The result is something that feels fresh, even revelatory — a work of elegiac bio-doc impressionism. Listen to Me Marlon gets under the skin of the most mysterious performer of the 20th century and forces us to recalibrate all our feelings about him.

Here are great swaths of Baldwin’s prose, read by Samuel L. Jackson in a vocal impersonation that is actually a rather brilliant piece of acting — he convinces you it’s the writer you’re hearing.

Like a cool lemon ice on a blistering summer day, In the Heights feels like a reward.

It's terse, atmospheric, fatalistic, with vertiginous camera angles and edits offsetting its gray documentary flatness.

On screen as on the page, The Age of Innocence is a stunning period piece filled with depth charges. [17 Sept 1993, p.49]

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

A feast of a film that goes on feeding you long after you've left the theater. [25 Dec 1995, p.83]

The rest of the film consists mostly of Akerman talking with her mother, blithely and lovingly, about everyday ephemera and about the past (Natalia was a survivor of Auschwitz), both via Skype and at her mother’s genteel home in Brussels.

"In Cold Blood," "Badlands," "The Executioner's Song," and now, joining those grisly milestones on the heartland hit list, and every bit their equal, is Boys Don't Cry.

One of the best, most karmically satisfying comedies of the year, much to the chagrin of the people who are in it.

The movie is a masterpiece, one made by a man counting down his own years as if they were rosary beads.

The movie is pricelessly comic -- the Harvey/Joyce scenes catalog the couple's neuroses with glee -- but it just as often reaches for something richer.

The miracle is that 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better: tighter, smarter, funnier.

A Bronx Tale is a joy, a film that comes unerringly from someone's heart and experience, and not from a power lunch of agents with clients to be packaged. [1 Oct 1993, p. 49]

There are no grandiose moments here, only little ones that, cobbled together, create a moving and profound experience.

The women here aren't afraid to get extreme about love, but in the end, you sense that they are too sound to destroy themselves over the worthless man they have allowed to personify it. That's what lifts Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from the amusing to the sublime. [23 Dec 1988, p.23]

The movie captures that heady adolescent sense of time stopping and the moment mattering while standing far enough back to let us acknowledge all the pitfalls Marieme is moving too fast to see.

Pound for pound, actor for actor, laugh for laugh, Knives Out may be the most entertaining movie of the year.

Hard Truths is a definitive work in Leigh’s canon.

For your two hours of discomfort, you will gain a better understanding of the insidious ways in which sexual predators work, and a clearer picture of how a victim’s denial and memory can conspire to bury the truth in the name of self-protection. You will also gain the experience of watching a wisely written, inventively directed, and extraordinarily acted story

Naked is one of the most scorchingly compelling films in years, Mike Leigh's masterpiece, an unflinching vision of civilization in retreat, life as apocalypse. [4 Mar. 1994, p.51]

The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.

Baldwin knew that hope is the engine that takes us to the future, to a changed and better day, and whether that hope is embodied in action, in expression, or in a child is immaterial. If Beale Street Could Talk is a stained-glass window looking out onto what could still be.

This is one of the year’s best films, a heartbreaking stunner that’s not easily shaken.

The film that many consider the finest of its decade, Raging Bull, has aged well, and not just because it was filmed in black and white.

A documentary about a Macedonian beekeeper doesn’t sound like one of the best films of the year, does it? But few movies capture the great wheel of nature turning with as much beauty and empathy as Honeyland, and fewer still show how easily the wheel can slip its track and come crashing to pieces.

A gorgeous autumnal period piece that catches a vanishing proprietary class on the eve of its extinction in Ireland in 1920.

Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up.

Foreign intrigue is raised to an art form.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

Unfolds with the serenity of a fable but underneath it draws intelligent, deeply troubled connections between the personal, political, and spiritual.

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

Terrific French film about that most universal of subjects - work.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

Slly, sublime, buoyant mischief that is virtually without parallel in 20th-century art, much less 20th-century film.

Tootsie, the story of a man who liberates himself by masquerading as a woman, is the funniest, most revealing comedy since "Annie Hall." [17 Dec 1982]

Brilliant and impassioned as Day Lewis' performance is, it isn't the only reason this film is so exhilarating. Director Jim Sheridan, who clearly has assimilated Brown's two memoirs (the film takes its name from the first), draws Christy's impoverished Irish family with idiomatic rightness and a satisfying and rare (to American films at least) emotional fullness. [15 Sept, 1989, p.41]

The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.

For all its bells and whistles, “Project Hail Mary” is also a lovely, bittersweet character study, a pas de deux between man and alien that elicits a surprising amount of emotions by the time the credits roll.

It's one of the great sister movies and one of the great performance movies. [26 Jan 1996]

The performance of Flanagan, a first-time actress, is both harrowing and possessed of an eloquence that has no need for words. You come away from this movie weeping for the Autumns of this world but awed by their endurance.

Krasker’s camera reveals a dank, matte, defeated city — so dully vivid as to be a character unto itself — except that this Vienna becomes something altogether different seen at night or underground. In that velvety shadowscape, even rubble and sewage look glamorous.

Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write.

Casualties of War is just as successful as "Platoon" was in making us feel Vietnam's moment-by-moment tension, but its central event gives it more resonance. [18 Aug 1989, p.43]

Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.

The most remarkable accomplishment of Heavenly Creatures is its unfailing ability to compel us to identify with its two young Salomes. They're right to sense that the adult world around them means to snuff them out, and you can understand and even sympathize with their desperate need to muster a preemptive strike so they can stay together. Heavenly Creatures is potent, daring, invigorating filmmaking. [23 Nov 1994, p.29]

One of the films in the running as Charlie Chaplin's funniest and most adroitly balanced between comedy and pathos. [7 Sept 1990]

All in all, “The Secret Agent” feels like a memory play filtered not only through its director’s reminiscences but through the cinema’s past as well.

The greatest B-movie ever made. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.D5]

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.

There Will Be Blood" is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

Quiet, powerful, contemplative, respectful of stillness, Eureka is the first film this year in which there is obvious greatness.

Jackie is a chamber drama rather than an epic; an impressionistic work of emotional opera rather than a chronological parade. What is this movie trying to do? Simply dramatize everything that can go on inside a woman simultaneously marginalized and revered.

Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

The Fly is that rare species of movie - a remake that far surpasses the original and, quite frankly, all expectations. [15 Aug 1986]

Gorgeously stoic art film.

In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.

To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't.

Paterson the movie doesn’t mine the dross and drab of our everyday lives for gold — it says they already are gold, and all you have to do is look. “Say it! No ideas but in things.” See it.

In short, This Is Not a Film is the world within an apartment, and it is quietly devastating.

Bi’s singular vision bears comparison to those of other geniuses such as Tarkovsky, Sokurov, David Lynch, Luis Buñuel and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Like those auteurs, he achieves what film is best at but seldom accomplishes — a stirring of a deeper consciousness, a glimpse into a reality transcending the everyday.

A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.

It's a unique trip that flirts with hokeyness at the surface but that grows more compelling, awe-inspiring, and tragic the deeper you go.

Boyhood is a stunt, an epic, a home video, and a benediction. It reminds us of what movies could be and — far more important — what life actually is.

Butler's approach is subtle: His documentary allows the story to unfold elegantly, without embellishment, and it is more powerful for that restraint.

Hamilton stands as a reminder of how hard it is to get a democracy right, and how necessary it is to keep trying, as long as it takes.

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Boseman makes the character’s eyes glitter with humor and rage and fear; Levee knows what he deserves and how far it remains out of his reach, and maybe so did the man playing him. It’s a magisterial performance.

The Human Voice is a banquet disguised as a light lunch, heady with flavors; you come away blissfully sated and hungry for more.

Quiz Show, Robert Redford's strongest movie yet, has contender written all over it. Swinging from the heels, it connects solidly, powerfully and probingly with the event that triggered America's loss of postwar innocence and erosion of public trust. [16 Sept 1994, p.59]

It’s in theory the worst family movie of 2018 — and in practice one of the year’s best films.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it may be a great one.

Hartley's spare dialogue cuts right to the characters' psyches; his terse, laconic style accentuates the everyday horror. [20 Sept 1991]

It is a love story. Also a profoundly metaphysical meditation on what it means to be human. Also one of the more touchingly relevant movies to the ways we actually live and may soon live. Oh, and the year’s best film, or at least the one that may stick with you until its story line comes true.

With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]

The movie’s presentation of her whole personhood adds sweetness to the spectacle, and drives home the outro of “My House,” a thumping new Beyoncé track that plays under the credits: “Pick me up even if I fall/ Let love heal us all, us all, us all.”

Director Bruce Beresford keeps stars Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton firmly rooted in the deep, dark black humor of Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. [01 Jul 2014, p.G15]

The byplay between DiCaprio and Pitt is delicious and finely drawn — you’d better believe Tarantino knows he’s dealing with two of our last old-school movie stars and sneakiest actors.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise isn't just one of France's great love stories - it's one of film's. [23 Feb 1992, p.B35]

In a crisply restored print, it's as joyous as ever. We loved them - yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can love them all over again.

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

About the search for common ground, among journalists on all sides of the conflict and, through them, between viewers in America and the Arab world. Only within that common ground, Noujaim believes, can something like a workable, personal truth be found.

Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.

[The novel's] themes have never not been fresh and they gleam here under the sympathetic and enlivening touch of Armstrong and her cast, who move through the events with sunny assurance and complete immersion in character. [21 Dec 1994]

Carol is a movie to drink in with eyes, ears, and sensibilities.

Enigmatic as it is, The Intruder dares us to see movies as visual marvels tethered to humanity.

In an age in which it feels as if seemingly pure intimacy no longer exists, this film thrives on nothing but intimate moments.

Lawrence is back on the big screen, and it simply demands to be seen. Yes, again.

Guy Maddin is a scholar, poet, prankster, and ferociously devoted classicist who likes to resurrect dead cinemas and deader directors and make them vital all over again.

A heady flow of brilliant stupidity.

Wiseman has made something so mundane as to be absorbingly exotic, a civics-lesson procedural. As with any procedural, the people involved in the process are just as important to the story as the process is.

Though he might be uncertain about sex, or even kissing and cuddling, Scott is an incurable romantic. And steadfastly loyal and kind. The value of that is made clear when the filmmakers disclose the full tragedy and horror of what Dina has gone through, and when he sings to her “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

It’s a tale as old as time and a story ripped from the news feed; a dream of connection and an anvil to the heart. See it for the arrivals of a directorial talent and a stunning young actress, and see it to remind yourself of this country’s ancient and eternal sins.

If you look fast, you'll see Waters himself in a cameo (as a flasher; what else?), proof the new film is in touch with its dyed roots.