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.