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.

The film courses with vitality -- and makes you glad to be alive. Kieslowski's deft touch gives Red its real magic; in the end, the subtle nuances are what stay with you.

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.

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

Vertigo stands as one of the thrill master's most psychologically dense and twisted works in which obsession, commitment, and dual identities all merge to create a voluptuous tale of thwarted love. [Restored version]

The great director's masterpiece of bad juju. [Director's Cut]

Although made in 1969, this French masterpiece is receiving its first stateside release with a new print struck for the occasion.

While all of the performances in this movie are superb, Harris’ turn here is hands-down award-worthy.

Peckinpah's grasp, for once, matches his reach and in this Western story he achieves a mythological tone for his moral fable.

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.

These creatures of the underworld are the fervid fabrications of del Toro's imagination: More than once they will catch you by surprise and make you gasp.

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.

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

Kurosawa's international breakthrough is a masterstroke in unreliable narration.

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

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.

One of the 10 best films ever made, period.

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.

A curious filmgoing experience: Virtuosic, assured, and possessed of undeniable aesthetic force, it’s also hard not to turn away from.

In a year when the coy social mores of upstairs and downstairs have been filtered once again through the aristocratic monocle of "Downton Abbey," it's a relief that there's a film this year that tackles the servant/master relationship with the straight-for-the-jugular malice of Parasite.

To this day one of the most riveting, horrific, and empathetically turbocharged pieces of motion picture history ever recorded, Eisenstein's mind-bogglingly complex composition – utilizing a seeming cast of thousands of extras in addition to the unnamed, iconic main figures – is a gory ballet of marching Cossacks, frantic Odessites, trampled innocence, and doomed dissent.

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

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

This is a film that alternatively shows humanity in all its ugly glory as well is its quiet moments of beauty.

Fiercely original in every respect.

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.

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.

Brutal yet elegant, 12 Years a Slave is a beautifully rendered punch to the gut about the most shameful chapter in American history.

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.

Pixar's animation is simply flawless; colorful, deeply realized, and ably conveying both the chaos of the kitchen, and the sensual allure of food well prepared.

Gravity is a major filmmaking accomplishment, no doubt, although it would have been interesting to see how it might have played sans dialogue. Unthinkable to Hollywood, sure, but still … Kowalski and Stone’s backstories and banter are, in the end, secondary to the film’s jaw-dropping visuals.

Beauty and the Beast, one of Disney's latest animated features is even better than The Little Mermaid. At the same time, it's vaguely disappointing.

Nic Roeg here offers one of the most disconcerting portraits of otherworldliness ever seen on the screen.

Anderson still directs with purpose, and while One Battle After Another is never as coherent as it is exciting, it avoids the tag of being “lesser Anderson.”

Hearts of Darkness gives a privileged glimpse of the artist's hell, but it also says something about grace.

Blisteringly entertaining.

This 1964 film, featuring an enduring Lerner and Loewe score, is a classic.

What the film excels at, however, is the anticipatory desire. It builds slowly, concluding with a stunning sequence that is all breathless remembrance and self-satisfaction that is both wordless and impalpable. The film will seem the height of romantic desire to some, but will be a slow burn for others.

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!

Ideas and their visual illustrations come at the viewer in a cascading torrent. The editing by Alexandra Strauss deserves its own recognition for its painstaking exactness.

There’s an old thesis that if your comedy is over 90 minutes, it’s probably not funny. A funny comedy should leave the audience tired from laughing by that point. That Radu Jude’s satire Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World clocks in at an epic 163 minutes should be a cause for concern – as should be the presence of bullying schlock director Uwe Boll, even in a cameo as himself.

Aftersun is lyrical without ever being obtuse, and it's a film that flourishes when attention is paid to details.

Love means being helpmates throughout all of life's stages. Death is part of love's bargain, and Haneke lays this fact bare.

The tension is enough to make you slightly sick, and the overall mood of the thing is deeply dispiriting, but then, nobody ever said that war isn't hell.

Very satisfying. Classic storytelling, modern techniques. And the images: This movie has embedded so many strange and new mental pictures in my head that I'm not able to shake free. Yet, neither would I want to be free.

It's a mistake to confuse Zero Dark Thirty for "truth" – that would be a disservice to the high level of craftsmanship, from first-billed actors to below-the-line production crew, at work in this movie fiction – but there is admirably little fat on its bones.

What makes Nanau’s film utterly compelling is the unfettered access he had to both the Sports Gazette journalists and to Minister of Health Voiculescu. There are no interviews or talking heads here: Everything unfolds as it is happening.

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

The movie's ending at the train station and the modern-day epilogue feel protracted and indulgent...Apart from the ending though, this is Spielberg's most articulate movie ever.

This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that run the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin and Lewis.

In Carol, all the elements dovetail perfectly to create a movie that is as irresistible as its title character.

Before Midnight surpasses the two previous films in this trilogy in terms of its intelligence, narrative design, and vivacity. It’s a grand accomplishment, and I feel greedy about wanting to see this film series continue.

Backed by the Rev. James Cleveland, a small band, and the extraordinary Southern California Community Choir, Aretha delivers a stunning, inspirational performance, moving both the choir and the audience to paroxysms of joy and celebration.

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.

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.

A meditation on survival, The Searchers is about the loss of faith and the death of heroes.

“Subtle” is the watchword for this kind of arthouse film. That can be a backhanded compliment, a buyer-beware to attention-deficit audiences, but Haigh is really quite plain with his preoccupations: the constant tick-tock of time, and the illusion that in marriage two are melded into one.

Capturing the nuances of quotidian life may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Angela Lansbury's frighteningly in-check performance is alone worth the trip.

There is little in the way of narrative eventfulness in the film, but Leigh luxuriates in the moments, and provides glimpses of what it takes to be an artist amid the fray.

Denying Scorsese's raw talent and experience as a filmmaker would be insanity – although the decision to digitally de-age his actors proves the technology is still spotty, and works best in long shots. But that the only major film made in America this year about unions dredges up Hoffa again, and the Italian American community is yet again made synonymous with organized crime, seems tone deaf and self-indulgent.

A masterful synthesis of generic conventions and creative imagination, a sublime amalgam of some of the best tendencies and talent our times have to offer.

Its audacity is entirely matched by its artistry.

A smart and delightful romantic comedy, yet in the course of creating his new charmer Alexander Payne has sheared off some of the rambunctious edges that made his previous films, About Schmidt, Election, and Citizen Ruth, such marvelous studies in social parody.

Billy Wilder’s cynical edge is finely honed in this darkly amusing satire, which won three Academy Awards. It’s a film that is perennially ready for its close-up.

This essential Billy Wilder film smoothly combines trenchant social observation with hilarious comedy.

The film is an intensely personal record, yet also a universal contemplation. Faces Places leaves the viewer with a sense of the glories of images and communication – sometimes random, sometimes specific, always continual and cumulative.

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]

It is not a failed love story, but it is a lost love story, as its characters fall victim to the realities of time and circumstance and are left wondering what may have been if either of those things had been different.

It’s odd and unfortunate, however, that The Return of the King just barely misses the eye-misting emotional wallop of the series’ previous installment, The Two Towers, which had a lyrical subtlety underpinning the vast vistas of growing chaos (and Christopher Lee hardly hurt matters) and hobbits-in-peril.

As for words? The script gives Stuhlbarg – a character actor who elevates everything he’s in – the monologue of a lifetime, which he delivers sotto voce, all kindness. And that is perhaps the prevailing note of Call Me by Your Name – of kindness, of tenderness.

With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast.

Divorce severs this marriage like the dull blade of a knife cutting through the tiers of a wedding cake.

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.

Petite Maman is a fine balance of heartache and whimsy.

In her first solo writing and directing effort, the hard-working indie film actress Greta Gerwig proves that she is her own muse. She takes the well-worn coming-of-age-dramedy format and fashions something fresh, funny, and artful from its familiar tropes. Also delivering the goods is a knockout cast of accomplished veterans and relative newcomers.

The Magnificent Ambersons retains a haunted, elegant feel that takes the viewer inside an era Hollywood has largely sidestepped.

Small in its movements and thoughtful in its observations, All We Imagine As Light is quietly resonant – so quiet you might wonder if it has much impact.

Yet in many ways Shoplifters is an unlikely yet organic extension of his last film, 2017's crime drama "The Third Murder." Less a whodunit than a whydidyoudoit, that legal procedural was really a subtle assault on Japan's judicial system, in which it's more important that a case makes sense than it reaches the truth. Shoplifters cuts close to the same marrow as "The Third Murder," but with how Japan views families as his subject.

This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.

No Other Land is inherently hopeful. Even as the bulldozers rumble, and soldiers take the safety off around kids, and goons point cameras in Abraham’s face and threaten Facebook-fueled revenge, there’s hope that the juggernaut of oppression can be stopped.

The only term is relentless, and for a lot of viewers Uncut Gems’ third act has been stressful, even traumatic. My response was more one of sheer awe – of the Safdies’ brilliant balancing act, of Sandler’s swirling dance of a performance, and of Howard’s sprint through a minefield.

Shot in winter grays with no warming ambers and the whiff of tuberculosis hanging around all the players, Inside Llewyn Davis is a chilly thing – a nominal comedy in brisk shivers.

All those seriously interested in foreign cinema are encouraged to take a look at this atmospheric drama -- sure to be remembered as one of the key achievements of the Hong Kong cinema in the 1990s.

As masterful as the character it portrays, TÁR is a textured, finely calibrated, stunningly composed, and thoroughly contemporary study. Its chords reverberate long after the music fades.

There Will Be Blood is not a movie that disappears quietly.

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

So fascinating is Brother's Keeper that you almost don't quarrel with things like the biased portraits of the prosecuting team and the Deliverance-like banjo-shuffling soundtrack. Brother's Keeper intrigue factor is enormously high and, it could almost be said, that this movie is good enough to be fiction.

Though Crumb is packed with information and telling details, the movie's objective is hardly art history or a survey of Crumb's place in the world of comics. The movie aims for broader subject matter, to discover something about the role art plays in the life of the artist, and about how the release of art may, indeed, allow the artist to function as a stable human being.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s feminist views have consistently been at the center of his work, but his latest film, No Bears, is an ambitious, powerful piece that puts himself in the center of two narratives, parallel to each other, in which two generations of women are forced into difficult situations because traditions and laws have made it almost impossible for them to be with who they love.

With 8 1/2, Fellini cast aside all vestiges of the naturalism that informed his early work. From here, he stepped off into the dazzling fantasyland of Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and Roma, but for many, this remains the quintessential Federico.

Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.

Minnelli's direction has seldom attained such a perfect fusion of form and content. The Band Wagon is quite simply a masterpiece.

When you see a great Peckinpah film like his second feature, Ride the High Country (1962), you feel that the director has found a way to tell a story that lays his own soul across the screen. This movie celebrates a hero of self-control. But each frame is energized with a sense of what that self-control has cost the man in love, friendship, and glory.

Even for the most adventurous viewers, it may prove taxing. But to embrace its strange singularity yields a thought-provoking experience, and perhaps even a transformative one.

Could easily have tipped over into melodrama, but Schnabel is too much an artist to let that happen; he realizes that in order to make his hero truly substantial, and not just sympathetic, he has to present him as an ordinary man making the best of extraordinarily lousy circumstances. By doing so he’s created a character we not only marvel at but identify with.

The keen observations of The Class ultimately become a remedial education in themselves.

The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.