One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

Bizarre, shadowy, enticingly eerie...more poetic, more tantalizingly original.

Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

It’s one of this year’s best movies. I don’t know how it will fare at the box office, but I can see it becoming a beloved favorite in the same way “The Shawshank Redemption” ultimately did. Like that classic, this one really makes you think about life and the things we take for granted.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

The Fits is what independent moviemaking should be and can be in this country. Like its heroine, it’s slight but it’s built to last.

The shock, really, is how tender Mad Max: Fury Road ultimately becomes. The film just wraps that tenderness in one of the most epic action extravaganzas of recent years. It's enough to renew your faith in movies.

That rose in the desert, a sequel that improves in every way upon its beloved predecessor and a romance that slowly builds a fire from embers thought dead.

The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.

Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.

Breathless is not an antique or a classic. It is still a new film, because it makes you feel cinema is still new. [18 Nov 2007, p.N9]

Women Talking is full of phenomenal acting by a group of actors at the top of their game. There are a lot of characters here, but even the most minor are given moments to shine.

The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.

Cinematic rarity — a genuinely philosophical film.

It is harrowing, heartbreaking, cheering, and unforgettable.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

Not since Charlotte Wells’s 2022 film “Aftersun,” about a woman remembering a pivotal trip she took with her father as a child, have I seen this level of personal filmmaking presented in such superb and original fashion. “Blue Heron” is one of the best films of the year.

Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain.

It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

Microcosmos is a microspectacular. [08 Nov 1996, p.C6]

Riveting tale of family dynamics packed with as much drama, conflict, and poignancy as the best feature film.

Catchy and unobtrusively assured, it's both hip and innocent, stylized and natural, charming its way through a conventional hey-kids-let's-have-a-party plot with bright comedy, great dancing, and on-top-of-it rap. It even manages to send a few messages about responsibility without being boring. In short, it's the best teen genre movie in ages. [23 Mar 1990, p.43]

It rates a resounding yes because it doesn't insult our emotional intelligence. [23 Nov 1983]

If they called it “Divorce Story,” you wouldn’t go see it. And you really should. Not only is Marriage Story possibly the magnum opus Noah Baumbach has been working toward for much of his career; not only does it give space to two or three or five of our finest working actors to re-enact the human condition as a daily tragicomedy; not only is it a “Kramer vs. Kramer” that refuses to take sides.

One of 2023′s best films, “The Taste of Things” is achingly romantic and devastatingly sad. You’ll spend the first two-thirds of this movie salivating, and the last third of it sobbing.

Intriguing, arresting, delightfully refusing to be pigeonholed.

The movie masterfully evokes, through stunning direction and magnificent performances, the heat and passion of desperate people living in desperate times. [18 Feb 1983]

The best mainstream film since "E.T.," is an uplifting reminder that Hollywood can still produce truly great entertainment...The plot is so exquisitely developed that divulging anything beyond the basic outline might diminish the joyous surprises that await an audience thirsting for originality in a reactionary medium. [03 July 1985, p.57]

This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

Cold War is a ravishment, a cinematic feast for the senses, and it packs an epic inner landscape into a dense 88 minutes.

A life is not plot; plot is not life. By scrupulously sticking not just to the accuracies of Turner’s life as we know them but to the tiniest of details, the chipped mugs on kitchen tables, the pantaloons on a passing merchant, the spray of storm surf across the bow of a ship, Leigh wants us to truly see the world Turner moved through. Only by seeing that world can we see how he saw and painted it.

Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July is a knockout, a huge angry howl of movie that uses a crippled Vietnam veteran's disability as metaphor for a country's paralysis. [5 Jan 1990, p.67]

Never has a film taken such relish in between-the-wars malice as Gosford Park.

This is a brilliantly structured hall of mirrors that wraps Catholicism and the movie industry into a tasty film noir.

Over and over in The Look of Silence, we hear people tell the filmmakers, “The past is past.” The wound is healed, they say, and if you don’t want trouble, don’t reopen it. The movie itself proves otherwise.

Just when you thought gangster movies had peaked, here's Warren Beatty in Bugsy, a film so suave, outrageous, flamboyant, knowing and above all playful that you're liable to overlook the fact that it's more loaded with American resonances than any three pop culture courses you could sign up for. [20 Dec 1991, p.53]

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

Fueled by Meryl Streep's performance in the title role, energized by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen's script and tempered by Mike Nichols' understated direction, Silkwood is a brilliant movie that puts art above polemics, and the facts above speculation. [14 Dec 1983]

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.

Cross Fame and Spinal Tap, color it Irish, and you've got The Commitments, the summer's most irresistible movie. [30 Aug 1991, p.79]

Blistering and brilliant work.

Spacey is diamond-brilliant in a role that plays as if custom-made for him.

All you really need to enjoy "Triplets" is a taste for the weird and the wonderful.

It's an instant classic, in every way the equal of the great Disney animations of the past. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

When Branagh's camera soars above the final celebratory dancing and choral anthem, you'll soar, too. [21 May 1993, p.23]

There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.

20 Feet From Stardom may possibly be the happiest time you’ll have at the movies all summer, but it comes with a heavy load of frustration. The joy...is in the sound of women singing their big, beautiful hearts out. The pain comes from the anonymity they’ve spent their lives working under and fighting against.

We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.

Astonishing.

The Joy Luck Club is "Terms of Endearment" in quadruplicate, aimed at the heart and right on target. [24 Sept 1993, p.47]

A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

Touching Academy Award winner that remains one of the best films ever made about returning veterans. The sterling cast includes Fredric March, Myrna Loy and Harold Russell. It's touching without being silly, and it has aged very well. [04 Jul 1989, p.23]

The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.

One of the year's most winning performances, Logue's Dex will grow on you as he stumbles toward emotional fullness.

What makes Toy Story such a dazzling surprise is that while technological novelty is partly what it's about, it transcends technology. [22 Nov 1995, p.29]

Stillman has become a master at escalating the laughter by waiting an extra beat and then understating something devastatingly funny, as when someone looks Chris Eigeman's club manager, Des, in the eye and says, "I consider you a person of integrity - except, you know, in the matter of women."

Nomadland balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for that restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it.

One of the wittiest and most creatively exuberant movies of the year, and maybe one of the best.

It's a relief that when Fellini decided to sum up his career, he still had enough left to do it so wittily, jauntily and with such expansiveness of spirit. Lovely stuff, just lovely. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

Vincent and Theo is one of the great Robert Altman films... It's Altman's most structurally conventional film, although it's filled with such trademarks as overlapping conversations. It's also his most personal and deeply felt. [16 Nov 1990, p.81]

Nobody ever placed brilliance in the service of silliness quite the way the Python gang did. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is stuffed with both.

After a period of creative drought, Zhang’s homecoming is a cause for celebration.

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.

This smart Richard III looks terrific, moves like the wind and rides the nerve of McKellen daring us not to enjoy its central monster's evil panache. [19 Jan 1995, p.57]

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

What makes A Streetcar Named Desire rewarding to watch today, especially on a big screen, is the same thing that made it so cherishable in the first place - Williams' heartbreaking lyricism, the titanic performances by Vivien Leigh's Blanche and Marlon Brando's Stanley, and Williams' most perfect realization of his ongoing central theme - the extermination of sensitivity and refinement by the brutes and carnivores of the world. [Director's Cut; 18 Feb 1994, p.37]

Jungle Fever is Spike Lee's best film yet. Although it's about a black man and a white woman launching an intimate relationship, it's anything but an interracial love story. Which is exactly the film's point. [7 June 1991, p.43]

This is one of the year’s best films. It’s also one of Lee’s finest joints.

Birdman finds Iñárritu in the mood for play, and with a mighty cast that fields every pitch he throws.

The arrival of Raúl Ruiz’s final work, Night Across the Street, brings the total to four, an elegant, clear-eyed bridge game of artists playing their last trump cards.

At Sundance, Whiplash quickly picked up the nickname “Full Metal Juilliard” on the basis of scenes in which Andrew, plucked from a late-night practice session to be the orchestra’s drummer, is raked over the coals by his new mentor. Horrifying as they are, these sequences are dazzling exercises in total humiliation.

The result is one of the most unforgiving ground-level documentaries about the music business ever made -- the six-string equivalent of "Hoop Dreams."

The summer season rarely has room for a nice, adult comedy like You Hurt My Feelings. It is counter-programming of the finest order and one of the year’s best films.

There is not only artistry in the development of the story - there is beauty, sympathy and emotional appeal in almost every scene.

Wake Up Dead Man is one of the year’s best movies. I’ve enjoyed all three movies, but this one is the best of the “Knives Out” mysteries so far.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.

The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.

It’s rare that a movie fires on all cylinders as this one does. The jaw-dropping animation tells a bittersweet and lovely story. The voice work is stellar, and the score sweeps you along on a wave of excitement. Fans of the books will not be disappointed.

Driving Miss Daisy, about the deepening relationship between a Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black chauffeur, is a luminous joy of a film, heartbreakingly delicate, effortlessly able through indirection to invoke the civil rights era without ever once slipping into portentous pronouncements. [12 Jan. 1990, p.35]

Lemmons’s film is an exercise in memory disguised as Southern gothic.

In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.

Hit Man is one of the year’s best movies.

Sing Sing refuses to pass any judgment while inviting the audience to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that these people are humans just like us.

Star Wars is, quite simply, one of the best family entertainment buys you can make this summer. It’s a gorgeous, fantastic toy, a marvelous science fiction film that anyone can enjoy, sci fi fan or not.

As often happens in films about putting on plays, life imitates art, but in this instance obliquely.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

Yet, paradoxically, the fact that almost every line becomes a double entendre confirms the fact that the movie is one of Allen's best. Although Allen, like the character he's playing, may self-destruct, the movie emerges triumphant. It holds us from start to finish - a rueful, ironic, wrenchingly funny study of yet another set of mixed Manhattan doubles dedicated to the belief that there's no marriage or relationship so bad that it can't be traded for - or transformed into - something worse. [18 Sept 1992, p.51]

That’s how the gifted young Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro makes his movies, in a style that seems casual and feels sure-handed — casual and sure-handed being about as good a combination as artistry, in any medium, has to offer.