Such gorgeous explosions, such a terrible vision, such an amazing work of art. Go. Now.

Frenzy is one of the great latter-day Hitchcocks; great technique, great suspense, and very black humor drive this tale of an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex murders.

The Thing is paranoid, bleak, uncompromising, and thankfully devoid of a traditional Hollywood happy ending. Led by Russell, the ensemble cast is outstanding, but the real star of the film is Rob Bottin's imaginative creature effects.

Even though we're aware of the tragic trajectory of the singer's life, for a while it almost seems as if reality got it wrong and Curtis might just squeak past the reaper's scythe with no more than a shave and a haircut.

Household Saints restores one's faith in miracles while teaching us how to invent them ourselves. That, and also teaching us not to worry about getting stigmata on the carpet when Jesus comes to visit.

A riot of sight and sound that, however baffling, has an irresistible, elemental pull.

One of Disney’s best and most popular live-action movies, this one is a favorite among those who grew up in the Seventies

There isn’t one false move in Tomàs Aragay and Cesc Gay’s beautifully modulated screenplay. Es perfecto.

Not only is it a film about a poet, Paterson transcends its story to become a work of poetry itself.

It's the most compelling American movie to come around in a long, long time.

Winter's Bone never hits a false note.

Harrowing and important documentary.

Repulsion's depiction of a young woman's dissolution into madness is one of the most harrowing mental descents ever depicted onscreen. (Reviewed 11/24/97)

This modern cult classic is a triumphantly dark comedy directed by one of the film world's truly original visionaries, Terry Gilliam. "Imagination" is this futuristic film’s middle name.

Tennessee Williams’ study of a crumbling Southern patriarchy is riveting stuff. Although the word homosexuality is never uttered, this Hollywood reworking brings a certain understanding of the son’s latent “immaturity” and his wife’s childlessness. Bolstered by extraordinary performances, this tale’s a summer sizzler.

A movie that amply delivers on the epic promise of its title, entertaining, enlightening, and emboldening viewers with its deceptively simple premise and execution.

I can think of no other movie that has dared to analyze grief and its aftermath with such naked honesty and precision.

One of the most intelligent crime-thrillers to come along in years.

Taylor, Burton, and Harrison are sublime in this sweeping epic of love and nations.

It’s a movie made of moments, the antithesis of "plot-driven," but the sum of these moments is magnificent, the culmination of so many elements: acting, scripting, score (by locals Michael Linnen and David Wingo), and cinematography.

It’s almost criminal to have to stay in your seat when the contact high of La La Land is goosing you to grand jeté in the aisle. The heart, at least, is at liberty to swell to bursting.

The story is one of those great mad scientist tales in which the potion invented with the best intentions for its enhancement of human life becomes instead an evil force bent on its destruction. The visual effects here are pretty great - and at first comedic - as the Invisible Man smokes and brawls and rocks in a chair. Oh, but then the horror happens.

With Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, [Tarantino] finally gets to complete his own work of cinematic archeology, and what he exhumes springs to life like the first time it was projected. Viva Kill Bill!

There is no better way to while away a Sunday afternoon than with this sprawling saga about the growth of Texas and the families that matured along with the state. If Texas had a state movie, then Giant would be it.

For my money, this Freudian tale about a beautiful kleptomaniac and liar is one of Hitchcock's best accomplishments, certainly one of his most perverse.

Minnelli and Grey sparkle, and the Fosse flash is everywhere in evidence.

In its way, Remember the Night is as full of the improbabilities of any of the more familiar Christmas movies that we ritually rewatch in this season every year. But it's also no less lacking in the affirmation it makes of the power of love, its ability to melt even the coldest of hearts, to transform our feelings for our fellow man and woman. If that's a feeling you treasure in your holiday viewing, remember the film.

Corman's legendary parsimony has rarely been so inobvious; House of Usher has the look and feel of a film made for far more than its tiny $200K budget (and on a tight, 15-day shooting schedule). Its authentically creepy dream-sequence – all grasping hands and hazy blue-gelled fog swirls –­ is a minor surrealist masterpiece by its own right.

More lethal than a nuclear waste dump, Kubrick's komedy at least kills us with laughter... It's one of the greatest - and undoubtably the most hilarious - antiwar statements ever put to film.

One of the 10 best films ever made, period.

A pure cinematic experience like Monos is a rare and precious gem. Colombian director Landes has created a surreal, sumptuous assault on the senses that’s as lushly beautiful as it is unforgettable.

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl.

One of the cinema’s very best car-chase sequences – set amid the hilly, windy San Francisco streets – caps this quintessential Steve McQueen policier.

Campion and her cast do an extraordinary job of bringing all these characters in midway through their own private traumas, and Dunst brings silent grace and sadness to a woman inherently doubting her own motivation.

The film's triumphantly perverse climax, in fact, is just that: a three-tiered split-screen of three couples shagging that resembles nothing so much as a national flag and is set to a rendition of "My Girl" sung by a black trio dressed as colonial soldiers. When it hits such giddily subversive high notes, Sammy and Rosie ... transcends provocation and bursts into ecstatic revelation.

So thick and rich you'll be tempted to eat it with a fork - but use a spoon to get every drop.

Just about as great as a movie's ever gonna be... As for the storytellng, The Godfather is an intricately constructed gem that simultaneously kicks ass.

Some movies are like Dorothy's twister; they just pick you up and whisk you away from the commonplace world you know to a world wondrous and astonishing. Days of Heaven is such a movie. [27 July 1998]

An exquisitely crafted box of nightmares, and once you realize that the lid has already closed with you inside, it will leave splinters under your skin.

Adapted by Katsuhiro Otomo from his sprawling, post-apocalyptic cyberpunk tale of government conspiracies, street gangs, and psychic powers that can save or destroy the world, it's still an all-time classic, and has never looked better.

Its simplicity belies an emotional complexity that will linger in your mind like a gentle dream.

An additional treat is seeing Hollywood good guy Henry Fonda playing one of the nastiest curs in the West. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great films in cinema history. (8/30/2000 Review)

Talk about your baby boys – Cagney takes the cake here as a psychopathic gangster with a seriously perverse mother complex. A gangster classic.

Bergman and Grant sizzle in this espionage tale written by Ben Hecht.

One of the all-time great action movies, The Great Escape also features an all-star international cast. The first half of the movie sets up all the various characters who have to drop their prickly differences and unite to outwit their German captors. Steve McQueen as the Cooler King is a genuine classic.

In this enduringly transcendent love story, Truffaut traces the relationships between three lovers and friends over the years. Moreau dominates every fragment of the movie with her magisterial eroticism. The film works in ways that touch the heart more than the mind.

In a way, Oppenheimer is like atomic physics: Each tiny spark interlocks to create a massive, breathtaking, terrifying, conflagration.

Throughout the film, Questlove deconstructs the sterility of a typical talking heads documentary. The inclusion of interviews isn’t to incorporate some sense of detached expertise. When faces do remain in focus, it’s to highlight the width of their grins, the tears in their eyes, their open mouths while watching the footage, their shock that someone else finally remembers.

This sentimental perennial is a holiday chestnut.

Michèle is a daring, complicated character – one that Isabelle Huppert brilliantly creates in concert with the director, Paul Verhoeven.

One of the sharpest prison dramas ever, although it's graced with some very humorous portions as well.

Based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, this is one of Hitchcock's finest moments, full of subtle humor and nasty black turns, not to mention a wonderful score by Franz Waxman and gorgeous cinematography from longtime Hitchcock director of photography Robert Burks.

If Ramsay's 2011 melancholy masterpiece "We Need to Talk About Kevin" was about the consequences of caring too little, You Were Never Really Here is its polar opposite – a story of a man who cares so much that his soul is bleeding out of every pore.

[A] prescient and sharply drawn comedy about the depths to which one unscrupulous station will sink.

Frenetic as Babylon is, Chazelle himself remains clear-eyed. His view of Hollywood is romantic but not romanticized, a flaws-and-all look back at a party that was bound to end and be completely incapable of handling the crash. But oh, what a swell party it is.

A marvelous achievement that refuses to avert its gaze from the poetry and the insane savagery of the hopeless.

Due more to how it makes you think rather than to what it shows, Night of the Living Dead gets under your skin and burrows into your blood and psyche.

Arguably, the best John Ford film ever, certainly one the very best, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an American classic. Ford addresses the complexity of heroism in a poetic manner.

Michael Mann is in top form here helming this bone-chilling thriller.

One of Hitchcock's very best comic thrillers, North by Northwest features scene after unforgettable scene.

That's the nuanced naturalism that makes Minari so captivating, so intimate: It doesn't tell a complicated story, instead letting the roots and branches of its family drama grow and become entwined with the audience's own stories.

Kubrick’s film vividly depicts the harsh realities of war and remains a great anti-war drama.

Everything about its scale is epic.

The peerless actors match and elevate Lonergan’s artistry beat for beat. And the film’s greatest gift of all may be that it declines to tidy up after itself, prettifying life’s messiness with a finishing bow. In the end, it’s the package that counts, not the wrapping.

This knuckle-whitening depiction of a man of God toppling into his own spiritual abyss is one of Schrader’s finest and most excoriating films to date.

Nolan maintains gut-wrenching suspense throughout by cross-cutting between the various characters and their plights. I’d go so far to say that Dunkirk could easily serve as its own master class in the art of film editing. Add to that an absolutely terrifyingly discordant score from Hans Zimmer and the result is, well, a bona fide classic.

Mandy, though, is flat-out orders of magnitude a more emotionally adept and shockingly powerful film in virtually every department, from the dazzlingly insane cinematography and lysergically–inclined production design to what I can only believe is Nicolas Cage’s single best performance to date.

Melodrama mixes with light-hearted touches, moral dilemmas, and historical reckoning in Almodóvar’s latest.

Did I imagine a gloaming quality to this film, or was that just the influence of my own trudge toward middle age? That, of course, has been the steady brilliance of this series: No matter your own pace on life’s arc, you can always catch your reflection in the fishbowl glass.

Amy Heckerling’s portrait of high school/shopping mall life in Southern California is still just about as good as it gets...The panoply of teen types and turmoils is dead-on accurate.

We see the work, the figurative (and sometimes literal) sweat that went into crafting these characters. It’s capital-M Movie Acting, and I couldn’t love it more. It moved me.

The film gets its biggest laughs – and there truly are some grandly bleak belly-shakers here – by upsetting the apple cart on traditional gender roles.

The film literalizes the damage done by the ruling class in ways that are shocking, but they land.

The real surprise is in how earnestly the director of some of the finest, spikiest romantic comedies ever made is willing to step off the gas and let heartfelt romance win the day. And it so very winning.

The spoof that launched a thousand parodies – this is the one that's 100% funny.

An epic biopic, over three hours in length, Gandhi captures the spirit of the man and his struggles.

Ingenious in its simplicity.

With Bad Education, the great Almodóvar delivers the finest movie of his career.

Unstoppable and righteous, it roars across the no-lane hardpan like the four-iron horseman of the kinetic apocalypse, amped up on bathtub crank and undiluted movie love. Oh, what a movie. What a lovely movie!

Hands down, this is the best Astaire-Rogers musical ever. Nothing more needs to be said.

Linklater’s newest film, a true masterwork, eschews this big-bang theory of dramatics in favor of the million-and-one little things that accumulate daily and help shape who we are, and who we will become.

Raimunda believes that dirty linen should be washed at home: Thank goodness Almodóvar hangs some of it up on the screen to dry.

Undine’s hauntingly aching romance is enchanting, as thick as the feeling of inhaling water into your lungs. There’s a drowning sensation to Petzold’s myth-building in Undine that’s totally engrossing, once again proving he is one of the world’s most exquisite love story composers.

To extend the boxing analogy, poker’s Raging Bull is the 1974 Robert Altman masterpiece, California Split.

As Hampton, Kaluuya gives the best performance of his career. He embodies what it meant to be a Panther, the simultaneous sacrifice and gratitude of carrying such militant devotion to liberation everywhere from the podium to the bedroom.

This multi-Oscar-winner nails its characters, time period, and locale so perfectly that it becomes even more compelling as time goes by. Fueled by two riveting character studies and its exposure of New York City's seamy underbelly, the movie screams “contemporary” and “eternal” at once...It's one of those rare movies that comes together just about perfectly, so check out this theatrical release while you can.

As disturbing as it is well-made, this low-budget indie is a thoroughly original piece of work.

Streetcar is always a wonderful screen drama and now, also, a study in film archeology. [Director's Cut]

Arguably the best cross-dressing comedy of all time, it's also one of director Billy Wilder's most fluid, vibrant, laugh-out-loud accomplishments, rife with zippy one-liners delivered in Lemmon's impeccable style, and a rakishly outrageous Cary Grant impersonation from Curtis. Monroe is at her gooey, blonde best here as the pouty, hard-drinking Sugar.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is nothing short of an enchantment.

As is typical by now, Baker (along with cinematographer Drew Daniels) captures the ethos and texture of America on the fringes in a way not many others do.

Hamaguchi’s films, from Happy Hour to Asako I & II, are all explorations of love, the complex, overwhelming emotion that has the power to break your heart. Drive My Car dissects that heartbreak, what it means to love someone and how to come to terms with that love once they are no longer around to fix what was broken.

The story winds its way over the material, forcing the characters and the viewers to constantly reassess everything they have seen and heard.

As sad and poignant and potentially hopeful as it is amusing. The movie is our story as much as it is Schmidt's, no matter if it's viewed as a self-reflection or cautionary tale

One of Chaplin’s sweetest and most humble movies.

Riley’s film is a welcome hand grenade of subversive power that often reminded me of another incendiary film, Terry Gilliam’s classic "Brazil."

The film itself is fictional, filmed in a 1.33:1 ratio to mimic the framing of the inspirational photographs. It’s absolutely breathtaking work – the camera helmed by Maria von Hausswolff captures the unassuming beauty of Iceland, but also does not hide its frigid nature, both terrifying and beautiful.