Stephanie Zacharek

Not just one of the great films of the '60s but one of the great films, period -- and the chance to discover it at the beginning of the 21st century, in an era when we think we've seen it all, is an unquantifiable privilege.

A coming-of-age movie, and a love story, that leaves you feeling both stripped bare and restored, slightly better prepared to step out and face the world of people around you, with all the confounding challenges they present. There’s not much more you can ask from a movie.

This is a true fairy tale, and one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made, but please do not take your young children to see it unless you want them to be scarred for life.

Welles’s presence, so radiant, so enthralling, so unapologetically egotistical, is all the more wondrous when you consider that Harry Lime was nearly played by someone else.

Parasite won the top prize at Cannes, and it’s South Korea’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. There are good reasons why it’s poised to resonate worldwide. It tells a story you could probably follow without subtitles, or any dialogue at all: the faces of these actors show with piercing clarity how it feels to be outsiders in a world of wealth and privilege.

This glorious, tender picture, a memoir written in film language, is only indirectly about the man who made it. He stands off to the side, in the shadows, beckoning us toward something. Roma is filmmaking as gesture, an invitation to generosity that we perhaps didn’t know we could feel.

12 Years a Slave works so hard to be noble, but it doesn't have to: Ejiofor is there to do all the heavy lifting.

Casey Affleck is both the soul and the anchor of the movie.

It's 85 minutes of screen time that represents one crystallized moment not in the Beatles' career per se but in the parallel career they forged inside all of us, the one that will last beyond any breakup, retirement or death.

Bird is one of the great modern animators -- as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period -- precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us.

Gravity is harrowing and comforting, intimate and glorious, the kind of movie that makes you feel more connected to the world rather than less.

This is a comedy with grim underpinnings, set in a society where violence seems to be the only answer. Anderson doesn’t find that exhilarating—if anything, he’s despairing about it—yet he soldiers on, pinpointing some truths so somber and dismal that it hurts to laugh about them.

Fincher and his screenwriter, TV writer-god Aaron Sorkin, have made a seemingly modest picture that achieves something close to greatness the old-fashioned, slow-burning way: By telling a story with faces, dialogue and body language of all types, from awkward to swaggering.

This radiantly sensual film ends on the perfect note, a rush of emotional intensity that’s wrapped in a secret, as hushed as the rustle of silk.

Peck captures all that’s galvanizing and forceful about Baldwin’s words and demeanor.

What’s wonderful about Wells’ instincts, and her sense of craftsmanship, is that she never spells anything out for us. Yet we walk away feeling that we know these people, even if we aren’t clear on all the specifics of their lives.

The drawback is that even though The Hurt Locker is extremely effective in places, it ultimately feels unformed and somewhat unfinished.

Zero Dark Thirty is precise, definitive filmmaking, yet Bigelow refuses to hand over easy answers. Some people call that evasion. I call it the ultimate despair.

One problem with social-issues documentaries is that you almost always know where they stand, and where they’re headed, from the start. But Collective is as tense and as taut as a great fictional drama.

A Separation doesn't try to make easy sense of that world, or of this family's suffering. It's simply a quiet cry of anguish.

The picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product.

Carol is a film you want to reach out and touch, if only you could reach anywhere near the top of the pedestal it's perched on. It is itself an unattainable love object, the goddess Venus disguised as a movie.

Before Midnight—visually stunning, in a late-summer way—is more vital and cutting than another recent marriage picture, Michael Haneke's old-folks-together death march Amour; it has none of Amour's tasteful restraint, and in the end, it says more about the nature of long-term love.

Dunkirk is extraordinary not just because it’s ambitious and beautifully executed, but because Nolan, who both wrote and directed it, has put so much care into its emotional details—and has asked so much of, and trusted, his actors.

The devastating truth of 45 Years, so beautifully wrought, is that even the most devoted couples are made up of two people who are essentially alone.

Leigh, Spall, and cinematographer Dick Pope — who borrows lots of lighting tricks from Vermeer and Ingres and even Turner himself, to glorious effect — have gently atomized Turner's character, breaking it into small, potent fragments that affect us in ways we don't see coming.

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

There's so much dreamy beauty in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that it's almost like a narcotic.