Michael Wilmington

Few films have caught the special feel and rhythms of childhood so well, with such uncondescending warmth and humor. And few bring out more powerfully the themes of anti-racism and the virtues and joys of community and family. [20 Apr 2007, p.C5]

Nobody Knows, by the often excellent Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is one of those special movies that can give us a new way of seeing.

This is one of the great alternative masterpieces of the American cinema. In many ways, Cassavetes' most important film.

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.

Ozu's informal '50s-set remake of "I Was Born, But . . . ." Not as lyrical as its model, but just as penetrating, this one, made in bright colors and flat surfaces that suggest the era's television dramas, has another obstreperous brother-combo who stage gas-expelling contests and wage a war to get, coincidentally, a family TV. [25 Nov 2005, p.C4]

Ozu is often wrongly characterized as a "soft" director preoccupied with middle-class home life, but this late film tackles extreme subject matter--spousal abuse and abortion--with unflinching skill. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

All but sweeps you away with its dazzling technique and shattering emotion. [27 November 1996, Tempo, p.1]

A very fine and strongly acted, if somewhat stagebound, adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's great, moving African-American family drama. [06 Apr 2007, p.C8]

One of the great screwball comedies. [23 Jan 1998, p.N]

Another Universal classic, based on H.G. Wells' tale of an invisible madman. [13 Aug 2007, p.C6]

It still soars, but now it seems richer, more expansive. Amadeus reminds us that movies can be lyrical as well as vulgar, ambitious as well as playful, brilliant as well as down and dirty -- just like Amadeus himself.

Impure Chandler it may be, but it's pure Altman and one of his nose-thumbing '70s maverick classics. [25 May 2007, p.C5]

Egypt's foremost filmmaker Chahine directs and stars in the movie most beloved by Egyptian audiences: a vibrant, lower-depths saga of the working community at a Cairo train station: concessionaires, porters and baggage-handlers, beset by bosses and torn by inner conflicts. [09 Jul 1999, p.L]

A film that can tear you apart emotionally; it's both one of the great movie soap operas and a powerful indictment of racism. Sirk's cool, elegant style--smooth as silk on top, jagged and hot with feeling below--has rarely been joined to a more perfect subject. [05 May 2006, p.C9]

Extraordinary film, one that, like the museum itself, captures and shows three centuries of Russian culture and history in all its beauty, confusion, terror and majesty.

A deceptively simple French film about teaching that keeps enlarging as you watch it, becoming beautiful and inspiring in a way most films never touch.

What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.

One of the screen's great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men in their 20s, hit Italy like a comic thunderbolt when it was released there in 1953 -- and it struck the American art-house audience in much the same way when it premiered here in 1956. Now it returns, and unlike its five aging-boy protagonists, this movie hasn't lost its first youth.

Shimmers and glows. But it also stings a little -- like the lovely flame that dies and the smoke that, in yet another Cole song, gets in your eyes.

Like "Memento," Mulholland Drive is an amnesiac noir in the tradition that goes back to "Spellbound" and "Somewhere in the Night."

Varda's touching day-in-the-life of a Parisian pop star. [12 Jan 2007, p.C3]

Some scholars may scowl, some lowbrows may scoff. But, like wordwise Will, these filmmakers know how to win a crowd -- from the queen down to the groundlings, from the sky above to the stage below. Bravo! [5 December 1998, Friday, p.A]

It's a work that sears the heart and conscience. The events are annihilating, the way they're told both beautiful and terrifying.

Probing... haunting.

The story is spellbinding, the acting lusty and the spectacle everything you could expect from a Golden Age MGM production--though sometimes it's a bit too much on the monumental side.

Watching Jonathan Caouette's amazing autobiographical documentary Tarnation is like descending into a pop-music, underground-movie hell and heaven, the shattered and shattering landscape of a living body and mind.

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]

In this movie, Auteuil ("Jean de Florette") and Binoche ("Chocolat") are such marvelous actors, they can shift us in almost any emotional direction with a speech or a glance.