Michael Wilmington

A masterpiece that can still leave you dizzy with wonder. As much as any movie ever made, this visionary science-fiction tale of space travel and first contact with extraterrestrial life is a spellbinding experience.

A magnificent throwback to an almost vanished era of epic filmmaking by great filmmakers in thrall to their own passions, rather than to the studio bookkeepers.

Vibrating with humanity, it's a potent portrait of love, ranging from the purely carnal to the impurely sublime.

With rich irony, The World juxtaposes the teasing, grand images of the outside world's wonders with the insular community and the mundane lives of the park employees.

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

This movie, the subject of controversy, is a defiantly personal statement on what the war really is--laced with that now-familiar "Roger and Me" mix of homespun wit, pop culture playfulness, populist heart twisting and "gotcha" guerilla film-making tactics.

A major cinema event of the year, a masterpiece of Italian film traditions in social/political realism and historical family epic.

The movie, one of Sirk's most popular, is impeccably designed and shot but also gaudy, garish, full of jukebox colors and feverish emotions. It's about the "broken" screen characters Sirk says he loves most--and it really gets to you. [14 Apr 2006, p.C6]

There's an incongruous but ravishing beauty in Far From Heaven, and in its three excellent central performances, that counteracts the seeming kitschiness of the story.

The Russian film The Return is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness - a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness.

A film that lets life flood into our souls.

A scathing, ingeniously funny 1960 portrayal of corporate corruption and backstairs sex. [18 March 1988, p.C24]

An unusual subject for Ozu, white-collar adultery, handled with his customary deep observation. [28 Jan 2005, p.C2]

Be forewarned: Dog Days, like many of Seidel's films, will drive some moviegoers to rage and walkouts with its unrelentingly depressing tone. But it also a remarkable, deeply disturbing work by a brilliant filmmaker.

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.

A Chekhovian tale of major artistic power.

The movie is a paean to outsiders and reckless love.

A ravishing portrait of Shanghai brothel life in the late 19th Century, shot entirely in one-take scenes in luxuriant red-and-gold interior sets. [02 Oct 1998, p.J]

Perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination.

A spectacular, engrossing, big-hearted film based on one of Korea's great national epics and made by that country's top filmmaker.

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 film masterpiece, restored more than three decades after its French release, "Army" remains a superb, coolly accurate portrait of a living hell recalled by two men who knew it well and record it truly, Melville and novelist Joseph Kessel.

While some of the second-generation road movies are interesting, few have retained the hypnotic force of Two Lane Blacktop, an intense curio of a troubled era.

Great direction, script (A.I. Bezzerides), score (Bernard Herrmann). [25 Aug 2006, p.C7]

An Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, its ideas were later perfected in the masterly "Playtime." [27 Aug 2004, p.C3]

Trains are perfect settings for murder mysteries and thrillers. The best of them -- surpassing Murder on the Orient Express, The Narrow Margin, Runaway Train and dozens of others -- is Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Based on Richard Llewellyn's stirring memoir of his Welsh boyhood, this is one of the great John Ford films, a multiple Oscar winner (it beat out Citizen Kane) and a strong, lyrical, deeply moving family saga set during a time of labor turbulence and social change. [11 Sep 1998, p.K]

82-year-old Ingmar Bergman takes one of the most painful, shameful episodes of his own life and, writing for director Liv Ullmann, transmutes it into magical, brilliant artistry.