Roger Ebert

Axel Freed, as played by James Caan, is himself a totally convincing personality, and original. He doesn’t derive from other gambling movies or even from other roles he’s played.

To see strong acting like this is exhilarating. In a time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in a dizzy editing rhythm, it is important to remember that films can look and listen and attentively sympathize with their characters. Directors grow great by subtracting, not adding, and Eastwood does nothing for show, everything for effect.

Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny.

One of the greatest of all fantasy films.

Francois Girard’s “Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould” brilliantly breaks with tradition and gives us a movie that actually inspires us to think about what it was like to be this man.

This is clearly one of the best of the year's films. Every time an animated film is successful, you have to read all over again about how animation isn't "just for children" but "for the whole family," and "even for adults going on their own." No kidding!

The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.

The brilliance of the film comes more from Polanski's direction, and from a series of genuinely inspired performances, than from the original story.

Here is the most passionate and tender love story in many years, so touching because it is not about a story, not about stars, not about a plot, not about sex, not about nudity, but about LOVE itself.

The movie is carefully modulated to draw us deeper and deeper into the situation, and uses no contrived plot devices to superimpose plot jolts on what is, after all, a story involving four civilized people who are only trying, each in a different way, to find happiness.

Once again, [Cameron] has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely.

In the world of this film, conventional piety is overturned and we see into the soul of a human monster.

There is a word to describe Ponyo, and that word is magical. This poetic, visually breathtaking work by the greatest of all animators has such deep charm that adults and children will both be touched.

The word genius is easily used and has been cheapened, but when it is used to describe Walt Disney, reflect that he conceived of this film, in all of its length, revolutionary style and invention, when there was no other like it--and that to one degree or another, every animated feature made since owes it something.

Kore-eda, with this film and the 1997 masterpiece "Maborosi," has earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema. His films embrace the mystery of life, and encourage us to think about why we are here, and what makes us truly happy.

It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it.

Brokeback Mountain has been described as "a gay cowboy movie," which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal.

One reason for the fascination of Woody Allen's Match Point is that each and every character is rotten.

The best approach is to begin with the characters, because the wonderful, sad, touching The Edge of Heaven is more about its characters than about its story

This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn't commit.

One of the funniest, most intelligent, most original films.

Wherever you live, when this film opens, it will be the best film in town.

Medium Cool is finally so important, and absorbing because of the way Wexler weaves all these elements together. He has made an almost perfect example of the new movie. Because we are so aware this is a movie, It seems more relevant and real than the smooth fictional surface of, say, Midnight Cowboy.

The acting and the best dialogue passages have an impact that has not dimmed; it is still possible to feel the power of the film and of Brando and Kazan, who changed American movie acting forever.

It's gloriously absurd. This movie has holes in it big enough to drive the whole movie through. The laws of physics seem to be suspended here the same way as in a Road Runner cartoon.

More than ever it is clear that Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is one of the great films of all time. It shames modern Hollywood's timidity. To watch it is to feel yourself lifted up to the heights where the cinema can take you, but so rarely does.

Rarely do movies affect us so deeply. The first time I saw Cries and Whispers, I found myself shrinking down in my seat, somehow trying to escape from the implications of Bergman’s story. The Exorcist also has that effect--but we’re not escaping from Friedkin’s implications, we’re shrinking back from the direct emotional experience he’s attacking us with. This movie doesn’t rest on the screen; it’s a frontal assault.

Painful family issues are more likely to stay beneath the surface, known to everyone but not spoken of. Still Walking, a magnificent new film from Japan, is very wise about that, and very true.

The movie heroes who affect me most are not extroverted. They don't strut, speechify and lead armies. They have no superpowers. They are ordinary people who are faced with a need and rise to the occasion. Ree Dolly is such a hero.

Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's Short Cuts captures that uneasiness perfectly.

Trucker sets out on a difficult and tricky path, and doesn't put a foot wrong.

The directness of The Seventh Seal is its strength: This is an uncompromising film, regarding good and evil with the same simplicity and faith as its hero.

The genius of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is that it understands the peculiar nature of the moral crisis for Americans in this age group, and understands that the way to consider it is in a comedy.

This is a powerful film and a stark visual accomplishment, but no thanks to Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). The driving character is her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who does all the heavy lifting.

Doubt has exact and merciless writing, powerful performances and timeless relevance. It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film.

A masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.

To modern audiences, raised on films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like The Passion of Joan of Arc is an unsettling experience--so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire.

Movies about high school misfits are common; this is an uncommon one. Terri, so convincingly played by Jacob Wysocki, is smart, gentle and instinctively wise.

The great performances in the movie are, of course, at its center. Gary Oldman plays Orton and Alfred Molina plays Halliwell, and these are two of the best performances of the year.

A film like "Hoop Dreams" is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.

This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time.

The movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like "Dr. Strangelove," it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder.

Donald Sutherland is perfectly cast and quietly effective as a man who will not be turned aside, who does not wish misfortune upon himself or his family, but cannot ignore what has happened to the family of his friend.

Have I mentioned A Serious Man is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny too.

What makes Atlantic City sweet -- and that's the word for it -- is the gentleness with which Lou handles his last chance at amounting to something, and the wisdom with which Sally handles Lou.

Against the overarching facts of his personal magnetism and the blind loyalty of his lieutenants, the movie observes the workings of the world within the bunker. All power flowed from Hitler. He was evil, mad, ill, but long after Hitler's war was lost he continued to wage it in fantasy.

It is Inherit the Wind among all of Kramer's films that seems most relevant and still generates controversy.

Breathless remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years.

Here is a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town and its encounter with a giant oil company.

Ron Howard's Parenthood is a delicate balancing act between comedy and truth, a movie that contains a lot of laughter and yet is more concerned with character than punch lines.

One of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made.

With access to remarkable archival footage, old TV shows, home movies and the family photo album, Brown weaves together the story of the Seegers with testimony by admirers who represent his influence and legacy.

The movie is astonishingly beautiful. The cinematography is by Bergman's longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist.

This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness audacity so liberating that not even "There's Something About Mary" rivals it.

It is as assured and flawless a telling of sadness and joy as I have ever seen.

A truly original American movie, a film like no other, a period of time spent in the company of the kinds of characters Saroyan and O'Neill would have understood, the kinds of people we try not to see, and yet might enjoy more than some of our more visible friends.

It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy.

Soderbergh's story, from a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, cuts between these characters so smoothly that even a fairly complex scenario remains clear and charged with tension.

Do we need a fourth film? Yes, I think we do. If you only see one of them, this is the one to choose, because it has the benefit of hindsight.

Here is a good and joyous man who leads a life that is perfect for him, and how many people do we meet like that? This movie made me happy every moment I was watching it.

Some of the best moments in Downhill Racer are moments during which nothing special seems to be happening. They're moments devoted to capturing the angle of a glance, the curve of a smile, an embarrassed silence. Together they form a portrait of a man that is so complete, and so tragic, that "Downhill Racer" becomes the best movie ever made about sports -- without really being about sports at all.

Very nice. I like Borat very much. I think it is, as everybody has been saying, the funniest movie in years.

Anyone who could read Munro’s original story and think they could make a film of it, and then make a great film, deserves a certain awe.

After seeing Awakenings, I read it, to know more about what happened in that Bronx hospital. What both the movie and the book convey is the immense courage of the patients and the profound experience of their doctors, as in a small way they reexperienced what it means to be born, to open your eyes and discover to your astonishment that "you" are alive.

An extraordinary thriller... The film centers on two remarkable performances, by Gwyneth Paltrow and Hope Davis.

Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details.

All of these moments unfold in a film of astonishing maturity and confidence; Eve's Bayou, one of the very best films of the year, is the debut of its writer and director, Kasi Lemmons.

No actor is more aware of his own instruments, and Eastwood demonstrates that in Pale Rider, a film he dominates so completely that only later do we realize how little we really saw of him.

Lohman in particular is effective; I learn to my astonishment that she's 24, but here she plays a 15-year-old with all the tentative love and sudden vulnerability that the role requires, when your dad is a whacko confidence man.

Certainly it is Lugosi's performance, and the cinematography of Karl Freund, that make Tod Browning's film such an influential Hollywood picture.

To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply.

As sheer moviemaking, it is skilled and knowing, and deserves the highest praaise you can give a horror film: It works.

The movie's last 30 minutes are like a kick in the gut.

The Sacrifice is not the sort of movie most people will choose to see, but those with the imagination to risk it may find it rewarding.

Romance & Cigarettes is the real thing, a film that breaks out of Hollywood jail with audacious originality, startling sexuality, heartfelt emotions, and an anarchic liberty. The actors toss their heads and run their mouths like prisoners let loose to race free.

Charlie Chaplin was a perfectionist in his films and a calamity in his private life. These two traits clashed as he was making The Circus, one of his funniest films and certainly the most troubled.

The film is astonishing in the amount of material it contains. It isn't thin or superficial; there is an abundance of observation and invention here.

A sports documentary as gripping, in a different way, as "Hoop Dreams."

Talk Radio is based on a play Bogosian wrote and starred in, and it was the right decision to star him in the movie, too, instead of some famous film actor. He feels this material from the inside out, and makes the character convincing. That’s especially true during a virtuoso, unsettling closing monologue, in which we think the camera is circling Bogosian - until we realize the camera and the actor are still, and the backgrounds are circling.

The kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy.

Transcends its origins and becomes one of a kind. It's glorious, unashamed escapism and surprisingly touching at the same time.

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

A great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

This movie is spellbinding storytelling. It begins with such a simple premise and creates such a genuinely intriguing situation that we're not just entertained, we're drawn into the argument.

A darker, deeper fantasy epic than the "Rings" trilogy, "The Chronicles of Narnia" or the "Potter" films. It springs from the same British world of quasi-philosophical magic, but creates more complex villains and poses more intriguing questions. As a visual experience, it is superb. As an escapist fantasy, it is challenging.

One of the most visually inventive films I have ever seen.

Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have analyzed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery.

A Woman Under the Influence gives us a woman whose influences only gradually reveal themselves. And as they do, they give us insights not only into one specific, brilliantly created, woman but into some of the problems of surviving in a society where very few people are fully liberated.

The Karate Kid was one of the nice surprises of 1984 -- an exciting, sweet-tempered, heart-warming story with one of the most interesting friendships in a long time.

I was carried along by the wit, the energy and a surprising sweetness.

This is, first of all, an electrifying and poignant love story....And it is also one hell of a thriller.

Does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world.

Like "City of God," it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year's best films.

This is a good movie, from a masterful novel.

The movie is, above all, entertainment: well-acted, well-crafted, scary as hell.

This great film by Anthony Fabian tells this story through the eyes of a happy girl who grows into an outsider.

The movie would be worth seeing simply for the sound of the music and the sight of Jamie Foxx performing it. That it looks deeper and gives us a sense of the man himself is what makes it special.

To see The Thin Man is to watch him (Powell) embodying a personal style that could have been honored, but could never be imitated.

Dying is not this cheerful, but we need to think it is. The Barbarian Invasions is a movie about a man who dies about as pleasantly as it's possible to imagine; the audience sheds happy tears.

What's fascinating is the way Mario, working from his father's autobiography and his own memories, has somehow used his first-hand experience without being cornered by it.

West Side Story remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno's fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there's no telling what might have resulted.

This is Rourke doing astonishing physical acting.

The Leopard was written by the only man who could have written it, directed by the only man who could have directed it, and stars the only man who could have played its title character.

Shane wears a white hat and Palance wears a black hat, but the buried psychology of this movie is a mottled, uneasy, fascinating gray.

The movie has never really been about gold but about character, and Bogart fearlessly makes Fred C. Dobbs into a pathetic, frightened, selfish man -- so sick we would be tempted to pity him, if he were not so undeserving of pity.

Andrea Yates believed she was possessed by Satan and could save her children by drowning them. Frailty is as chilling.

What's best about the movie is that it considers interesting adults--young and old--in an intelligent manner. After it's over we almost feel relief; there are so many movies about clods reacting moronically to romantic and/or violent situations. But we hardly ever get movies about people who seem engaging enough to spend half an hour talking with (what would you say to Charles Bronson?). Here's one that works.

McQueen is great in Bullitt, and the movie is great, because director Peter Yates understands the McQueen image and works within it. He winds up with about the best action movie of recent years.

This is one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition.

You may have heard that Lorenzo's Oil is a harrowing movie experience. It is, but in the best way. It takes a heartbreaking story and pushes it to the limit, showing us the lengths of courage and imagination that people can summon when they must.

A superb crime melodrama.

Runaway Train is a reminder that the great adventures are great because they happen to people we care about.

What we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy.

[Kurosawa] was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford's gallery of supporting actors.

Instead of plot it has a cascade of incidents, instead of central characters it has a cast of hundreds, instead of being a comedy it is a wondrous act of observation. It occupies no genre and does not create a new one. It is a filmmaker showing us how his mind processes the world around him.

There is one cool, understated scene after another.

One of the best qualities of Map of the Human Heart was that I never quite knew where it was going. It is a love story, a war story, a lifetime story, but it manages to traverse all of that familiar terrain without doing the anticipated.

The greatest of all the Dickens films, and which does what few movies based on great books can do: Creates pictures on the screen that do not clash with the images already existing in our minds.

Ron Howard's film of this mission is directed with a single-mindedness and attention to detail that makes it riveting.

Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.

This is a dark, dark, dark film, focused on an obsession so complete and lonely it shuts out all other human experience. You may not savor it, but you will not stop watching it, in horror and fascination.

There are great performances in the central roles. Phoenix essentially carries the story; it's about him. Lahti and Hill have that shattering scene together. And Lahti and Hirsch, huddled together in bed, fearfully realizing that they may have come to a crossroads, are touching; we see how they've depended on each other. This is one of the best films of the year.

The movie is made with boundless energy. Fellini stood here at the dividing point between the neorealism of his earlier films (like "La Strada") and the carnival visuals of his extravagant later ones ("Juliet of the Spirits," "Amarcord'').

The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles.

If you are squeamish, here is the film to make you squeam.

Pollock is confident, insightful work--one of the year's best films.

The movie's strength and weakness is Anne Baxter, whose Eve lacks the presence to be a plausible rival to Margo, but is convincing as the scheming fan. When Eve understudies for Margo and gets great reviews, Mankiewicz wisely never shows us her performance; better to imagine it, and focus on the girl whose look is a little too intense, whose eyes a little too focused, whose modesty is somehow suspect.

You savor every moment of Jackie Brown. Those who say it is too long have developed cinematic attention deficit disorder. I wanted these characters to live, talk, deceive and scheme for hours and hours.

One of the risks taken by The Killing Fields is to cut loose from that tradition, to tell us a story that does not have a traditional Hollywood structure, and to trust that we'll find the characters so interesting that we won't miss the cliché. It is a risk that works, and that helps make this into a really affecting experience.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a movie of good performances, and it had to be, because the performances can't rest on conventional melodrama.

The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological. It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made "The Producers."

This film is a wonder - the best work yet by one of our most original and independent filmmakers - and after it is over, and you begin to think about it, its meanings begin to flower.

This is the first film to approach the subject of "undocumented workers" solely through their eyes. This is not one of those docudramas where we half-expect a test at the end, but a film like "The Grapes of Wrath" that gets inside the hearts of its characters and lives with them.

David Gordon Green's second film, is too subtle and perceptive, and knows too much about human nature, to treat their lack of sexual synchronicity as if it supplies a plot.

This is not your average family cartoon. Shrek is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

Seen after 30 years, Dr. Strangelove seems remarkably fresh and undated - a clear-eyed, irreverant, dangerous satire. And its willingness to follow the situation to its logical conclusion - nuclear annihilation - has a purity that today's lily-livered happy-ending technicians would probably find a way around.

Here is a tense and sorrowful film where common sense struggles with blood lust.

A searing portrait of the human condition. [12 Oct 2007, p.B6]

Blake Edwards's "10" is perhaps the first comedy about terminal yearning. Like all great comedies, it deals with emotions very close to our hearts: In this case, the unutterable poignance of a man's desire for a woman he cannot have.

The film is masterful in its control of acting and visual style.

A magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.

This film is joyous, but more than that: It's lovely in its construction. The director, Prashant Bhargava, born and raised on Chicago's South Side, knows what his basic story line is, but reveals it subtly.

One of the best police movies in recent years, a virtuoso fusion of performances and often startling action.

It's rare to get a good movie about the touchy adult relationship of a sister and brother. Rarer still for the director to be more fascinated by the process than the outcome. This is one of the best movies of the year.

It "explains" nothing but feels everything. It reminds me of two other films: Bresson's "Mouchette," about a poor girl victimized by a village, and Karen Gehre's "Begging Naked," shown at Ebertfest this year, about a woman whose art is prized even as she lives in Central Park.

What makes Psycho immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers.

A movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.

An exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he's (Zemeck) is one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D.

Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in "Le Samourai," by Jean-Pierre Melville.

Samurai Rebellion can be seen as a statement against the conformity that remained central in Japanese life long after this period. It is the story of three people who learn to become individuals.

It's one of the smartest and most merciless comedies to come along in a while. It centers on an area of fairly narrow interest, but in its study of human nature, it is deep and takes no prisoners.

There are scenes as true as movies can make them, and even when the story develops thriller elements, they are redeemed, because the movie isn't about what happens, but about why.

Brother's Keeper, the year's best documentary, has an impact and immediacy that most fiction films can only envy. It tells a strong story, and some passages are truly inspirational, as the neighbors of Munnsville become determined that Delbert will not be railroaded by some ambitious prosecutor more concerned with bringing charges than with understanding the reality of the situation.

Chariots of Fire is one of the best films of recent years, a memory of a time when men still believed you could win a race if only you wanted to badly enough.

After "Monster," here is another extraordinary role from an actress [Theron] who has the beauty of a fashion model but has found resources within herself for these powerful roles about unglamorous women in the world of men.

The movie is a work of art and whimsy as much as one of science.

What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is.

Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, and here is a man who creates a complete, engrossing, lovingly crafted film. He is filled with his stories. The Secret in Their Eyes is a rebuke to formula screenplays. We grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs.

Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.

Here is a director taking audacious chances, doing wild and unpredictable things with his camera and actors, just to celebrate moviemaking.

High Hopes is an alive and challenging film, one that throws our own assumptions and evasions back at us. Leigh sees his characters and their lifestyles so vividly, so mercilessly and with such a sharp satirical edge, that the movie achieves a neat trick: We start by laughing at the others, and end by feeling uncomfortable about ourselves.

Here is a movie that knows its women, listens to them, doesn't give them a pass, allows them to be real: It's a rebuke to the shallow "Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

It is one of the great film noirs, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler's ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares.

This is Mike Leigh's funniest film since "Life Is Sweet" (1991). Of course he hasn't ever made a completely funny film, and Happy-Go-Lucky has scenes that are not funny, not at all.

This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation.

The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood.

It's one of those ageless movies, like "Casablanca" or "The Third Man," that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they've surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. It's a Wonderful Life falls in the second category.

John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King is swashbuckling adventure, pure and simple, from the hand of a master. It's unabashed and thrilling and fun.

The documentary is an uncommon meeting between Treadwell's loony idealism, and Herzog's bleak worldview.

Burden of Dreams gives us an extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams.

The movie is genuinely exciting and romantic, great to look at, and timeless.

Larry Clark's Bully calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment. His film has all the sadness and shabbiness, all the mess and cruelty and thoughtless stupidity of the real thing.

Putty Hill makes no statement. It looks. It looks with as much perception and sympathy as it is possible for a film to look. It is surprisingly effective.

Campbell's performance is carnal, verbally facile, physically uninhibited and charged with intelligence.

The wedding sequence... is a virtuoso stretch of filmmaking: Coppola brings his large cast onstage so artfully that we are drawn at once into the Godfather's world.

Rear Window lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of foreplay.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.

In America is not unsentimental about its new arrivals (the movie has a warm heart and frankly wants to move us), but it is perceptive about the countless ways in which it is hard to be poor and a stranger in a new land.

I liked these characters precisely because they were not designed to be likable -- or, more precisely, because they were likable in spite of being exasperating, unorganized, self-destructive and impervious to good advice.

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997]

The remarkable thing about Wadleigh's film is that it succeeds so completely in making us feel how it must have been to be there. [2005]

The trouble with Funny Girl is almost everything except Barbra Streisand. She is magnificent.

The movie is funny, but it's more than funny, it's exhilarating.

A powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and secret desires.

The movie is so accurately acted, especially by Jim Metzler as Mason and Matt Dillon as Tex, that we care more about the characters than about the plot. We can see them learning and growing, and when they have a heart-to-heart talk about going all the way, we hear authentic teenagers speaking, not kids who seem to have been raised at Beverly Hills cocktail parties.

Warren Beatty's production of Dick Tracy approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip.

You do not need to know a lot about jazz to appreciate what is going on because, in a certain sense, this movie teaches you everything about jazz that you really need to know.

He’s a real smoothie, Warren Beatty, and when he plays one in a movie he is almost always effective. But his title role in Bugsy is more than effective, it’s perfect for him - showing a man who not only creates a seductive vision, but falls in love with it himself.

It is a spellbinding enigma, and one of the damnedest films Morris has ever made.

The Band’s Visit has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.

No one is better at this kind of performance than Nicolas Cage. He's a fearless actor. He doesn't care if you think he goes over the top. If a film calls for it, he will crawl to the top hand over hand with bleeding fingernails.

Finian's Rainbow is the best of the recent roadshow musicals, perhaps because it's the first to cope successfully with the longer roadshow form.

This is one of those rare docs, like "Hoop Dreams," where life provides a better ending than the filmmakers could have hoped for. Also like "Hoop Dreams," it's not really a sports film; it's a film that uses sport as a way to see into lives, hopes and fears.

Scorsese tells his story with the energy and pacing he's famous for, and with a wealth of little details that feel just right.

Up in the Air takes the trust people once had in their jobs and pulls out the rug. It is a film for this time.

Jules and Jim is one of those rare films that knows how fast audiences can think, and how emotions contain their own explanations

Here is a searing film of human tragedy.

The movie is bursting with life, energy, fears, frustrations and the quick laughter of a classroom hungry for relief.

An epic poem of violence and greed.

The Interrupters is based on a much-acclaimed article in the New York Times Magazine by Alex Kotlowitz, who followed a period of intense violence in Chicago. He joined with James to co-produce the film. It is difficult to imagine the effort, day after day for a year, of following this laborious, heroic and so often fruitless volunteer work.

Kristen Dunst is pitch-perfect in the title role.

It would be easy to tear the plot to shreds and catch Kramer in the act of copping out. But why? On its own terms, this film is a joy to see, an evening of superb entertainment.

Here is a rare movie that begins by telling us how it will end and is about how the hero has no idea why.

A great American film.

This is one of the year's best films.

Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious is the most elegant expression of the master's visual style, just as Vertigo is the fullest expression of his obsessions.

Luke is the first Newman character to understand himself well enough to tell us to shove off. He's through risking his neck to make us happy. With this film, Newman completes a cycle of five films over six years, and together they have something to say about the current status of heroism. But Cool Hand Luke does draw together threads from the earlier movies, especially Hombre, and it is a tough, honest film with backbone.

A movie you cannot turn away from; it is so pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence, that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from.

In its quiet, dark, claustrophobic way, this is one of the best films of the year.

In a few characters and a gripping story, Ford dramatizes the debate about guns that still continues in many Western states. That he does this by mixing in history, humorous supporting characters and a poignant romance is typical; his films were complete and self-contained in a way that approaches perfection. Without ever seeming to hurry, he doesn't include a single gratuitous shot.

Using Syed and shooting on actual locations in Bombay, director Mira Nair has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama. “Salaam Bombay!” is one of the best films of the year.

One of a very few films that wants to do something unexpected and challenging, and succeeds even beyond its ambitions. See this film. Then shut up about it.

A great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they’re doing and why.

There is an odd moment when Harpo shows Groucho a doghouse tattooed on his stomach, and in a special effect a real dog emerges and barks at him. The brothers broke the classical structure of movie comedy and glued it back again haphazardly, and nothing was ever the same.

Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good. You will see what I mean.

Hitchcock called his most familiar subject "The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused." Jarecki pumps up the pressure here by giving us a Guilty Man Accurately Accused, and that's what makes the film so ingeniously involving.

Into the Abyss may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

If I were asked to name the single scene in all of romantic comedy that was sexiest and funniest at the same time, I would advise beginning at six seconds past the 20-minute mark in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, and watching as Barbara Stanwyck toys with Henry Fonda's hair in an unbroken shot that lasts three minutes and 51 seconds.

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets isn’t so much a gangster movie as a perceptive, sympathetic, finally tragic story about how it is to grow up in a gangster environment.

A movie out of the ordinary -- especially if you like science fiction.

Last Days is a definitive record of death by gradual drug exhaustion. After the chills and thrills of "Sid & Nancy" and "The Doors," here is a movie that sees how addicts usually die, not with a bang but a whimper. If the dead had it to do again, they might wish that, this time, they'd at least been conscious enough to realize what was happening.

It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling.

Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie.

It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding.

The story of herself (Varda), a woman whose life has consisted of moving through the world with the tools of her trade, finding what is worth treasuring.

Beauty and the Beast reaches back to an older and healthier Hollywood tradition in which the best writers, musicians and filmmakers are gathered for a project on the assumption that a family audience deserves great entertainment, too.

Here is one of the most entertaining films in many a moon, a film that charms because of its story, its performances and because of the sly way it plays with being silent and black and white.

The film is extraordinarily beautiful. Bertolucci is one of the great painters of the screen.

An amazing film. It is deep, rich, human. It is not about rich and poor, but about old and new. It is about the ancient war between tradition and feeling.

Paths of Glory was the film by which Stanley Kubrick entered the ranks of great directors, never to leave them.

For four hours we live in these two rooms and discover the secrets of these people, and at the end we have gone deeper, seen more, and will remember more, than with most of the other movies of our life.

Interiors becomes serious by intently observing complex adults as they fend and cope, blame and justify. Because it illuminates some of the ways we all act, it is serious but not depressing; when it's over, we may even find ourselves quietly cheered that Allen has seen so clearly how things can be.

This is a wonderful film. There isn't a thing that I would change.

It is about the actual lives of refugees, who lack the luxury of opinions because they are preoccupied with staying alive in a world that has no place for them.

As for myself, as Leticia rejoined Hank in the last shot of the movie, I was thinking about her as deeply and urgently as about any movie character I can remember.

I have seen Waking Life three times now. I want to see it again -- not to master it, or even to remember it better, -- but simply to experience all of these ideas, all of this passion, the very act of trying to figure things out.

No finer film has ever been made about organized crime - not even "The Godfather."

But King Kong is more than a technical achievement. It is also a curiously touching fable in which the beast is seen, not as a monster of destruction, but as a creature that in its own way wants to do the right thing.

Peggy Sue Got Married is a lot of things - a human comedy, a nostalgic memory, a love story - but there are times when it is just plain creepy, because it awakens such vivid memories in us.

You would imagine a film like this would be greeted with rapture in France, but no. The leading French film magazine, "Cahiers du Cinema," has long scorned the filmmakers of this older generation as makers of mere "quality," and interprets Tavernier's work as an attack on the New Wave generation which replaced them.

It is intriguing to wonder what Scorsese saw in the Hong Kong movie that inspired him to make the second remake of his career (after "Cape Fear"). I think he instantly recognized that this story, at a buried level, brought two sides of his art and psyche into equal focus.

Throughout Fantasia, Disney pushes the edges of the envelope.

Edwards and Moore are working at the top of their forms here, and the result is a pure, classic slapstick that makes Micki + Maude a real treasure.

The Year of Living Dangerously is a wonderfully complex film about personalities more than events, and we really share the feeling of living in that place, at that time.

The film gathers fearful force.

Cat People wasn't frightening like a slasher movie, using shocks and gore, but frightening in an eerie, mysterious way that was hard to define; the screen harbored unseen threats, and there was an undertone of sexual danger that was more ominous because it was never acted upon.

The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling.

At a time when too many movies focus every scene on a $20 million star, an Altman film is like a party with no boring guests.

Perhaps I have made the movie sound too serious... So let me just say that Down and Out in Beverly Hills made me laugh longer and louder than any film I've seen in a long time.

Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think.

Of all the Bonds, Goldfinger is the best, and can stand as a surrogate for the others. If it is not a great film, it is a great entertainment, and contains all the elements of the Bond formula that would work again and again.

Late Spring is one of the best two or three films Ozu ever made.

Light Sleeper isn't about the help he can get from psychics, however; it's about desperation that makes him project healing qualities upon anyone who is halfway sympathetic. The movie is familiar with its life of night and need. It finds the real human qualities in a person like the Susan Sarandon character - who, in a crisis, reacts with loyalty and quick thinking.

A clever, funny and very skillful thriller about how a kid builds his own atomic bomb. This isn't really a teenage movie at all, it's a thriller. And it's one of those thrillers that stays as close as possible to the everyday lives of convincing people, so that the movie's frightening aspects are convincing.

It tells its story calmly and with great attention to human detail and, watching it, I found myself drawn in with a rare intensity.

Scarface is one of those special movies, like "The Godfather," that is willing to take a flawed, evil man and allow him to be human.

Breaking Away is a wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time.

Children of Heaven is very nearly a perfect movie for children, and of course that means adults will like it, too.

This is a masterful and heartbreaking film, and it does honor to the memory of the victims.

Nothing Cruise has done will prepare you for what he does in Born on the Fourth of July. His performance is so good that the movie lives through it. Stone is able to make his statement with Cruise's face and voice and doesn't need to put everything into the dialogue.

What makes Get on the Bus extraordinary is the truth and feeling that go into its episodes. Spike Lee and his actors face one hard truth after another, in scenes of great power.

They are all so very articulate, which is refreshing in a time when literate and evocative speech has been devalued in the movies.

The Big Easy is one of the richest American films of the year. It also happens to be a great thriller.

There's not a scene here where Badham doesn't seem to know what he's doing, weaving a complex web of computerese, personalities and puzzles; the movie absorbs us on emotional and intellectual levels at the same time. And the ending, a moment of blinding and yet utterly elementary insight, is wonderful.

What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound.

Plays like an anthology of the best parts from all the Saturday matinee serials ever made.