Michael Wilmington

Kobayashi's great, laceratingly exciting 1962 Japanese samurai revenge saga, once voted by Japanese critics their country's all-time best film. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

Nobody Knows, by the often excellent Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is one of those special movies that can give us a new way of seeing.

Brims with intelligence, compassion and sensuous delight in the textures, sights and sounds of life--all the way from the Taj Mahal to Pearl Jam.

Clean up the language, and this little roach of a movie could play the bottom half of a double bill with Rowan and Martin's “The Maltese Bippy.” [26 March 1999, Life, p.9E]

Still packs a wallop. It's also a movie with no easy passage to its dark heart.

Like a Visconti epic gone mad, explosive, beautiful, unforgettable. [08 Dec 2006, p.C8]

Imamura, like many older directors, has evolved a style of wonderful simplicity, lucidity and economy, cutting to the marrow of events, switching moods with effortless ease. [11 Sep 1998, p.F]

In this movie, Auteuil ("Jean de Florette") and Binoche ("Chocolat") are such marvelous actors, they can shift us in almost any emotional direction with a speech or a glance.

Baby Doll failed because it was stigmatized as dirty. Watching it now, it seems fresh and witty, knowing but not lewd. [26 May 2006, p.C1]

Not only is the wide screen black-and-white "Angels" Sirk's best movie -- dramatically richer than his more popular '50s romantic melodramas, but just as visually beautiful -- it is the only film from a Faulkner story that the novelist himself liked and praised. [05 Jun 1997, p.8]

A masterpiece that can still leave you dizzy with wonder. As much as any movie ever made, this visionary science-fiction tale of space travel and first contact with extraterrestrial life is a spellbinding experience.

A magnificent throwback to an almost vanished era of epic filmmaking by great filmmakers in thrall to their own passions, rather than to the studio bookkeepers.

Vibrating with humanity, it's a potent portrait of love, ranging from the purely carnal to the impurely sublime.

With rich irony, The World juxtaposes the teasing, grand images of the outside world's wonders with the insular community and the mundane lives of the park employees.

Like "Memento," Mulholland Drive is an amnesiac noir in the tradition that goes back to "Spellbound" and "Somewhere in the Night."

This movie, the subject of controversy, is a defiantly personal statement on what the war really is--laced with that now-familiar "Roger and Me" mix of homespun wit, pop culture playfulness, populist heart twisting and "gotcha" guerilla film-making tactics.

A major cinema event of the year, a masterpiece of Italian film traditions in social/political realism and historical family epic.

The movie, one of Sirk's most popular, is impeccably designed and shot but also gaudy, garish, full of jukebox colors and feverish emotions. It's about the "broken" screen characters Sirk says he loves most--and it really gets to you. [14 Apr 2006, p.C6]

There's an incongruous but ravishing beauty in Far From Heaven, and in its three excellent central performances, that counteracts the seeming kitschiness of the story.

The Russian film The Return is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness - a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness.

A film that lets life flood into our souls.

A scathing, ingeniously funny 1960 portrayal of corporate corruption and backstairs sex. [18 March 1988, p.C24]

An unusual subject for Ozu, white-collar adultery, handled with his customary deep observation. [28 Jan 2005, p.C2]

Be forewarned: Dog Days, like many of Seidel's films, will drive some moviegoers to rage and walkouts with its unrelentingly depressing tone. But it also a remarkable, deeply disturbing work by a brilliant filmmaker.

It still soars, but now it seems richer, more expansive. Amadeus reminds us that movies can be lyrical as well as vulgar, ambitious as well as playful, brilliant as well as down and dirty -- just like Amadeus himself.

A Chekhovian tale of major artistic power.

The movie is a paean to outsiders and reckless love.

A ravishing portrait of Shanghai brothel life in the late 19th Century, shot entirely in one-take scenes in luxuriant red-and-gold interior sets. [02 Oct 1998, p.J]

Perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination.

A spectacular, engrossing, big-hearted film based on one of Korea's great national epics and made by that country's top filmmaker.

Extraordinary film, one that, like the museum itself, captures and shows three centuries of Russian culture and history in all its beauty, confusion, terror and majesty.

A film masterpiece, restored more than three decades after its French release, "Army" remains a superb, coolly accurate portrait of a living hell recalled by two men who knew it well and record it truly, Melville and novelist Joseph Kessel.

While some of the second-generation road movies are interesting, few have retained the hypnotic force of Two Lane Blacktop, an intense curio of a troubled era.

Great direction, script (A.I. Bezzerides), score (Bernard Herrmann). [25 Aug 2006, p.C7]

An Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, its ideas were later perfected in the masterly "Playtime." [27 Aug 2004, p.C3]

Trains are perfect settings for murder mysteries and thrillers. The best of them -- surpassing Murder on the Orient Express, The Narrow Margin, Runaway Train and dozens of others -- is Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Based on Richard Llewellyn's stirring memoir of his Welsh boyhood, this is one of the great John Ford films, a multiple Oscar winner (it beat out Citizen Kane) and a strong, lyrical, deeply moving family saga set during a time of labor turbulence and social change. [11 Sep 1998, p.K]

82-year-old Ingmar Bergman takes one of the most painful, shameful episodes of his own life and, writing for director Liv Ullmann, transmutes it into magical, brilliant artistry.

Attack of the Clones celebrates a certain youthful spirit in both moviemaking and movie watching; because it's as much phenomenon as movie, audiences will either ride with or reject it. I was happy to take the ride.

Probing... haunting.

Badlands is about a landscape as much as the couple fleeing across it. Watching it, you sense that Malick finds his outlaw lovers beautiful and terrible, pathetic and monstrous, funny and overwhelmingly sad. [27 March 1998]

Beautifully remastered and containing Cocteau's long-unseen special prologue and credits -- is as much a feat of feverish delight as it was in the dark days of Vichy and WWII.

Another masterpiece from one of the world's more neglected great directors, a master artist who here reveals the soul of another.

It's an easygoing epic -- and John Wayne, as the one-eyed, booze-swilling bounty hunter who tracks the baddies down, gives a lusty, amusingly overripe performance. [08 Oct 2000, p.49]

Kieslowski's beautiful, sad and clear-eyed The Decalogue -- an overwhelming psychological and spiritual epic for our times -- faces the darkness, sends out a song against the storm.

Told with such sadness and exaltation, such mastery of image and sound, that watching it makes you feel renewed and hopeful.

Some movies delight you. Some stimulate and provoke. Some enlighten and inform. And some simply hand you a rousing good time-- does all of that and more.

John Wayne's Ethan is his all-time top performance: funny, romantic, hard-bitten, scary, the personification of machismo.

One of the finest, funniest and most civilized of all Hollywood domestic comedies. [01 Sep 2006, p.C5]

Ozu's informal '50s-set remake of "I Was Born, But . . . ." Not as lyrical as its model, but just as penetrating, this one, made in bright colors and flat surfaces that suggest the era's television dramas, has another obstreperous brother-combo who stage gas-expelling contests and wage a war to get, coincidentally, a family TV. [25 Nov 2005, p.C4]

This is the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn comedies--and one whose unabashedly feminist screenplay seems more incisive with each passing year. [10 Mar 2006, p.C7]

There isn't a moment in Shanghai Triad that celebrates or revels in violence, and by movie's end, Zhang has portrayed the Shanghai underworld as a place of irredeemable evil.

What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.

Kansas City is a wonderful film, done with all Altman's offbeat virtuosity, maverick humor and creative daring -- plus the acid nip that runs through all his recent works.

If you haven't gotten hooked already on Michael Apted's series--collectively, one of the great documentaries in the history of the cinema--you should prepare yourself for the latest installment, 49 Up.

A peach of a story delightfully imagined by Dahl and lushly realized by Burton. It's full of witty or awesome scenes, flights of fancy and characters either totally, lovably sweet or outrageously, humorously rotten.

An absolute delight, one of the most sheerly pleasurable movies Altman has ever made. It's wry, jokey and sexy, a tart and delectable entertainment. And, like most of Altman's best work, it's graced with a top-notch ensemble of first-class [9 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

An amazing film, still a shocker after all these years. [07 Sep 2001, p.C1]

The movie holds up far better than its detractors guessed - splendidly, in fact - not only thanks to Scott's spellbinding acting, but to the epic imagery, Coppola's (and Edmund North's) highly intelligent script and Schaffner's lucid, perfectly controlled direction.

No matter how many heists you've seen, how many gangs you've watched fall apart or how many aging crooks you've seen walk up a mean street to a violent destiny, Rififi never loses its ruthless grace and force.

A powerful film made with minimal means, it's a story of poor people on the fringes of society, done without sentimentality or condescension but with wicked humor.

The third film, After the Life, much like "On the Run," mixes a hard-edged, relentless and stripped-down crime tale with a compassionate overview.

even in the notable ranks of Leigh's movie, TV and theater work-an oeuvre embracing high comedy, biting comment and shivering pathos-Naked is extraordinary. In the hands of Leigh and his magnificently gifted, gutsy cast, these days and nights on London's streets burn themselves on our minds.

A classic comedy. [25 May 2007, p.C7]

Whether Kundun is a perfect movie or not, it's an important and beautiful one. Scorsese's movie takes us into a world we've rarely seen with this kind of sympathy or detail: a magical-looking society built on Buddhism and centuries of art and tradition.

It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did.

What makes "Ladybird, Ladybird" work so well-what enables Loach's actors, especially Crissy Rock and Vladimir Vega, to bring off such extraordinary, deeply moving scenes-is the film's strange mixture of compassion and an unsparing eye. [20 Jan 1995, p.C2]

Pure magic, a three-act movie fantasy that transports us -- as the best films do -- to a world of its own, a place of ambiguous joy and delirious terror.