Michael Wilmington

People always complain that movies aren't as entertaining, entrancing or outrageous as the best of the old Golden Age. Yet, memorably and magically, here's one that is. Don't let it dance away unseen. [22 Jul 1994, p.C]

The Human Stain has those qualities we often want but rarely see in our films: intelligence and ambition, decency and humanity, poetry and pity, fire and ice. Watch it and weep.

The film seems a mad mix of staid PBS bio-drama, flamboyant musical comedy and surreal cartoon nightmare.

A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.

A weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going, an opus for film geeks that rang my personal bell. A bizarre minimalist epic that will either transport or infuriate, it's defiantly, exquisitely eccentric.

One of the best of its streamlined, over-produced, double-clutch kind: a high-speed, slicker-than-slick car-chase movie with unexpected deposits of character and comedy.

A mad, resplendent peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made during those giddy years.

The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).

The Crow imbues its comic brutalism with emotion and satire. Too raw and pulpy, it probably shouldn't be regarded as a memorial to Brandon Lee. But as an obsessive rock 'n' roll comic book movie shocker of loony intensity, it stands, or flies, by itself.

It's a terrific, kinetic experience, and it's also a brilliant showcase for a crackerjack ensemble of great actors.

A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]

Sometimes, it's exciting to watch a movie formula jell on screen-and that's what you can see happening in The Client, the latest, and best, of three successive films adapted from legal thrillers by John Grisham.

Most of all, it's a film for moviegoers who love powerful stories and ravishing imagery: timeless, eternal, the kind of tales handed from one generation and culture to the next -- and alive in all of them.

Whatever its flaws, Funny Girl is one star vehicle that works perfectly for its subject.

It's the film for which Albright painted a series of progressively decaying portraits of Dorian, climaxing in a ghastly vision of venereal rot and putrescence. [27 Feb 1997, p.11B]

A perfectly balanced blend of romance in exotic settings (shipboard, in Italy) and the trauma-drama of accident and heartbreak. [08 Aug 1999, p.23]

A film of great spiritual intensity and haunting minimalism that enlarges your concepts of movies and of life. Like the monks of the Carthusian order, it distills something intoxicating through a style that's pure and rigorous.

Ablaze with poetry and danger, and suffused with an odd kind of intellectual kitsch.

It's a summit meeting between three brilliant leading men from three generations with three striking on-screen personas.

For any of you who've ever daydreamed of playing hoops with Jordan, Michael Jordan to the Max is almost certainly the closest you'll ever get.

Few directors are more adept at playing with all this anguish and exhilaration than Mike Nichols.

The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.

It's a film for specialized tastes, quiet, delicate. But it suits those tastes beautifully.

The Sea isn't just brooding Scandinavian domestic tragedy, a lesser Bergman-Ibsen pastiche. It's also hilarious and rowdy, and it plays with our sympathies and expectations in such surprising ways, with such brilliant actors, it's easy to see why it won the equivalent of eight Icelandic Oscars.

A witty and psychologically perceptive look at the Parisian literary scene.

A noir with a smile, and after all these years, its deft mixture of darkness and light still makes us smile.

You probably won't find two more fascinating camera subjects, two livelier conversationalists or two richer, more rewarding, more engaging and inspiring companions in any movie, fiction or non-fiction, this year.

A beautiful, intensely moving film.