It remains one of the best-written and best-performed American films of all time.

With a surgical saw instead of a hatchet, del Toro takes apart patriarchy and opportunistic religion as well as fascism.

Great American movies are, these days especially, few and far between, so let's everybody take a deep breath and mark the moment: Hoop Dreams, all three hours' worth, is a great American movie. It's got the sting of drama and the ache of truth; it's even got the sting of truth and the ache of drama.

It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

Rififi, with its stark visuals, dark humor and constrained performances, earned Dassin the Best Director nod at the Cannes Film Festival and a secure place in film history.

Without a single gunshot (and just one flick of a switchblade), it turns into an existential suspense film with the highest stakes imaginable: the survival of the human spirit.

A visual masterpiece about a scared little girl's breathtaking journey of self-discovery. All of the fun is getting there.

It's that rarest of all films, the one that can unify, not divide, the generations, as both jaded teen-agers and their more innocent parents can connect with it. And of course for the kids, it's pure balm from heaven.

Killer of Sheep is a miracle movie because it's receiving its first theatrical release 30 years after it was made and because, as a movie, it's miraculous.

Samson Raphaelson's marvel of a script unfolds in six sequences that rise and fall with the surprising weight of mini-lifetimes; under Lubitsch's tart-tender direction, the emotionally transparent Stewart and the electric, conflicted Sullivan create an immortal comic courtship. [13 Feb 2004]

The movie is a marvel - bold, lucid and succinct (even at 123 minutes). It's also harrowing and moving in its depiction of noncombatant men, women and children caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism.

A non-stop cinematic funhouse impossible to resist.

The movie is impressive both as a celebration of the Old West and a tough, ambivalent depiction of a ruthless pioneer. [04 Jun 2004]

Ratatouille is a sublime dish of a movie, and the company's piece de resistance.

It is the most dynamic animated film ever made, and the prance of its camera, the sense of penetration into its action, the brilliantly paced editing pyrotechnics give it a crackle of life far more abundant than any feature that's come before.

The Hurt Locker redefines war-film electricity.

The movie does work, spectacularly.

Rarely has combat been portrayed as beautifully as in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Taiwanese director Ang Lee's thoughtful meditation on menace, mortality and the martial arts.

A film that celebrates the intricacies of life in ways both splendid and mundane, revealing it all with unflinching honesty.

It is a striking, ironical tribute to the vanishing glory of the silent screen, and a lively reflection of present-day conditions in Hollywood. [15 Sep 1950, p.14]

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

Crammed, cheek to jowl, with bleak moments, high hopes, sweetness and naked emotion.

The movie is emotionally tumultuous and evenhanded and serene. It celebrates the odd pockets of imagination and individuality that can be nurtured in middle-class suburbia. [2002 re-release]

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

A movie masterpiece -- thrilling, passionate and wise.

By all means, buy a ticket to The Fast Runner, but don't go expecting a masterpiece; actually, in its first hour, the dramaturgy and staging of scenes set in igloos are cramped and amateurish.

A glamorous, alluring entertainment that revels in the artifice of Hollywood while exposing its corrupt heart, L.A. Confidential pays stylish homage to some of the great film noirs of the distant and recent past.

Stanley Kubrick was always infatuated with human clockwork, both in terms of what makes each of us tick and how we choreograph our lives, deaths, and sins. The Killing, his big heist movie, suits this obsession perfectly. It is often considered, and rightly, his first masterpiece.

This movie registers like a pop song that enters the mind only in fragments because, as a whole, it lacks the style or substance to be memorable.

A lyrical, mysterious and provocative meditation on the power of memory and narrative, After Life is a fascinating speculation on life and death -- until its plot takes a turn so melodramatic that the spell is broken. [20 Aug 1999, p.3E]

It's still the Holy Grail of crazy comedy.

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

In his first fiction feature, Zwigoff doesn't forget to bring the funny. But he doesn't bring enough poetry.

A vibrant emotional epic.

Le Samourai's take on complicity, betrayal and love is thoroughly original and as tough as a film can be. [06 Jun 1997]

Mirren brings intellect, humor and romance to the role of Elizabeth II.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

What a relief to see a movie in which an audience responds with peals of laughter to subtle facial shifts as well as punch lines.

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.

This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.

True-blue Incredibles is a super tribute to the power of family and the might of imagination.

Has the sentiment and sweetness of a good coming-of-age movie but lacks the drive and pulse that makes for a great rock and roll movie.

There's not a false moment within the film's 88-minute running time, nor many that could be done any better.

There's no cheap uplift to their victory, no pop catharsis. What's great about United 93 is that you never feel it's just a movie - even though, as a movie, it's terrific.

A spellbinder of the rarest kind and quality. It opens audiences up to an infinite variety of emotional and intellectual nuances.

In a stroke of voice-casting genius, the voices of Marjane and her mother are provided by real-life mother and daughter Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, respectively, both of whom bring heft and measured emotion to the characters.

Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

By turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

A great, lusty movie in the tradition of Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

If any movie can rid Americans of "Iraq war fatigue," it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentary No End in Sight.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

Alien, even with some scene tinkering that has left this "director's cut" one minute shorter than its original release, is still one of the creepiest, scariest, most shocking films ever.

A gorgeous flirt of a murder movie.

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

Just when you might give up on young American film directors making art the way Bergman and Kurosawa did, along comes Bennett Miller's quiet, tumultuous Capote.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

A quiet, heartfelt story of love and loss.

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

Thanks to Kerr's eloquent tremor of a performance, when the heroine witnesses apparitions, they're immediately credible to the audience. [29 May 2009, p.1C]

That rare kids' movie that may be even more entertaining for its intended audience's adult companions.

It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.

Everything about Up is an up, in the most visceral and poetic ways.

Prove(s) once again how ingenious, artful and flat-out entertaining animation can be.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

The result is harrowing and inspiring. As escapist entertainment, it's the movie of the year.

Thanks to a combination of fluid camerawork and careful pacing, the Belgian writer-directors have produced a compelling narrative that sounds, if not a cautionary note, a worried one.

The best part of Little Women is that it tells a great big story. [24 Dec 1994]

Hard to take in its particulars.

Except for the Mozart music and Tharp movements around the edges, Amadeus plays like a monument to mediocrity. The movie belongs to Salieri.

Sokurov, for all his accomplishment, is less a bold innovator than a raider of lost art.

For Americans, Gomorrah will play like every other Mafia epic - and no other Mafia epic.

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

All about mood, and not one bit about action - which explains why it's at once both the most passionate film of the year so far, and the most determinedly inert.

A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.

There's an element of the nature film to Grizzly Man, and those passages are truly stunning, offering an up-close look at these magnificent animals.

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

Park's imagination is as fecund as the bunnies that bob up and down from their rabbit holes in every corner of the Tottington garden.

The Fugitive runs hard and true the whole way through.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes.

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]

The true heartbreak of Maria Full of Grace is that it never comes.

A chilling reminder of the precipice the world stands on nowadays, from a man who looked over the edge more than once.

Romanticism fights stoicism to a draw, and the movie grows ever more static, too. Down to the quasi-ambiguous hate-crime finish, Brokeback Mountain comes as close to being a still life as you can get with human characters.

A stunning documentary that examines life at the ground level in a patch of banally pretty but otherwise nondescript French meadow. [27 Nov 1996]

Bracingly honest and ceaselessly compelling documentary.

Cache is the feel-guilty movie of the new millennium.

Almodovar has created an ecstatic homage to the women who have inspired him all his life.