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.