established him: A moody silent melodrama based on Marie Belloc Lowndes' tale of a mysterious lodger in fear-crazed London, who may be a modern Jack the Ripper. [04 Jan 2002, p.C1]

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [25 Jan 2002, p.C1]

Of all the movies I've seen in the past several years, this is one of the ones I love the most.

Few Hollywood action pictures are half as exciting or ravishing.

The Four Marx Brothers -- Groucho the Gabber, Harpo the Honker, Chico the Chiseler and Zeppo the Zero -- were the wildest, most anarchically funny movie comedians of their era. (Of any era.) And this is the high water mark of their unique cinematic insanity: a ferocious satire on government, war and diplomacy that leaves no propriety or pretension unpricked, no sacred cow unslaughtered. [19 Sept 1997, p.O]

This astonishingly beautiful documentary employs microphotography of overpowering crispness and detail to create one of the most stunning records of nature the cinema has given us. [11 Oct 1996, p.J]

A film that sweeps us away into a world of spectacle, beauty and excitement, a realm of fantasy unimaginable without the movies.

An instant classic and a dramatic beauty, a film that gets us to the core of Greene's chilly, dark and romantic view of the post-war world.

Like all great fantasies and epics, this one leaves you with the sense that its wonders are real, its dreams are palpable.

It's a shame the dippy TV knockoff Hogan's Heroes has supplanted memories of this great dark WWII POW comedy. Seeing it makes you understand why Schindler's List was a long-time Wilder project. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

One of the cinema's supreme, most outrageously eccentric and audacious technical experiments: the legendary single shot movie.

If May's script is brilliant, so is the vivid, raw acting -- which suggests heavy Cassavetes influence. [30 Jul 1999, p.O]

Though Majidi draws from familiar Iranian sources, he's made something unique and moving: a sweet tale with a stirring finish.

If it's not an actual masterpiece, it's at least the next best thing, a fully characteristic, fully alive work by a master of his art.

A film poem of sometimes humbling beauty: a movie that opens up a new world to us - in the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan - with an enchanting freshness and austerity of vision.

Few films have caught the special feel and rhythms of childhood so well, with such uncondescending warmth and humor. And few bring out more powerfully the themes of anti-racism and the virtues and joys of community and family. [20 Apr 2007, p.C5]

It's a scintillating comedy-drama and one of Altman's most richly moving and entertaining pictures.

A watershed picture, for both Spielberg and war movies.

Heroin may be a downer, but Trainspotting definitely takes you up…a series of roaring, provocative, outrageous highs. [26 July 1996, Friday, p.C]

It's as impressive for the near-flawless performances of its deep cast of British film and theatrical stars (including Jean Simmons as Ophelia, Eileen Herlie as Gertrude and John Gielgud as the voice of Hamlet's father's ghost) as it is for its director's surprisingly rich and baroque visual style. [04 Aug 2006, p.C8]

One of the most appealing, beautifully made and well-loved of all the classic children's animal movies. [21 Sep 2001, p.C1]

The actors who play these parts--Chishu Ryu as the father and Setsuko Hara as the daughter--are the most emblematic members of Ozu's famous stock company. Her warm beauty and his stoic rigor--and the frequent smiles both use to cover their feelings--convey oceans of meaning beneath the drama's polite, humorous, carefully etched surface, where immaculate interiors and lovely scenery reflect a world in very delicate balance. [07 Jan 2005, p.C2]

A prison movie of unusual richness and jarring power.

Cat People is an admirable first entry into the brainy, elegant, spooky world of Val Lewton. [09 Sep 2005, p.C4]

an American classic: poetically bloody, madly comic, infernally beautiful. [16 Aug 1987, p.3]

The greatest rock concert movie ever made -- and maybe the best rock movie, period.

Both the movie and Denzel Washington are knockouts.

Blends a love of semi-trashy pop entertainment with a love of poetry, art and high moral seriousness. It's a young person's movie (Godard was 34 and Karina 24 in 1964) that retains its mysterious pull even as the film and we get older.

This remarkable movie is really one-of-a-kind. [15 Dec 1995]

Writer-director-star Takeshi Kitano's 1993 Sonatine, a brutal, brilliant crime thriller about an aging gangster at the center of a maze of double-crosses and vendettas, gives us another look at a remarkable Japanese film artist. [17 Apr 1998, p.N]

Point Blank catches the feel of the late '60s and the sunshot, edgy atmosphere of Los Angeles then (the go-go clubs, the used-car lots, the penthouses and the storm drain tunnels) like few movies since. [07 Feb 1997, p.K]

It's a shining valentine to the movies--full of homages, collages and swooningly romantic Ennio Morricone music--and it gets right at the messy, impure, wondrous way they capture and enrapture us. [16 February 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

A fierce, brilliant film that breaks (and then mends) your heart.

Lovingly designed, impeccably stylish and heartwarming.

May show both director and star working at their professional peaks, but I don't think it's as good as that underappreciated masterwork "A.I." It's not as resonant and daring, not as full of magic and marvel. Spielberg stretches himself technically here but not emotionally.

42nd Street is the quintessential '30s backstage song and dance movie-and one of the most influential and much-copied movie musicals ever. [09 Mar 2007, p.C6]

This magnificent 1974 sequel, the centerpiece of Coppola and writer Mario Puzo's 20th Century gangster saga, is still one of the most ambitious and brilliantly executed American films, a landmark work from one of Hollywood's top cinema eras.

The Polish thriller that made Polanski world-famous, a taut psychological drama in which a bourgeois married couple invite a hitchhiking student for a weekend of sailing. The sea becomes an arena for desire, menace and deadly games. [19 Jan 2007, p.C3]

Delicately subversive, hypnotically sardonic, full of terror, banality and wafer-thin lyricism.

From Vicki Baum's novel, scrumptiously directed by Goulding, with a constellation of a cast that includes Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore and Joan Crawford. [28 Nov 1999, p.35]

In Top Hat's all-time showstopper, to Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek," light-footed Fred and feathery Ginger dance us right into paradise. [23 Aug 2005, p.C3]

Impure Chandler it may be, but it's pure Altman and one of his nose-thumbing '70s maverick classics. [25 May 2007, p.C5]

All but sweeps you away with its dazzling technique and shattering emotion. [27 November 1996, Tempo, p.1]

Though it's a sad, somber, deeply questioning work, it's done with a light, loving spirit.

One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life.

Loach is a super-realist, and Sweet Sixteen has the disarming feel of a documentary. It's a film that miraculously catches life on the fly, without apparent embellishment, cliche or melodrama.

Pulp Fiction isn't just funny. It's outrageously funny. [14 Oct 1994]

A great, velvety, beautiful anachronism. It's a movie almost drunk on romance, literature and cinema, a splendid period picture that keeps rashly breaking rules and boundaries [17 Sept 1993, Friday, p.A]

Superb crime thriller. [07 Sep 1998, p.1N]

Busby Berkeley's finest hour comes in this flabbergasting Warners musical, with James Cagney as a Berkeley-like choreographer who directs, for a string of Broadway theaters, a series of "preview" dance numbers that blow your socks off.

A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.

It's full of cinematic invention, rich verbal and visual poetry, packed with raw life and nonpareil acting. [Dirctor's Cut]

This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.

It's a joy. Altman does Dallas the way he did "Nashville" in Nashville or Hollywood in "The Player."

One of the most beautiful of all recent films on the problems of old age -- and on the interplay of theater and life.

Of all the movies that try to take us into the mind and viewpoint of a child, Carol Reed's 1948 The Fallen Idol, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story, is one of the most ingenious.

Paths of Glory is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's The Green Berets or Sylvester Stallone's Rambo. [25 Feb 2005, p.C2]

Among its many excellences, Vera Drake functions superbly as a pure thriller; the last half is reminiscent in structure and detail of Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man."

The funniest -- and almost the saddest -- silent comedy. [20 Apr 2001, p.C1]

No other film has a final effect quite like "Rules." One walks away from it drained and exhilarated, after experiencing a whole world and seemingly every possible emotion in a few swift golden hours.

If all this potent drama recalls Bergman, the beautifully articulated staging and setting suggest that master of operatic social-sexual drama, Luchino Visconti ("The Leopard").

Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

A landmark musical movie -- controversial, mercurial, even cheeky. It's the kind of film that wildly divides audiences and critics -- people tend to either love or hate it. I loved it.

It's a spree of a movie, one of the most impishly entertaining of Altman's career. Smart, sparkling, almost sinfully amusing.

Three Times is great cinema, pop romance that carries a special charge.

Like all the Coens' movies, "Man" is supremely self-aware and darkly, hellishly funny. It's also brilliantly written and acted to a fare-thee-well by an outrageously good cast.

It closes the trilogy like a lightning blast followed by the ominous, resonant drone of thunder. Great action sequences crop up frequently today, but great action movies are always few and far between. Beyond Thunderdome is one, every bit as much as its two predecessors.

Moretti gives us something different but very important. He shows us how life goes on.

Based on Leonard Gardner's California-set novel, full of brilliant low-key acting, accurate vernacular and precise low-life observation, it stars Stacy Keach as a nearly over-the-hill old pro and Jeff Bridges as a young pug starting out. [19 May 2006, p.C7]

Jones lets it all loose here. It's the performance of a lifetime: full of menace and venom, eloquence and fire, rot and pathos, crackling rawness and realism.

It sounds slightly absurd, but McCarey was a master of on-set improvisation, and Going My Way has the easy-going rhythm, humanity and warmth of life itself. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

Bravo shines with humor and character. [28 Jul 2006, p.C10]

Great, bittersweet family drama.

Great filmmakers push their ideas and characters to the limit, unafraid of consequences - which is what Pedro Almodovar has done in Talk To Her, his latest film and, I think, his best.

A beautiful picture with a great heart, a classic-to-be with a common touch.

Anyone who thinks nothing is happening in The Scent of Green Papaya-in the absence of car chases, rapes, gunfights and whatever else we may now demand from our entertainment-is obviously not paying attention. [11 Mar 1994, p.D]

A grand ride. Sleek, beautiful and packed with emotion, not too flashy but full of heart, this is a movie worthy of its unlikely yet glorious subject: Depression-era America's best-loved racehorse and the two races that made him a legend.

It's permeated with a sweetness and vulnerability unusual for any crime movie. [29 May 1998, p.N]

One of the great movie horror tales, with one of the greatest of all movie villains, appeared to relatively little fanfare in 1955 when actor Charles Laughton released his sole movie directorial effort: a startlingly Gothic visualization of Davis Grubb's Southern nightmare novel The Night of the Hunter.[23 Nov 2001, p.C5]

Sunset Blvd. remains one of the best, truest, funniest, saddest and scariest of all movies about Hollywood. [09 Jun 2006, p.C8]

One of the screen's great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men in their 20s, hit Italy like a comic thunderbolt when it was released there in 1953 -- and it struck the American art-house audience in much the same way when it premiered here in 1956. Now it returns, and unlike its five aging-boy protagonists, this movie hasn't lost its first youth.

One of the screen's supreme works and perhaps Ingmar Bergman's finest film, "Persona" is also his most radical in form and technique.

Los Angeles has always been the capital city of film noir..., but few movies present a darker, bleaker view of the city than Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown. [17 Oct 1997, p.o]

Achieves a mellowness and melancholy that recalls the jazzy dissonance of director (and here, composer) Eastwood's best work: "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Bird," "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River."

Brilliant adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 20th Century comic-erotic classic. [08 Jul 2005, p.C2]

One of the greatest films--Akira Kurosawa's poignant 1952 masterpiece Ikiru...is both a tragicomedy about how our best intentions are misinterpreted and a profound meditation on an old man's reactions to impending death. [26 Sep 2003, p.C2]

Director Otto Preminger excelled at intellectual thrillers and he's at his peak here. [07 Feb 2007, p.C12]

A landmark movie that becomes a priceless entryway into a distant land and its people, few of whom will ever seem as foreign and far away again.

Egypt's foremost filmmaker Chahine directs and stars in the movie most beloved by Egyptian audiences: a vibrant, lower-depths saga of the working community at a Cairo train station: concessionaires, porters and baggage-handlers, beset by bosses and torn by inner conflicts. [09 Jul 1999, p.L]

It's a movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance.

Eisenstein's incandescent creativity remains strikingly obvious. The most brilliant of all Soviet silent films. [30 Jan 1998, p.N]

A movie bull's-eye: noir with an attitude, a thriller packing punches. It gives up its evil secrets with a smile.

A deeply moving blend of cold terror and rapturous hilarity. Lovingly crafted by Italy's top comedian and most popular filmmaker, it's that rare comedy that takes on a daring and ambitious subject and proves worthy of it.

A stunner: a fiercely brilliant film of such wrenching impact, nonstop drive and unpredictability that watching it becomes an exhilarating ride.

As these three rowdies carouse, bond and then break apart, Towne and Ashby give us an indelible portrait of the moral chaos and bitterness of the Vietnam years, true to the last detail. [14 Aug 1998, p.M]