Michael Wilmington

Hollywood's great holiday musical is this sparkling adaptation of writer Sally Benson's memoir: a movie that takes us on a Currier and Ives 1903 holiday tour of St. Louis with the postcard-perfect Smith family. [08 Jan 2004, p.N1]

A near-classic blend of mystery, personality, humor and terror, laced with one stunning shock after another. [18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

One of the most entertaining movies this year, and one of the few that shows real invention and audacity, along with big-studio technical flash. [8 June 1986, p.C27]

Mystic River is classic Eastwood, classic noir. If there is still some doubt about whether this one-time macho star is actually a world-class moviemaker, Mystic River should end the argument for good. One of the best American movies of the year, crisply well-crafted and beautifully acted.

Altman's dreamy, snowy northwestern about wily operator McCabe (Warren Beatty), sexy Madame Miller (Julie Christie) and a bittersweet tale of how the West was unzipped. [04 May 2007, p.C2]

A masterpiece of wry violence and stylized mayhem, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi turns loose one of Japan's most brilliant film auteurs, Takeshi Kitano, on one of its most enduring pop legends.

This is a film precisely constructed, brilliantly imagined.

One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

Downfall, whatever its shortcomings, bears strong witness to great evil. That is its triumph as a film.

In the remarkable, ferociously intelligent new film No Man's Land, Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic gives us a movie portrait of the Bosnian War, a conflict that has devastated his country, friends and neighbors -- and found in it both shocking humor and searing, relentless tragedy.

Bravo!

The thrilling sequel-return of Mifune's hip samurai from Yojimbo. [01 Nov 2002, p.C9]

One of the quintessential '60s foreign art films, a bizarre melange of pop music, revolution, sex, movie allusions and poetry. It's a masterpiece of sorts by one of the most important European filmmakers of that era. But it's also a movie that can drive you crazy.

Somber, meditative and visually magnificent, this film, about a famous Greek author ruminating on his past, is a piece of cinematic poetry: calm, beautiful and chilling as the eternal sea against which much of it is set. [22 Oct 1998, p.2]

One of the great American social films: strong, ribald, deeply compassionate. [30 Sep 2005, p.C6]

A fit tribute to an entertainer who, no matter what hate or hardship threw in his way or how many mistakes he made, we can't stop loving.

Blazes up constantly with a stunning, off-kilter brilliance, an incandescent force that sometimes explodes the space between us and the screen.

If the uncut Fanny and Alexander is Bergman's greatest work, as I think, it's because it's his most inclusive. He shows almost everything: all his moods, conflicts, styles and many of his favorite actors.

Some movies can lay claim to being the best thing around in a week, a month, a year. Robert Altman's Short Cuts is closer to being one of the all-time bests, among the finest American films since the advent of sound. [22 Oct 1993]

This jolting tale of a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil, her desperate movie actress mother and the two priests called in to exorcise the demon, actually seems a deeper movie now -- more intense, less formulaic or shallow. Yet it's also retained all its original hypnotic narrative grip. [2000 re-release]

It's a thriller that really thrills, a drama that really engages, a portrait of a world and system out of joint that is painfully convincing and totally engrossing from the first simmering minute to the last explosive second.

It is a movie about the gradual erosion of life's seeming certainties, and it's also about the destructive immorality that may lie beneath the most exquisitely composed veneer. As we watch "Chocolat," this great director and his great actress, Huppert, convince us: Evil is.

A great love story and a deeply moving celebration of simple lives.

It's impossible, when we watch "I Am Cuba" today, not to see some poignance in its soaring shots, sadness to its thrilling vistas. [08 Dec 1995, p.C]

One of the most honest movies ever made about male friendship. [13 Feb 1998, p.N]

A brilliant entertainment, full of bemused skepticism and reckless, prodigal love -- for these people and their vanishing era and lives.

Fireworks is a great new film that takes the traditions and makes them burn and explode, in violence and beauty, flame and flower. It's a film that lights up the night, opens your eyes. [20 Mar 1998, p.C]

Hoop Dreams has the movie equivalent of all-court vision. It picks up everything happening in the gym, in the stands and even outside. It gives us the thrill of the game, but it doesn't cheat on either the vibrant social context or the deep human story.

Splendid, soaringly ambitious Chinese period fantasy.

Movies today rarely touch chords that are spiritual or deeply emotional, but Nathaniel Kahn's remarkable documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey does both.

One of the most beautiful and profound films to emerge from Japan during the past decade.

Trashy and glorious, the restored Metropolis is a pop epic for the ages.

The story is engrossing, full of thrills and humor, the period re-creation wondrous and the pace intoxicatingly brisk. And the actors are all so good and their parts so well-written that we're engaged emotionally as well.

Viveka Seldahl and Sven Wollter will touch you to the core in a film you will never forget -- that you should never forget.

This is a movie for all cultures and all people, for families and especially for those who have lost them.

A great movie on a powerful, essential subject -- the Holocaust years in Poland -- directed with such artistry and skill that, as we watch, the barriers of the screen seem to melt away.

An extraordinary work, grandly conceived, brilliantly executed and wildly entertaining. It's a hobbit's dream, a wizard's delight. And, of course, it's only the beginning.

Sometimes cinema's highest achievements become clear only in retrospect. Days of Being Wild--now clearly revealed as one of the peaks of Hong Kong filmmaking and a masterwork of contemporary cinema giant Wong.

Kaufman's startling Quills gives us an anatomy of fear, images both silken swift and molten hot, scenes that disrupt and inflame the imagination.

A boisterous, brilliant, heart-warming comedy--strikes me as just about perfect.

From the very first images of Saul Bass' credit sequence, the whorls and patterns revolving in darkness, the huge eye bathed in red, the movie lets us feel the heartbeat and divided soul of its hero. And its creator. It is a movie about desire, darkness and the pull toward destruction. Most of all, it is about impossible love and overwhelming fear--conveyed with consummate control and art. Watching it, we feel the fear, suffer the desire. [Restored version; 18 Oct 1996, p.1]

Astonishing, crazily delightful.

This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5]

The kind of brilliantly weirdo picture that, by all rights, shouldn't have gotten made at all but this time, miraculously, was.

Watching Le Cercle Rouge, we're caught up in a world that, however improbable some of its twists and turns seem, strikes us as a perfect, imaginative creation.

Sumptuous and beautiful, suffused with a serene melancholy and deeply ambivalent love for a long-vanished past, Luchino Visconti's 1963 The Leopard is one of the greatest of all historical costume epics.

The cast is tremendous; these actors work with Resnais like a well-oiled stock company that knows every trick and can communicate almost telepathically.

Both sides of the story -- the larger context and the intense and intimate drama -- are painted with an absolutely unswerving sense of truth. And, as we watch this movie, full of violence, injustice and compassion, there is barely a moment that seems calculated or contrived.

As he was dying, Tarkovsky fashioned this great valedictory about a family in the first stages of nuclear apocalypse and a father's ultimate sacrifice. [31 Jan 2003, p.C4]

A near-masterpiece, it is one of the most effective and convincing studies of a criminal ever put on screen. [22 Jan 1999, p.A]

Masterpiece is the right word for The Sweet Hereafter. It is extraordinary: a poem of familial pain, a song of broken embraces. [25 December 1997, Tempo, p.1]

It's a work by cinematic geniuses that reveals beauty and terror in a long-ago time with a virtuoso intensity. You won't soon forget its mad, lovely sights and sounds.

The movie, beautifully written, photographed and acted, remains Bergman's most characteristic work, alternating between terror and charm, sentiment and humor. It has one of the loveliest last scenes in any Bergman film. [10 Dec 2004, p.C5]

In a league with Hollywood's top historical epics, ancient or otherwise. It's stunningly handsome film, with an equally stunning cast and engrossing story.

One of the great screwball comedies. [23 Jan 1998, p.N]

West Side Story has a nonpareil set of songs and dances, with ecstatic, exuberant, wonderful music by Leonard Bernstein and witty or heart-tearing lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. [Sing-a-long]

Once again, Ozu's script, co-written with constant colleague Kogo Noda, is a marvel of organic detail and deceptive naturalism. Ozu's late style -- the serene, easy flow, the smooth succession of floor-level interior shots, the quietly restrained acting, the mastery of intimate psychology and the subtle portrayal of Japanese society in transition -- are all in place. [24 Mar 1989, p.23]

One of the cinema's imperishable visions of faith against injustice. [20 Feb 1997, p.9E]

Such a sour, mindlessly inflated experience that seeing it may temporarily put you off historical movies.

As we watch, we can sense, once again, the eye of a painter, the dreams of a poet and, tying them together, the vision of a master.

This landmark movie's madcap humor and terrifying suspense remain undiminished by time.

One of the cinema's true classics.

It's a nail-biter and knuckle whitener of the first rank: a super real life techno thriller that reduces the fantasies of Tom Clancy and his clones to ground zero.

El Dorado is essentially a darker remake of Rio Bravo, with Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Hunnicutt and James Caan as the now archetypal quartet. But, though the situation is the same, the mood is crisper, tenser, with a heightened sense of pain, loss and death underlying the humor and action.

Totally original and personal, this is a vast modern comic/poetic epic, lyrical, austere and strange. Despite its failure, Playtime is now regarded by many critics as one of the century's film masterpieces. [09 Jan 1998, p.M]

The things that make me love the movie are the mood, the hardboiled but good-hearted morality, Hawks' consummately professional eye-level style and those wonderful characters. [28 Jul 2006, p.C7]

Kurosawa's 1958 classic samurai comedy adventure; George Lucas used it as the model for Star Wars, in which Mifune and the two squabbling farmers are transformed into Han Solo, C-3PO and R2-D2. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

Magnificent to look at, thrilling, ingenious, spellbinding and superbly done on every level, this is not just one of the best films of the year or the decade, but of all time.

Some scholars may scowl, some lowbrows may scoff. But, like wordwise Will, these filmmakers know how to win a crowd -- from the queen down to the groundlings, from the sky above to the stage below. Bravo! [5 December 1998, Friday, p.A]

This is a romance with minimal physical contact and sex--and that's part of what makes it work so well as a love story.

The protracted scenes of eating, cooking and cleaning carry neo-realism to its end point -- and to a violent climax which emerges logically and terrifyingly from the welter of daily trivia preceding it. [24 Oct 1997, p.L]

Sumptuously exciting, glowing with expertise, seething with life, gorgeously designed and thrillingly articulated.

Made after Visconti's second paralyzing stroke, in darkly splendid Roman interiors, this is a somber, meditative, confessional work about corruption and mortality, the ways the world and desire batter down even the most protected doors. [17 Oct 1994, p.5C]

The film is truly special, truly different -- a wondrous talky roundelay about and for people who love life.

An amazing celluloid poem by a filmmaker whom Ingmar Bergman called "the greatest." He very nearly was. He was also, perhaps, too pure a creator and reckless a citizen to survive unscathed.

The suspense is pulse tearing, but Hitchcock, in a movie made explicitly for the war effort, gives it an extra edge. Also, in his favorite and most ingenious cameo role, Hitch solves the problem of appearing in a film with no extras -- the cast consists only of the other shipwreck survivors -- by having himself photographed before and after losing 100 pounds on a special crash diet. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

It is a story of eerie beauty, overpowering fear and almost no solace at all -- save perhaps for a few jazzy chords on the night club piano and the chirp of the bullfinch in that empty, empty room. [06 Jun 1997, p.C]

You may not like Beau Travail - which is, after all, a quintessential "critic's film" - but I think you'll have to admit it's been almost perfectly executed.

The script is by Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth) and the mixture of dry wit and terror is expert. Hitchcock, who was 73 when he directed, demonstrates all his old skill and romantic pessimism. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

A beautiful and genuinely spirit-lifting film about poverty and education.

One of the great, outrageously irreverent American movie comedies. [27 Sep 2005, p.C3]

Days of Heaven is the grand climax of the whole "Bonnie and Clyde"-"Badlands" tradition of outlaw-lovers-on-the-run movies. Shot by Nestor Almendros and the uncredited Haskell Wexler, it's a cinematographic masterpiece. [20 March 1998]

An adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's tale of the follies of adventure--beautifully directed and shot (by Oswald Morris) and perfectly cast. [11 July 2003, p.C5]

A movie I loved on first sight and, even more important, love in remembrance. Taken all in all, there's only one last thing to say about it. Go.

A great, haunting film; it affects us in ways we're not used to...it is capable of both lifting our hearts and chilling us to the bone.

Brando made Don Vito something we rarely see in movies: a tragicomic villain-hero, a vulnerable hood. The don is so close to a comic character -- the movie itself is so close to comedy -- that Brando's capacity to move us in the role is doubly impressive. At the end, it is the older Godfather's tenderness and sagacity we recall. [21 Mar 1997, Friday, p.A]

A film that can tear you apart emotionally; it's both one of the great movie soap operas and a powerful indictment of racism. Sirk's cool, elegant style--smooth as silk on top, jagged and hot with feeling below--has rarely been joined to a more perfect subject. [05 May 2006, p.C9]

Romero's newest is a horror movie for hard-core fans of the gory and the gruesome and a classic genre film for genre aficionados.

The most well-loved of all Christmas movies.

Ex-Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's "The Front Page" may be the greatest of all newspaper plays, but none of the other movie versions matches this snazzy remake. [04 May 2001, p.C1]

You can't praise highly enough the contributions of the ensemble--De Niro and Pesci especially--but it's Scorsese's triumph. [22 November 1995, Tempo, p.1]

One of the all-time classic noirs. [06 Nov 1998]

It's a low-budget romance-thriller that changed the face of cinema. [14 May 2000, p.8]

They're a witheringly beautiful couple; ex-cinematographer Stevens lavishes all his gifts of composition, lighting and texture on their closeups. [05 Apr 2007, p.C10]

It's so thoroughly engaging, so beautifully made, strikingly shot and chock-full of humor and humanity, I can't imagine any intelligent audience not falling in love with it - if only they take the leap of faith to see it.

Moves us now because it's so playful and the players are so young - and because later, when Godard tried to play for keeps, in his self-consciously radical films of the late '60s and '70s, he began to lose his game.

In Jan Campion's The Piano, the emotions are deep, fierce, primordial. Sexuality overwhelms the film's characters like ocean waves blasting against a cliffside. [19 Nov 1993]

This is one of those films that encapsulate most of its maker's key thoughts and feelings while also connecting us vividly to a fascinating past. No one who loves French film (or movies in general) should miss it.