Michael Wilmington

A great, velvety, beautiful anachronism. It's a movie almost drunk on romance, literature and cinema, a splendid period picture that keeps rashly breaking rules and boundaries [17 Sept 1993, Friday, p.A]

Superb crime thriller. [07 Sep 1998, p.1N]

Busby Berkeley's finest hour comes in this flabbergasting Warners musical, with James Cagney as a Berkeley-like choreographer who directs, for a string of Broadway theaters, a series of "preview" dance numbers that blow your socks off.

A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.

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

This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.

It's a joy. Altman does Dallas the way he did "Nashville" in Nashville or Hollywood in "The Player."

One of the most beautiful of all recent films on the problems of old age -- and on the interplay of theater and life.

Of all the movies that try to take us into the mind and viewpoint of a child, Carol Reed's 1948 The Fallen Idol, adapted by Graham Greene from his short story, is one of the most ingenious.

Paths of Glory is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's The Green Berets or Sylvester Stallone's Rambo. [25 Feb 2005, p.C2]

Among its many excellences, Vera Drake functions superbly as a pure thriller; the last half is reminiscent in structure and detail of Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man."

The funniest -- and almost the saddest -- silent comedy. [20 Apr 2001, p.C1]

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.

If all this potent drama recalls Bergman, the beautifully articulated staging and setting suggest that master of operatic social-sexual drama, Luchino Visconti ("The Leopard").

Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, 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; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

A landmark musical movie -- controversial, mercurial, even cheeky. It's the kind of film that wildly divides audiences and critics -- people tend to either love or hate it. I loved it.

It's a spree of a movie, one of the most impishly entertaining of Altman's career. Smart, sparkling, almost sinfully amusing.

Three Times is great cinema, pop romance that carries a special charge.

Like all the Coens' movies, "Man" is supremely self-aware and darkly, hellishly funny. It's also brilliantly written and acted to a fare-thee-well by an outrageously good cast.

It closes the trilogy like a lightning blast followed by the ominous, resonant drone of thunder. Great action sequences crop up frequently today, but great action movies are always few and far between. Beyond Thunderdome is one, every bit as much as its two predecessors.

Moretti gives us something different but very important. He shows us how life goes on.

Based on Leonard Gardner's California-set novel, full of brilliant low-key acting, accurate vernacular and precise low-life observation, it stars Stacy Keach as a nearly over-the-hill old pro and Jeff Bridges as a young pug starting out. [19 May 2006, p.C7]

Jones lets it all loose here. It's the performance of a lifetime: full of menace and venom, eloquence and fire, rot and pathos, crackling rawness and realism.

It sounds slightly absurd, but McCarey was a master of on-set improvisation, and Going My Way has the easy-going rhythm, humanity and warmth of life itself. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

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

Great, bittersweet family drama.

Great filmmakers push their ideas and characters to the limit, unafraid of consequences - which is what Pedro Almodovar has done in Talk To Her, his latest film and, I think, his best.

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