Michael Wilmington

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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

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]

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

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

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.

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

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

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]

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]

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

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.

One of the best realistic dramas of the year.

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

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

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]

It's a movie full of bewitching images and timeless fun and beauty.

Lovingly designed, impeccably stylish and heartwarming.

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

One of the most excitingly contemporary musicals ever made.

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.

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

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]

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

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]

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

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

One of the cinema's true classics.

If one judged movies purely on the basis of photography and sets, Restoration would deserve a place near the top. [26 Jan 1996, p.C]

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

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]

Despite a level of lurid violence that may offend many, this movie has a motor humming inside. It's been assembled with ferocious, gleeful expertise, crammed with humor, cynicism and jolts of energy. In many ways, it's the best action movie of the year. [17 Jul 1987]

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

Great, bittersweet family drama.

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]

Splendid, soaringly ambitious Chinese period fantasy.

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

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]

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

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

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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

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.

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]

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 flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

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.

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.

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]

The splendid new documentary Crumb, a sympathetic yet woundingly candid portrait, catches the artist with much the same skill. [26 May 1995]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

Despite studio indifference, this was perhaps the one time in his career Sam Peckinpah enjoyed an uncomplicated, nearly universal critical response: The movie was instantly hailed as a modern Western classic. [18 May 1997, p.81]

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]

A film that lets life flood into our souls.

Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.

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]

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]

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.

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.

A film that uses beautiful tableaux and convincingly raw actors to build to a climax of shatteringly understated poignancy and power.

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.

Quiz Show becomes not just a nostalgic tale of a Camelot warrior and two Faustian eggheads, or a flashy social message drama like the "Golden Age" TV plays of that same era, but a scary precursor of our own time, when the power of TV-and its influence over national and personal life-has grown. [16 Sept 1994, p.C]

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.

It's a horror movie for aficionados. But it's also for people who don't usually like horror movies at all, who regard them as cheap, crude and over-obvious.There's nothing cheap or crude in Pulse," a fine, shivery movie about the terror of solitude and emptiness.

A movie that celebrates and mourns heroism and friendship, while reminding us how seldom we truly see either on our big screens.

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

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.

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

Forty years later, The Killing has lost little of its punch. It's both vintage '50s noir and a stunning introduction to a killer director. [22 Jul 1998, p.L]

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]

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

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]

An incredibly silly film of great humor, brilliant design and epic insanity.

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]

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

It's a sordid but expert shocker.

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.

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]