Michael Wilmington

It's a simple-seeming but luminous movie, an intelligent, very funny and dead-on small-town comedy-drama adapted and directed by Robert Benton from Richard Russo's gently humorous 1993 novel. [13 Jan 1995, p.C]

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

Few Alfred Hitchcock movies are more fun to watch than To Catch a Thief. [15 Jun 2007, p.C7]

Jafar Panahi of Iran is one of his country's great filmmakers, and Offside is his best movie to date.

It's a movie that's so personal, naked and vulnerable that you can understand why some of its humor seems rough, some of its visuals excessive. But Crooklyn has a quality not as obvious in any Lee film since "Do the Right Thing": the sense of a whole world opening, rich and real, before your eyes. [13 May 1994, p.A]

All the "Star Wars" movies will continue to entertain us for many years to come. They were grand fun, and this last one's a corker.

A timeless romantic thriller that steeps us in one of those great artificial movie worlds that become more overpowering than reality itself.

Perhaps the most original movie fantasy creation of the year: an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation that clings, stickum-like, to your mind's eye and the softest, most woundable parts of your mass-culture heart. [7 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

The best of all cattle-drive westerns. [11 Oct 1998, p.16C]

Swing Time, a Depression-era Manhattan ballad -- and best of the bunch by a hair over Top Hat -- has Fred as a threadbare gambler named Lucky, Ginger as a saucy dance teacher named Penny and a heart-stopping Kern-Dorothy Fields score that includes The Way You Look Tonight, A Fine Romance, Pick Yourself Up and their masterpiece farewell duet number, Never Gonna Dance. [23 Aug 2005, p.C3]

Altman's great kaleidoscopic ensemble comedy-drama about a frenzied few days in country music's capital, with an unlikely, quirky, explosive crowd of musicians, hangers-on and politicos all converging on a fateful concert crossroads.

A masterpiece. Davis' great naughty Southern belle role, co-starring Henry Fonda and Fay Bainter. [07 Jul 2006, p.C7]

25th Hour struck me as one of the best movies of 2002, but it's also a film that will strike some of its audience as ethically dubious or threatening.

A hard-core movie with a soft, light-hearted center and an edge like a knife.

The most purely enjoyable of all the great Ford films. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you.

Georgia, written with rare honesty and economy by Leigh's mother, Barbara Turner, and very sensitively directed by Ulu Grosbard, is a tough-minded look at show business and families. [10 Jan 1996]

Still seems close to the pinnacle of film noir. [Director's Cut]

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

Like most Godard, it can be watched repeatedly, always yielding new secrets and beauties. Most profound of all, perhaps, are those incredible black-and-white images of Paris.

Moviegoers should be almost as entranced by the teeming, glorious landscapes and dark, bloody battlegrounds of Two Towers: astonishing midpoint of an epic movie fantasy journey for the ages.

Fantastic, exciting, a real cinematic/theatrical feast. [15 Oct 1993, p.I]

It remains an anti-war masterpiece. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

The movie is a triumph on almost every level-of artistry, technique, humanity, entertainment and spirit.

It's as thrilling and lushly beautiful a movie as has been released all year, matched only by Zhang's epic "Hero." And I think this film is the more powerful.

An improbable masterpiece -- a bizarre mixture of grandly operatic visuals, grim brutality and sordid violence that keeps wrenching you from one extreme to the other.

A movie about the passions of simple people, and it's done with such extraordinary empathy and commitment that it all but pulls you under. [29 November 1996, Friday, p.A]

1966 French masterpiece -- the finest, most deeply personal work of a filmmaker who has been compared, justifiably, to both Dostoyevsky and Bach.

A brilliant work of the imagination capable of truly seizing and igniting our fantasies.

This is one of the great alternative masterpieces of the American cinema. In many ways, Cassavetes' most important film.

Tati's fabulous comedy about a bumbling French vacationer in Brittany -- the first appearance of his hilarious pipe-smoking alter-ego Hulot -- is almost a silent movie done in sound, with spare dialogue, affectionate characterizations, sunny beach scenes and complex sight gags that recall the genius of Chaplin and Keaton. [19 Dec 1997, p.T]

Kubrick's beautiful adaptation of the William Thackeray novel follows a young Irish gambler, rogue and romantic adventurer (Ryan O'Neal) though a painterly 18th Century English landscape of frozen elegance and upper-class hypocrisy.

Acted with transparent subtlety and grace, brilliantly written and beautifully shot from Ozu's customary low camera angles, this superb film is one of cinema history's now universally accepted masterpieces. [14 Jan 2005, p.C6]

Curtiz holds you in his master grip, creating one of those WW II-era California noirs that keeps swinging you from darkness to sunlight, love to hatred, happiness to the pits of despair and death. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

Based on Reginald Rose's legendary TV play, under Sidney Lumet's sympathetic hand, this is one of the great '50s actors' showcases. [16 May 1999, p.27]

A rare example of a literary film that preserves the best of its source while creatively filling up on it.

The Third Man is a film where everything works: script, direction, the performances of Welles, Cotten, Trevor Howard (the cynical police major) and Alida Valli (the enigmatic traveler), Robert Krasker's flamboyantly tilted black-and-white cinematography and the unforgettably spare and haunting zither score by Anton Karas. [5 Sept 1996, p.6]

Stirred by the winds of nostalgia, lapped by its ocean of dreams, "The Secret of Roan Inish" is one of the loveliest surprises of the year. [03 Mar 1995, p.C]

Nobody ever gathered together a sharper, more pungent international "Golden Age" cast (including Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, S.Z. Sakall, Marcel Dalio, Leonid Kinskey, John Qualen and Curt Bois) in a more imperishable exotic movieland cabaret (Rick's) than Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz did in this greatest of all Hollywood World War II adventure romances.

Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]

Truly original and unique: genuine film poetry, full of spellbinding images and sequences. [20 Mar 1998, p.L]

This French documentary gives us unprecedented intimacy and sweep.

The Seventh Continent is a calm chronicle of hell, a clinical look at how commonplace people can erupt into despair or violence. Bleak, cool, beautifully controlled, liberatingly intelligent, it chills our hearts as it opens our minds. And it establishes Haneke as one of the more remarkable young contemporary filmmakers.

Stylish, ingenious and gleaming with charm, wit and malice, it's another expert blend of domestic drama and crime thriller, a vivisection of the bourgeoisie.

As magnificent as a high-masted 19th-century British warship, as explosive as a Napoleonic-era ocean battle seen above the cannon's mouth... probably the best movie of its kind ever made.

The stars are at their best and most rambunctious and so is Walsh. If you have any taste for Warner Brothers Golden Age studio classics--and want to catch a gem you may have missed--this one hits the spot. [17 Nov 2006, p.C6]

One of the most excitingly contemporary musicals ever made.

Gangster classic. [21 Jan 2005, p.C6]

The atmosphere is unremittingly tense, the undercurrents poignant and grim. It's the best movie ever made by pastoralist Henry King. [26 July 1988, p.21]

One of the great film noirs and a quintessential heist movie, a classic of American hard-boiled storytelling that, though endlessly copied, hasn't been bettered. [27 May 2005, p.C6]

A wildly original movie with astonishingly varied moods and influences.

Leigh is an artist not at all blind to the world's darkness and pain. But the generosity and togetherness he and his company show in Secrets and Lies is something the movies -- and the world -- truly need. [25 October 1996, Friday, p.A]

Gregg Toland's cinematography here makes you yearn for what he might have done on a Ford Western. [17 Oct 1996, p.11]

This cast could hardly be bettered and it's a great story as well: a taut, engrossing, highly perceptive scan of the fears, desires, repressions and ugliness boiling under the deceptively quiet surface of pre-war years. Our movies rarely get an American story this rich, evocative and true, and rarely realize it as well. If "Eternity" has dated at all, it's only in a good way; we can only wish our own movies were half as good or reflected American reality half as well. [5 Dec 2003, p.C8]

This is the Paris -- and the mad, beautiful young Parisienne -- we look for in dreams.

This is a picture that may sound sappy but probably will enrapture audiences lucky enough to catch it. [19 May 1995, p.L]

It's perhaps only because it can't be seen in its full glory on television that "Lawrence" isn't ranked more highly on some recent all-time "best film" lists. But it belongs near the very top. It's an astonishing, unrepeatable epic.

The screen's most magical tale of the world of theater is this lush, intoxicating period epic: the summit of the collaboration of writer Jacques Prevert and director Carne. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

Shadow is the acme of Hitchcock's special principal of dramatic counterpoint. The surface is sunny and buoyant; dark, deadly currents flow underneath. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

A film which should gratify any audience starved for intelligent dialogue, realistic portrayals of romance and lovely, non-cliched open-air photography.

A '60s landmark. [31 Oct 2003, p.C6]

Like many Hollywood classics, Oz benefited from happy accidents: Happiest of all was the casting, as Dorothy, of MGM teenage songbird Garland, whose wide-eyed emoting and passionate singing make the movie. Behind her is a near-perfect supporting cast. [18 Jun 1999, p.I]

A spellbinder: provocatively conceived, gorgeously shot and masterfully executed.

It's tantalizing, delectable and randy, a movie of melting eroticism and toothsome humor.

It's one of Hitchcock's most inventive works, a great favorite of French director Jean Renoir. [24 Sep 1995, p.71]

This is a terrific movie: jolting, savage, horrifically funny, nightmarishly exciting but also brainy and compassionate.

There's a muscular sincerity to this movie, a power and spread to its imagery that triumphs over the occasional candied purple patches or strained plot twists. [16 Jul 1993 Pg. F1]

This seedy Barfly is beautifully written, acted and directed. It may be full of dank desire, wasted love and jesting misery--but it blooms. Whatever its flaws, it does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being.

Whatever may be flawed in Oliver Stone's searing, full-torque new war movie "Salvador", one thing about it is burningly right: It's alive. It broils, snaps and explodes with energy. The events (condensed from two years of battles and political upheaval in El Salvador) fly past at a murderous clip, hurtling you along almost demonically. [10 Apr 1986, p.6]

As a transcription of Bogosian's theater piece, Talk Radio is tense, packed and crackling with life. As a dramatic investigation into Alan Berg and his murder, it's shallow and dubious. But as a synthesis of those two disjointed halves into a volatile whole--a comic-paranoid nightmare about media success, media myths, prejudice and the pathological relationship between performers and their audience--the film is an often dazzling success. Bogosian and the cast are bravura performers; Stone a director with guts and talent.

Ward's "Map" is a wildly ambitious film and, often, a wildly beautiful one--and if it isn't quite a masterpiece, if we sense that Ward's resources aren't enough for the World War II London scenes, in the end, any flaws or lapses simply may not matter. Movies, especially ones with a broad epic canvas and international logistics, don't often get this intimate. They don't give you such a sense of nerves stripped raw, joy or misery nakedly expressed.

Though definitely one of the best American movies of the year--a work of high ensemble talent and intelligence, gorgeously mounted and crafted, artistically audacious in ways that most American movies don't even attempt--it's still a disappointment… It's not the capstone we might have wanted Coppola to make. [23 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.9]

It's an ode to heroism, idealism and romance that still sweeps us away.

It’s a story idea that seems dubious at first, but manages to flesh out wondrously--mostly because scenarist Ron Shelton has such a wickedly tight grip on the absurdities and dynamics of small American cities.

It's an '80s "road" film -- in the '70s vein of "Five Easy Pieces" or "Two Lane Blacktop" (which Wurlitzer wrote) -- and it's almost a little masterpiece: morally brave, beautifully measured, funny, sad and powerful. With quiet skill, it tears open and subverts some glittery fantasies of the American dream. [11 Mar 1988, p.27]

Impudent, grandiose, a multilevel crowd-pleaser--almost returns the Disney animated features to their glory traditions of the '30s and '40s.

A lot of this horrific Little Shop is not only sweet, melodic, funny and oddly idealistic, it's even, well, tasty. [19 Dec 1986, p.1]

Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It is a joyfully idiosyncratic little jazz-burst of a film, full of sensuous melody, witty chops and hot licks

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

Certainly Crocodile Dundee is nothing you can examine deeply or mull over afterward. It's simply an expert crowd-pleaser. It has such a sure, easy, confident touch that it's almost failure-proof--like a tip of the hat, a sip of beer, a quick, golden G'day.

It's a jewel-like, minimalist film about a group of crisscrossing wanderers and outlaws on one lyrically strange day and night in Memphis--where haphazard-seeming events slowly merge into entrancingly complex figures and patterns.

It conveys a sense of moral quagmire, of sinking into squishily dangerous terrain, honeycombed with tunnels and traps, all hell exploding around it. That’s the imagery of the movie’s first battle scene, a taut prologue for a superb film.

Like its black anti-hero, the mapantsula (Zulu for small-time crook ) of the title, the movie makers do their job with swiftness, guile and gall. It’s a moral drama in disguise.

In this film, Shaw come alive for you in ways that go beyond his physical presence (still handsome, a balding, bearded 74), or the sound of his clarinet (its impeccable sheen and limpid line).

Two suggestions as you watch it: Never take anything for granted, and keep your hand on your wallet as you leave the theater.

It's a movie of uncommon eloquence and elegance, acted by a truly gifted cast.

There's a zest and brilliance in Neil Jordan's racy heist thriller The Good Thief that makes it almost intoxicating to watch.

Has some of the wit, sass and sexual candor of an "Annie Hall." But it covers the same kind of territory with more bite and bile.

A classic, mythic portrayal of African history, religion and politics by the great Senegalese novelist-filmmaker Sembene, centering on a princess' kidnapping and its aftermath. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

It's a brutally convincing movie about two hell-bent young Turkish-German lovers dancing on the edge of destruction in a Hamburg underworld of drugs and casual sex. Yet it's also compassionate and even tender.

Just as Zhao uses his comic gifts to create an affecting human, so Dong's performance as Wu is a triumph of honesty and tact.

A picture about America with the blinders off, a film about heroism that makes you chuckle and feel sad - and a film about childhood that lets us reenter that lost world and see the grass, sky and sunlight the way they once looked, in the golden hours.

iIt's a film for art- and foreign-movie devotees. But it's also a movie for audiences who simply want to get turned on.

A beautiful, almost defiant film on an unusual subject: love among the elderly.

It's a genteel film with a gun in its pocket, but it's also a film with a universal chord of feeling that keeps welling up from the dark surfaces and violent byways of the plot-and a final confession that both warms the heart and chills the blood.

I don't see how you can get away from calling Cage’s performance a great one. [10 November 1995, Friday, p.C]

A beautifully acted and deeply compassionate study of ordinary people coping with the vicissitudes of life.

A racily entertaining, wonderfully sly and goofy comic film noir with more twists than a mountain road-or, to darken the metaphor, than a cartrunk full of rattlesnakes.