Shawn Levy

It's a celebration of American female screen acting, it's a study of early feminism that feels relevant today, it's a carefully mounted exercise in period filmmaking and it's a beloved novel come to life for the fourth time. [23 Dec 1994]

A near-perfect movie.

The timing and cutting of the film are terrific, the build-up to an absurdly hilarious climax is just right, and the performances are near perfect.

It is affecting, accomplished, witty, poignant and memorable.... Unstrung Heroes is one of the year's best films. [22 Sep 1995]

A stunning film.

Almost more valuable as a piece of foreign policy than as the highly accomplished work of cinema it is.

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

A spell-binding, engaging and often breathtaking work in which exquisite sets, costumes, photography and music combine with top-notch acting and out-of-this-world fighting scenes.

After Life is a thoroughly original, wholly realized work that leaves a profound and nagging bug in your brain for days after you've seen it: What in your life is worth holding on to? What one thing would you wish never to forget? It's a question as relevant to the lives we live each day as it is to our final moments. [24 Sept 1999, p.26]

This edition -- clean and tight as Scott would have it -- presents a strong case for Alien as both the greatest horror film and the greatest science-fiction film ever made.

In many respects, it's Kurosawa's most sumptuous film, a feast of color, motion and sound: Considering that its brethren include "Kagemusha," "The Seven Samurai" and "Dersu Uzala," the achievement is extraordinary. [01 Dec 2000, p.26]

The animation is even more mind-blowing, if that's possible. The characters and objects seem even more palpable and real than last time. There's a thickness to bodies of the human characters and an amazing attention to detail throughout.

Films don't get more essential than this.

It's so full-blooded, smart, sexy, tense and absorbing, so cleverly written and shot and cut, so filled with superb acting and music, so perfect in its closing moment, that it surely ranks with the most impressive debuts in world cinema.

About as good a movie as you could have hoped for. Really good. Hole-in-one good.

Demanding, harrowing and very, very real. You won't shake its impact easily.

Not a masterpiece, but still fabulous.

We've seen documentaries with more daring themes, greater drama, sharper craft and timelier subject matter. But few have been as affecting as The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

It's a fine, absorbing work, built with brilliance and without excessive showiness or flash. It feels, in fact, like a classic virtually upon its arrival.

An exhilarating slap in the face, bracing and sexy, smart and visceral, stylish and raw -- the advent of a fabulously exciting new moviemaking talent.

Not only does this film make you think, it makes you want to think. Few films -- few works of art of any stripe -- can claim that.

The result is a film that outrages and fills the viewer with poetry that's at once epic and intimate, scandalizing and life-affirming -- a real work of art.

It's hard to recall the last time a big-ticket summer movie delivered so fully on its promise.

Heart of Gold feels like an ample slice of the real America, the one truly worth caring for. And it's such a rare thing in this benighted age that the simple clarity with which it's presented feels like nothing less than a miracle.

I am here to tell you that Greengrass has fashioned one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, and that watching it makes you value your loved ones and your privileges more, perhaps, than you ever have. He has made a film that makes you feel, makes you think and makes you want to connect. And that, finally, might be the greatest thing that art can do.

It's quite possible that Titanic is one of the greatest romantic epics ever filmed.

The film reveals itself to be not so much a historical allegory as an Iliad of the heart. It's sad and smart and beautiful and true.

Brimming with bittersweet wit and emotion and built with deceptively fluent craft.

One of the most joyous, diverting and original mainstream American movies in years.

One of the best films ever made in this country, filled with our proudest national virtues, cognizant of our deeply rooted human weaknesses and frighteningly able to evoke emotions.

Bad Education, in this light, is Almodovar's "8-1/2" or "Day for Night," a lens through which all of his movies appear as a seamless whole. It's not the story of his actual life but, more excitingly, the deft, witty, bittersweet story of the life of his art.

It is a pure, streamlined delight, the advent of a talent with no exact equal in modern film.

As a fable, The City of Lost Children may not have a resonantly significant moral, but as a film, it is without a doubt the most incredible thing that the cinema has brought us this year. [22 Dec 1995]

From the acting to the special effects to the landscapes to the cinematography, editing and music, to the details of decor, wardrobe and armaments, we never once feel that we are in anything but the hands of an absolute master of the medium.

It is, in its quiet, precise, classical way, nearly perfect.

The film, built around McKellen's magnificent performance, is a sleek and deceptively artful work, a bio-pic that manages to encompass the whole of a man's rich life by concentrating solely on the final months of it.

It's a teeming, steaming, bubbling stew, a tremendous good time, a rich entertainment and a heck of a lesson in music, human etiquette and the politics of making it (or not) in show biz.

Directed, written by and starring Allen Baron, it's a totally absorbing picture: dark, curt, rancid and lean in the best noir style. [28 Apr 1998, p.C01]

It has the feel of something slaved over lovingly in merry isolation, and it is virtually the only thing I've seen this year that conveys in the viewing the obvious enjoyment its makers had in whipping it up.

In absorbing drama and staggering emotions, it renders an issue too often seen as black or white in heartbreaking gray.

Shot to shot, scene to scene, The Social Network nearly never puts a foot wrong or, really, does anything to make you feel less than compelled.

There's so much to say, but let this suffice: See it; it's a sweet taste of the best of what cinema can do. [16 Mar 2007, p.28]

One of the greatest films about the civilian experience of war ever made anywhere.

A gorgeous, engrossing, utterly alien and fresh movie that has the human truth and impact of classic Greek myth and the overwhelming beauty and mastery of the greatest epic films.

This is Mel Brooks' finest hour. [28 Jan 2005, p.11]

Audacious, gorgeous and unique.

Teems with pot smoke, body parts and profane outbursts -- you ride a giggly wave throughout, jokes and turn-ons and shocking sights alternating in buoyant fashion.

In exchange for a small piece of your life, you receive an infinity.

It's a bento box of shifts, feints, hints and small, sharp insights, built around a surprisingly deep core of feeling. And it confirms Coppola as an artist to watch and relish.

Made with brisk energy, shot with Powell's limitless ingenuity, written with fairy-tale echoes and steeped in a love for northern Scottish folkways, it's apt to become a favorite film the first time you see it. [02 Mar 2001]

A truly powerful, masterful work.

This is a deeply felt work of art in the form of a big, brassy movie-movie.

One of the great marvels of the medium, a film that you cannot miss if you hope to be literate in cinema -- or, indeed, if you seek acquaintance with the great works of modern times.

Far From Heaven would have been one of the great American films of the '50s; it is certainly the finest American melodrama of our time.

The protagonists have subsumed their identities to the collective, and they rise and fall in their hearts as the collective prospers or suffers. Their effort is absurd, but their intent is pure. Watching it evokes a combination of pity for their naive idealism and awe at Melville's uncanny brilliance.

It's a delicate and ingenious film that skewers modern life without ever baring its nails or turning sour. [17 Dec 2010]

Miyazaki is a genius, and this film is a masterpiece; go see it.

It's a purely winning film.

Movies don't get any more real than this.

Fight Club -- cue the blurb machine -- is a knockout.

This is an awesome performance in an outstanding film, a film worthy, if you can imagine, of the book at its heart.

But the human elements -- jealousy, anger, weakness, fortitude, loyalty, vengeance and honor, all acted out by a resolutely realistic cast -- make the movie extraordinary.

The film is one of the great portraits of the artist as impossibly gifted young snot. [31 Dec 1999]

Flynn is sexy, valiant, athletic and true: a movie star in every sense of the term. [13 Sep 1996, p.30]

It's a triumph of the film that it manages to make Jeffrey Dahmer a human being -- at least a member of the species -- without ever bending toward empathy with or excuses for him.

If Leo's situation seems like a typical opening gambit by the director of "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!", little else in this tight, quiet, razor-sharp film will feel familiar. [12 Apr 1996]

A masterfully varied set of images, paces and moods.

A masterful treasure trove of hilarious gags and inventive moments. It's so good that a single viewing it might awaken you to the charm of snails, frogs legs and -- heaven help us -- Jerry Lewis. [14 Jul 1995, p.E01]

There aren't many works of art out there that so rupture your sense of the familiar. It may play slowly, but it blazes its way into your head. [14 Jul 2000]

There are levels of complexity and nuance and intellectual rigor in The Hours -- it's clearly a film into which you could gain continued insight after several viewings.

It's so spry and lively and warm that you want to dance to it.

The result is a rare and precious work. The Motorcycle Diaries is an epic road movie with everything you'd want from such a film: laughs, kicks, adventures, pathos, poetry, natural beauty, strange encounters and friendship tested and strengthened.

Del Toro presents one dazzling visual spectacle after another.

The acting is so persuasive as to be transparent.

It's a wonderfully crafted work, handsome, lively, stirring and utterly convincing in its depiction of the perils and thrills of sea life. But I'm not sure that my personal enthusiasm for it will translate entirely for viewers whose favorite movie about the high seas is, for perfectly good reasons, "Pirates of the Caribbean."

So good at what it does that it can exhaust you: In the later going, one big number follows on the heels of another so quickly that it feels more like an opera than a regular musical.

Malle, only 25 when the film was released, bounces confidently among several threads -- classic French policier, juvenile delinquent film, doomy tale of tragic love, clock-ticking thriller.

One of those undeniably beautiful things. The film is, in fact, an encyclopedia of beauty -- the beauty of desire, the beauty of nostalgia, the beauty of music and clothing and smoke and pain, and, chiefly, the beauty of women.

It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.

One of the most alluring and bizarre shapes that Godard's itchy search for truth and meaning took in those heady long-ago days. In comparison, most Hollywood movies are like tiddlywinks.

Beautiful, poetic, mournful, at once rich and spare, Brokeback Mountain takes a daring conceit and creates of it an overwhelming work of art that should speak to anyone capable of love.

Working toward its refreshingly light but utterly apt ending, the film teems with insights into the human condition revealed by an unusually smart script and a wonderfully committed cast. It's a truly fine work.

Watching it isn't easy, but it is definitely worth having waited for.

It's raw, visceral stuff that precious few movies are capable of equaling.

It’s a story that begins in an ancient riddle and ends, perfectly, in the rumble of an oncoming storm. It’s about life, A Serious Man is, and it’s as close, I think, as any American narrative movie of recent vintage has come to touching on the uncanniness of it.

It's a sexy thriller, tautly constructed, deeply acted and heartfelt, despite a cool and knowing tone.

A purely cinematic experience. You've got to see it, in other words, to understand.

It's a movie about having a sibling and all of the pain, joy, love and anxiety that that entails: a movie, in other words, for almost everyone.

Burstyn is astonishing, forsaking all vanity to make silly biddy Sara a fully dimensioned human being.

It's no wonder that Polanski, himself an artist who has survived a series of nightmares, should tell it so naturally and powerfully.

Brings you into a world you didn't know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it's a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.

Like "In the Bedroom," the film is studded with brilliant acting, and it's all rendered with gorgeously fluent technique. The result is a film that skirts cruelty and easy satire for deep, troubling realities -- a nearly thorough triumph, in short.

In the wake of everything we've seen on TV and in movies in recent decades, it's amazing that something as harmless as language can still stupefy us. As The Aristocrats demonstrates, there is real humor in the confrontation of taboos.

It romps along with infectious good humor but continually imparts a sense that underneath all the surreal frivolity lurks a scathing allegory of modern-day Balkan troubles.

It's a raw and honest film, and it keeps its feet firmly on the ground, even as The Ram flies through the air to deliver -- or receive -- another beating in the squared circle of life.

Emotionally brutal, ferociously acted, crafted with unflagging expertise and relentlessly locked in its vision of human darkness, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is as grim and despairing as any tragedy by Sophocles or Shakespeare.

Reigns as the most assured, provocative film so far this year.

To follow up his superb "The Host," director Joon-ho Bong has crafted a remarkable film about love, faith, determination, guilt, and honor, a full-blooded, constantly inventive movie that enthralls, entertains, horrifies and never lets go its grip.