Michael Wilmington

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.

Watching Taste of Cherry and following its path of fear and redemption, living through this strange day with these foreign but utterly recognizable and deeply sympathetic characters, we believe in them. We feel with them. We care what happens to them. And, knowing them, we know a bit more, as well, about ourselves. [29 May 1998, p.D]

Swooningly beautiful, furious and thrilling, Zhang Yimou's Hero is an action movie for the ages.

Moore's best movie, and one of the most blisteringly effective polemics and documentaries ever.

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]

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]

Hitchcock's first thriller and the film that established him: A moody silent melodrama based on Marie Belloc Lowndes' tale of a mysterious lodger in fear-crazed London, who may be a modern Jack the Ripper. [04 Jan 2002, p.C1]

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [25 Jan 2002, p.C1]

Of all the movies I've seen in the past several years, this is one of the ones I love the most.

Few Hollywood action pictures are half as exciting or ravishing.

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]

This astonishingly beautiful documentary employs microphotography of overpowering crispness and detail to create one of the most stunning records of nature the cinema has given us. [11 Oct 1996, p.J]

A film that sweeps us away into a world of spectacle, beauty and excitement, a realm of fantasy unimaginable without the movies.

An instant classic and a dramatic beauty, a film that gets us to the core of Greene's chilly, dark and romantic view of the post-war world.

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

It's a shame the dippy TV knockoff Hogan's Heroes has supplanted memories of this great dark WWII POW comedy. Seeing it makes you understand why Schindler's List was a long-time Wilder project. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

One of the cinema's supreme, most outrageously eccentric and audacious technical experiments: the legendary single shot movie.

If May's script is brilliant, so is the vivid, raw acting -- which suggests heavy Cassavetes influence. [30 Jul 1999, p.O]

Though Majidi draws from familiar Iranian sources, he's made something unique and moving: a sweet tale with a stirring finish.

If it's not an actual masterpiece, it's at least the next best thing, a fully characteristic, fully alive work by a master of his art.

A film poem of sometimes humbling beauty: a movie that opens up a new world to us - in the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan - with an enchanting freshness and austerity of vision.