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.

By the end of Wonderland, I might have felt completely pistol-whipped if not for the gracefulness of some of the movie's actors.

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.

The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world.

It's a tricky feat, channeling the glamour of a famous international terrorist without glamorizing him. But damned if French filmmaker Olivier Assayas doesn't pull it off with Carlos.

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

La La Land is both a love letter to a confounding and magical city and an ode to the idea of the might-have-been romance, in all its piercing sweetness. It’s a movie with the potential to make lovers of us all. All we have to do is fall into its arms.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s semiautobiographical Lady Bird is both generous and joyous, but when it stings, it stings deep.

A work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody.

Speaks to the teenager in all of us.

To say Toni Erdmann is funny doesn’t even begin to capture the out-there texture of the jokes, and of the actors’ timing.

Sandler has perfected the art of talk-smiling through his teeth, barely moving his lips, and it’s perfect for Howard: He’s a guy who’s always hustling, because to stop would be a kind of death. He shows what he’s feeling by trying to hide what he’s feeling. He’s extreme, but he’s also for real. And his is the shtick you keep buying even when the movie around him tempts you with cheaper, shinier stuff.

Although the Coens are consummate craftsmen, they don't always show the lightness of touch or the depth of feeling they do here.

A cupcake of a movie, a sweet and lightweight little thing that's all but served up in a ruffled paper cup.

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically.

There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

In No Bears, the 62-year-old Panahi shows nothing more than the normal effects of aging: his hair is grayer than before, the lines in his face perhaps slightly more pronounced. But this is hardly a broken man. He knows one thing for sure: defiance is the ultimate act of survival.

Spotlight feels both timeless and modern, a dexterously crafted film that could have been made anytime but somehow feels perfect for right now.

Both gentle and staggering, an examination of the way our personal experiences can spur creativity—or render it inconsequential.

Memoria is moody and perplexing, even in the context of Weerasethakul’s others, and if you’re a neophyte, it may not be the best one to start with. But even so, its circuitous, misty trails of logic leave you feeling as if you’ve been entrusted with some kind of nebulous treasure; it’s easy to become pleasurably lost in speculation about what it all means.

The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.

The Class is a lovely, exhilarating work about the ways in which failure and frustration can open the pathways through which we make sense out of life.

No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.

Kids have no idea they’re feeling wonder — just feeling it is the thing. That’s the lightning in a bottle captured by director Sean Baker in The Florida Project.

I see it as nearly perfect: It's one of the best fantasy pictures ever made.

The Zone of Interest is possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way.

This is a dense, multilayered picture, one firmly rooted in a specific landscape, a dramatic coastal spot dotted with the carcasses of decrepit fishing boats, as well as the magnificent skeleton of one long-dead whale.

A sequel made with care and integrity, Toy Story 3 is just moving enough: It winds its way gently toward its big themes instead of grabbing desperately at them, and because its plot is so beautifully worked out, getting there is almost all of the fun.

Hogg has made a gorgeous, haunting movie drawn from a very real place and time.

The group's members come off more like real musicians than parodists.

If it's a far less flashy film than The Act of Killing, it's also a better and possibly more honest one.

The movie is tender like a rainstorm: only in the aftermath, after you’ve allowed time for its ideas to settle, does its full picture become clear. It’s the kind of movie that makes everything feel washed clean, a gentle nudge of encouragement suggesting that no matter how tired you feel, you can move on in the world.

The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of Lost in Translation, is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.

Röhrig isn’t an experienced actor. In fact, he’s a poet and a former kindergarten teacher, living in the Bronx. But that could be what makes the performance so magnetic.

Instead of just being desperately heartfelt, Her keeps reminding us — through cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema's somber-droll camera work, through Phoenix's artfully slumped shoulders — how desperately heartfelt it is.

With her film adaptation, Gerwig re-embroiders and reinforces that unspoken reassurance. Like Alcott, she leads by example: She has made a film that’s complex and thoughtful but that is also, at every moment, pure pleasure to watch.

Chomet bows to the tradition of conventional animation even as he tests its limits.

No matter how much money has been poured into a movie, it’s emotional generosity that matters, and Johnson gives without squandering. His great gift is that he knows when to stop.

Tótem offers a promise of light beyond the sorrow, a concept that’s hard for children to comprehend. But then, adults need to be reminded of it too.

This wondrous, absorbing little picture covers a great deal of winding meta-territory, reflecting on the ways in which a single family's story can be told—or maybe, more accurately, examining the idea that there's no such thing as a "single story."

Nickel Boys is a picture on the move, a work that’s traveling forward, the thing we always ask for yet often don’t know how to accept when it arrives.

There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like Tangerine and The Florida Project, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with Anora, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It's his best movie yet.

The Favourite is a wicked delight, a fantastic little cupcake of a movie laced with thistle frosting.

The movie has a crispness about it, an unwillingness to succumb to sentimentality.

The Brutalist is a kind of crazy space church, designed specifically for the communal moviegoing experience. It's a place to gather and give thanks.

Although there isn't a single kiss in this love story, it's intensely erotic -- and more to the point, it's not afraid of eroticsm's juicier and more forthright twin, carnality.

Alice Rohrwacher's enigmatic and bracing La Chimera, its touch as glancing as a zephyr, asks more of us while demanding less. It’s the kind of movie you wake up from, as opposed to one you merely watch.

The Worst Person in the World is a comedy, not a drama. But it’s ruthless in the way the best comedies can be.

Licorice Pizza feels pleased with how casual and effortless it is, which is the exact opposite of being casual and effortless.

A picture that’s both tranquil and dazzling, two qualities that should be at odds with one another yet somehow bloom in tandem under Reichardt’s gentle touch.

Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is one of those movies -- like last year's inner-city down-a-thon, "Precious" -- that can't quite make a distinction between profundity and plain old bleakness.

Mirren's performance is glorious: Rather than impersonate the queen -- which would have been all too easy to do -- she reaches deeper to locate the buried, calcified thoughts and feelings that might guide this deeply inscrutable woman.

Kechiche and his actresses explore the in-between—ecstasy, exploration, the comfort and eventual boredom of domesticity—and the aftermath, the painful shards of feeling we cling to after something has shattered. And they don't mess around when it comes to the ferocity of love, sex, or, God help us, the two combined.

A narrative picture with many of the qualities of a documentary, not to mention a comic book -- is one of those rare, inventively made movies that isn't so taken with its own novelty it loses sight of its characters. Its warmth is for real, and it enwraps you.

There’s no doubt Phantom Thread will be forever lauded as a great fashion movie, but I don’t think it’s even a good one. Its view of how fashion is made feels desiccated and airless, as if beautiful clothes can come into being only under a dome of oppression and anxiety.

Isn't much more than marvelous entertainment -- but then, that's a lot right there.

Though beautifully made and acted, The Souvenir had the sad, chilly pallor of a centuries-old miniature portrait, a bit of the past you could hold in your hand and yet never fully grasp. The Souvenir Part II puts the earlier film in a bigger, more detailed frame, rushing in with swirls of context, color and perspective.

A small but extremely significant message in a bottle. That metaphor is almost literal: The picture made its way to Cannes via a USB drive -- which was smuggled in a cake.

It's all beautiful, all right. But before long I began to feel beaten against the rocks of that beauty -- Finding Nemo smacks of looky-what-I-can-do virtuosity, and after the first 10 minutes or so, it's exhausting.

Mangrove, too, tells a sometimes harrowing real-life story. Yet it has a lightness of touch that McQueen hasn’t shown before. Mangrove, as is all of Small Axe, is personal for McQueen — he is of West Indian descent himself — and his affection for these characters, as well as his passion for their cause, ignites his telling of their story.

The Incredibles has that rare quality of feeling modern and classic at the same time.

It’s a work that blends compassion with artistry so purely that there’s no way to separate them. This is bold filmmaking that makes us feel more courageous too.

Like rock 'n' roll itself, the movie's really all about girls. Even when -- no, especially when -- it's pretending not to be.

Nolan shapes Oppenheimer’s story into something like an epic poem, focusing not just on his most famous achievement, but on everything that happened to him afterward; Nolan is maybe even more interested in Oppenheimer as a complicated, questioning patriot.

It deftly walks the line between appropriately somber and great, sophisticated fun.

Although there's plenty of music, and plenty of joy, in Once, it's ultimately a quiet, wistful picture.

This is a sort-of comedy about personal trauma, a delicate line to walk—and Victor mostly pulls it off.

It’s about love and poetry and dreams, and about the chance encounter that can close a wound with the magic efficiency of a tiny butterfly bandage. How you pour all of that into one movie is something of a mystery. But then, a good poem is always something of a mystery too.

It's an expertly made picture that I wish I could stamp out of my mind. What's the value of artistry that sucks the life out of you?

There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what a curtain!

Represents a failure of nerve: As if Gondry and Kaufman weren't sure that the story of Joel and Clementine would hold us, the doomed couple's unfolding-in-reverse romance is intercut with a subplot filled with zany touches.

This is a graceful and enveloping feat of filmmaking.