Richard Brody

Vertigo is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them.

Emotions, identities, and even bodily functions are distorted by the mechanized uniformity, but Tati’s despair is modulated by a sense of wonder.

Jenkins burrows deep into his characters’ pain-seared memories, creating ferociously restrained performances and confrontational yet tender images that seem wrenched from his very core.

The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith’s trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm.

It’s one of the rare movies that seems truly musical in its inspiration—and which, like much great music, envelops an astonishing complexity of invention and depth of insight in emblematically straightforward expressions.

All About Eve is one of the greatest movies about theatre—an idea that, in itself, opens an ironic abyss into which Mankiewicz spelunks with an impish, riotous aplomb.

Psycho, in its dark and sordid extravagance, remains utterly contemporary, in its subject as well as in its production.

[Anderson] makes a movie that’s both brilliant and hollow, an old-fashioned movie about the world of today (and maybe tomorrow), a vision of hopeful possibilities that remains unmoored from realities. Yet his film, even in its omissions, brims with strategic ingenuity and daring, cinematic and political—to fight other films’ empty fantasies with substantial ones, to battle other advocates’ pernicious myths with virtuous ones.

The movie dramatizes the constraints of the era, the imposition of a narrow and religion-based morality, the stern discipline that’s internalized as a result, the elision of women and their world from public life, and the firm expectations of family and society that Héloïse will endure in her unwanted marriage. Yet it does more than merely depict them—it embodies them, in the characters’ poised stillness, which makes the airy surroundings feel as rigid as stone.

The greatness of Murnau’s work—maybe even the essence of beauty—is that it offers much to talk about, because it is neither emptily decorative nor devoid of ideas, but, rather, embodies ideas even as it surpasses them, and conveys, by the very fact of its being, emotions far beyond those arising from story, character, or situation.

It’s both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie. But the movie is also romantic in another, intimate way—it’s a great love story and a painful triangle, involving the tenderfoot lawyer (James Stewart), his gunslinger friend (John Wayne), and the woman they both love (Vera Miles).

Akerman’s chillingly sardonic feminist fable—which also bears the weight of unspoken wartime trauma—is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified.

The film not only bears witness to the self-surpassing power of inspired collaboration but, as an art work, also exemplifies it. [Review of re-release]

Badlands is [Malick's] Breathless.

Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps.

Lady Bird, daring, distinctive, and personal in text and theme, is recognizably conventional in texture and style.

The film as it stands is a vision of a lost world of graces and traditions that are as alluring as they are confining, as beautiful as they are useless—as well as a portrait of the makers and the victims of modernity.

The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission.

Along with the documentation of material destruction and displacement, the movie is a record of psychological warfare, of the effort to demolish morale, suppress energy, break will. This, as much as the physical violence that it documents, gives the movie immense moral authority.

Uncut Gems jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone.

It’s not the whole story, of course; it’s resolutely on the side of decorum and falls far short of the inner and outer postwar apocalypses envisioned in film noir. But the intensity of its liberal romanticism is utterly gripping.

Simon films the lives of others with an empathetic passion that transforms observation into deep and resonant subjectivity.

The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness.

With this intricate web of personal and family connections, and the brave maneuvering in the face of the overseers’ commands, Gerima is doing nothing less than reconstituting and affirming the full humanity of the enslaved.

There’s palpable joy in the sheer ingenuity of the movie’s conception and in the realization of it. Panahi goes at his subjects with an irrepressible cinematic verve that extends from the story and the dialogue to the performances and the very presences of the actors.

Rigid formality leaves much unsaid in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film, but the director reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression.

In Kiarostami’s furiously clear view, religious dogma suppresses the eye’s observations through the dictate of the word; his calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy, have the force of a steadfast resistance.

Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. It’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him.

The animation, by Craig Staggs, has a notable imaginative specificity, and the meticulously complex interweaving of styles turns the film into a horrifying true-crime thriller that’s enriched by a rare depth of inner experience.

The movie’s writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, crafts a tight story with startling freedom, leaping between characters in order to conjure their fateful interconnections, while giving them all, persecuted and persecutors alike, an identity and a voice. In the process, he brings history to life with bracing immediacy—a feat all the rarer for the audacious twists of cinematic form with which he renders the movie an act of archival reclamation.

It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.

Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama; she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity.

Gavagai is an extraordinary and memorable film; its strong and clear emotional refinement arises from a rare force of imagination, a rare power of observation, a rare cinematic sense to fuse them, and a rare skill to realize them together.

The story...opens out into a dazzling multigenerational array of characters, as well as a panoply of trenchant themes.

In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.

A work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination.

For Wiseman, the “small pleasures” of the title are highly concentrated distillations of mighty exertions, from the grand and carefully catalogued tradition of French cooking to the immediate tradition of the Troisgros family restaurants (now in its fourth generation).

Having already helped launch the genre, the director Howard Hawks here reinvents his comic voice, establishing archetypes of theme and performance that still hold sway.

Haim brings a constant and instant focus even to riskily inchoate emotions, and Hoffman lends his driven energumen a lambent glow of innocence. Both inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.

The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.

For all its droll shading of the screenwriter’s art, “All of Us Strangers” is a screenwriter’s movie, in which the power of intention over observation, of the blueprint over the finished product, is asserted with a vengeance.

Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.

Rough, tender, funny, and harshly searching.

The director Chris McKim incisively intertwines a generous batch of audio interviews with Wojnarowicz’s friends, family, and associates; a rich set of archival footage to conjure his time and place; and vigorous effects to evoke his inner world.

The entire construction of The Souvenir: Part II, the connection between its drama and Julie’s student film, reflects an earnest and principled, if simplistic, didacticism about the pain and the privilege that allow aesthetic pleasure to be created.

Scarface is by far the most visually inventive and tonally anarchic movie that Hawks made. Among other things, it’s a tribute to the freedom that independent producers afforded directors then—and still do today.

As the poor man of refinement, the overlooked wanderer despairing of romance, the survivalist imp of defiant pride, Chaplin is the apotheosis of the world’s despised and downtrodden, and also their hope.

Her rhapsodic tribute to the teeming artistic apprenticeship that Paris soon offered her isn’t solely a vision of beauty: she also observed, and unsparingly recalls, the political and social ugliness with which she was confronted during her time there.

In Hellman’s film, Taylor and Wilson exert a negative charisma: their presence is both powerful and blank, deeply expressive in its neutrality. They offer one of the few original post-sixties reconfigurations of the movie star. Their manner is a perfect match for the story, and for the mythic, symbolic landscape in which it’s set.

Minding the Gap is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.

There’s a way of looking at this movie, a colossal tale of the sociopathy of American history, that’s a matter of listening to what’s said and what isn’t. The movie raises the idea of silence to a nearly transcendent pitch of passion.

Though “Marty Supreme” is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize—hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically—the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality.

Sturges seems to leap out from behind the screen to address the viewer directly. Few classic filmmakers with so much to say manage to find so many splendid words to say it in.

Richardson in particular vaults to the forefront of her generation’s actors with this performance, which virtually sings with emotional and intellectual acuity.... Few performances—and few films—glow as brightly with the gemlike fire of precocious genius.

The dramatic fusion of physical and administrative power captures nothing less than the bloody forging of modernity.

In Godard’s “King Lear,” a single phrase, a single word, gives rise to an astonishing outpouring of visual investigation and invention.

The trio’s breezy erotic sophistication masks an urban populism that’s as artistically fertile as it is politically risky; their domestic disasters have the feel and tone of epic clashes.

Ford depicts a working-class solidarity based on morality, tradition, and community; he conveys his nuanced and tender sociology with surprising sound effects and expressionistic tableaux that feature the sort of angles that made Welles famous (and which the younger man borrowed, in turn, from Ford’s Stagecoach).

Almodóvar pursues the politics of memory with uninhibited vigor, with a relentlessly physical immediacy that endows his tale of startling coincidences with the power of documentary.

Losey’s strongest critique of the times emerges with a unique stylistic flourish in his wide-screen, black-and-white images, featuring slow glides, skewed angles, standoffish perspectives, and hectic striations. These images seem adorned with quotation marks, as if Losey placed his own movie in the mediatized madness that he was criticizing.

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

It is a fiercely composed, historically informed, and richly textured film, as insightful regarding the particularities of the protagonist as it is on the artistic life — and on the life of its times.

Happy Hour, a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.

[Chahine]'s richly textured, good-humored, visually forceful storytelling portrays the surging, ribald vitality of Egyptian society that squirms beneath the unjust authority of dictators and dogmatists.

Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.

A masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop.

In fusing Cleo’s intricate consciousness with the teeming vitality of city life and the fine grain of daily activity, Varda displays her vast artistic inspiration and expands the power of the cinema itself.

The impasse implied in “The Novelist’s Film” gets a strenuous and sardonic dramatic workout in "Walk Up," which is both a work of art and a theory of art—or, rather, several theories, which emerge in the course of the discussions between characters who are themselves artists or former artists.

Only some on-the-nose symbols and facile political sentiments diminish her majestically playful, fiercely empathetic vision.

The film puts people and their surroundings, the moments of grand drama and the moments of contemplative solitude, in a state of spiritual equality.

With “Daughters,” Dash places Black Americans’ intimate dramas in a mighty historical arc with metaphysical dimensions; with his “Color Purple,” Bazawule acknowledges Dash’s work as a landmark in that history and a fundamental inspiration in his approach to historical drama.

With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.

The directors, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, rely on some tricky devices to tell the story of this film shoot—but those tricks, far from undercutting the emotional drama, intensify it. The result is the most accomplished and absorbing film about time spent in lockdown that I’ve seen.

Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which is done with a cell phone. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.

Its mighty ambition and mighty power are suggested by its unusual length (it runs nearly four hours) and its distinctive, original style and tone. Yet it’s rooted in a familiar kind of story, a tale of the sort that lesser filmmakers could easily dramatize in familiar ways but which Hu expanded into a vision of life.

The film locates extraordinary political and cultural tributaries, marked by archival footage, that arise from the history of Dawson City and the gold rush.

It’s a quiet, candid, sharply conceived and imaginatively realized masterwork, her first film of such bold and decisive originality; it’s Reichardt’s first great movie.

Italy’s crises of employment and housing are the subjects of its sentimental story, which is also a wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts.

There’s something in Schoenbrun’s sense of style that captures the alluring yet alienating essence of screen-centered lives: the feeling of not being where one is, the feeling that what’s happening elsewhere, on those screens, is more important, even more real, than one’s own life.

Manfred Kirchheimer’s 2006 documentary, only now being released, is an exemplary work of urban romanticism, intellectual history, and visual analysis.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.

Ford is more than a witness—he is a crucial participant in the events of the film, and its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in his grief-stricken, self-interrogating aesthetic.

The filmmakers’ probing analysis reveals the basic principles of freedom and dignity within the political essence of labor issues.

The American Sector is an exemplary work of cinema as political action, and proof (if any were needed) that the activist element of a film is inseparable from its well-conceived form.

Keene films the supernatural tale of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images fuse the forces of nature with the spirit of mystery. Björk brings an otherworldly calm to her visionary role, and occasionally sings.

Bergman blends a theatrical subjectivity—scenes of the inner life that defy physical reality and depend on special effects, whether in the film lab or on set—with a tactile visual intimacy, with his characters, the objects close at hand, and the superb coastal landscape.

The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies.

Diop films the characters and the city with a tactile intimacy and a teeming energy that are heightened by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and music; she dramatizes the personal experience of public matters—religious tradition, women’s autonomy, migration, corruption—with documentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and bold affirmation.

In The Green Knight, Lowery revises a legend, in style and in substance, in order to evoke a way of telling different stories, and of telling stories differently. He takes the risk of perpetuating a deluded gospel of evil, or of seeming to do so, in a daring effort to dramatize a world in desperate need of artistic redemption.

Though “Afternoons of Solitude” shows only the present tense of bullfighting, it looks deep into history and spotlights the tragic contradictions of modern life itself.

Peele’s perfectly tuned cast and deft camera work unleash his uproarious humor along with his political fury; with his first film, he’s already an American Buñuel

Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory.

The cultural richness of Birds of Passage is overwhelming, its sense of detail piercingly perceptive, and its sense of drama rigorously yet organically integrated with its documentary elements. Fusing the sociopolitical, the natural, and the mythopoetic realms, the movie offers a model to filmmakers anywhere regarding the dramatic power that inheres in the cultural specifics of any story.

Filming with long, ironically balanced takes, Porumboiu delivers an ingeniously intricate goofball comedy that evokes heroes of legend while bringing sociological abstractions to mucky life.

The intricate story moves through New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico, and picturesque points in between, but Tourneur cooks up shot-by-shot surprises that outdo those of the screenplay.