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.