It's flawed, but it's also rich. And how many films make you feel that you and the filmmaker are following the course of a dream?

Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.

Cleo from 5 to 7, a sort of combination between realism and avant-garde imagination, is the kind of film that young people, learning to appreciate foreign-made pictures, will find stimulating. [15 Feb 1963, p.8]

Timothy Treadwell was killed, along with his girlfriend, by a rogue bear in October 2003.

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.

Robot Dreams reminds us that animated feature doesn’t mean “movie for kids.”

The film confronts not just the expected issue of environmentalism but also explores themes of survival, separation, loss, and death.

A messy, congenial empowerment story that knows how aggravating adolescence can be when you refuse to fit in.

Spartacus stands up handsomely. At times it's even stirring, as in Woody Strode's performance as the African gladiator who, in sparing Spartacus' life, opens his eyes. Spartacus is one of Hollywood's great comic strips. [3 May 1991, p.45]

The film has an epic sense of devastated wonder that can only come from standing as far back from the parade as one possibly can while still holding on to one’s empathy.

Artistically, though, you can’t help but trust him. Like any star turn, Holliday’s performance rings utterly true. It’s that indefinable but unmistakable reality-beyond-reality called art.

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.

Writer-director Sødahl expertly balances the sentimental and the acerbic, the grave and the altar. But Hope lives or dies on its central performances, and they are perfectly realized.

A glorious late-summer pendant.

Even more than "Chicken Run," Were-Rabbit is a tiny plasticine masterpiece.

A 2009 film only now getting theatrical distribution in the United States, it is perhaps Farhadi’s richest, most complex and ambitious.

The heroine’s voice-overs, delivered into the microphone of a Bell & Howell tape recorder in Minnie’s bedroom, are the movie’s motor. They’re proud and insecure, profanely comic, dripping with adolescent wisdom and self-absorption.

It makes politics exciting again.

Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.

All Is Lost works quite brilliantly on its most basic narrative level.

Banshees is like a short story trying to be a novel. The extra pages get filled with the postcard views. There are bits of wit — again, this is Martin McDonagh we’re talking about — but overall “Banshees” is lugubrious and slow.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but pride of place goes to Bennett’s Sir James, an upper class twit of Pythonesque proportions. Rarely has a character this moronic been this happy.

It’s an eerie mood piece that slowly and surely tightens the thumb screws before all hell breaks loose; that and the fact that much of Hereditary takes place in one rambling dark house is evidence that Aster has spent a lot of time studying “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’s nice to have a classicist back in town.

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.

A hugely entertaining adrenaline rush of a thriller that does a couple of simple things right. That's all it needs to do. First, it casts Harrison Ford in the title role of convicted wife-murderer Richard Kimble, ever scrambling forward, one step ahead of pursuing cops, while hunting the real killer. Second, it never stops. [6 Aug 1993, p.41]

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

A watchful, winding-down tragedy of a movie that delivers what it promises. As commentary, it's grim. As filmmaking, it's a powerfully disturbing odyssey through the Bucharest health care system.

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.

Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.

While I was never bored, I felt somewhat disconnected from this movie. It’s not that I wasn’t engaged or involved — I enjoy when a movie makes me work for its pleasures — it just felt like I was missing so much and left me wishing I’d seen more of the director’s movies.

The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.

As Apichatpong erases, once again, the barriers between the celestial and terrestrial, he also does away with the cordons between film genres - this is sci-firomancefamilyreligiousthrillercomedyporn. No video service has a section for that. The only suitable shelf is the one in your soul.

Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

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

It’s an empathetic yet forceful cautionary tale; we should pay heed to its message.

There’s an intimacy to this Macbeth that’s transfixing. Largely filling the frame with the actors doesn’t do just them a great service. It also does Shakespeare’s language a great service, making it that much easier for the viewer to attend to it.

A key point, though, is that all the scientists profiled have staked their careers on this one discovery.

A masterpiece.

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

Flow can be read as a climate-change parable, an empathic plea for understanding each other, or as a simple entertainment featuring cute animals and perilous situations.

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

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.

Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.

A tender genuflection to the women's energies that keep that spinning world from keeling over.

Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.

Crewdson's work is distinctive, and this film does a great job helping us understand the specific nature of his vision.

Bi Gan’s Resurrection is trippy cinema at its best, a nearly three-hour deep dive into experimental cinema.

I have not seen the film “Fifty Shades of Grey” but I doubt that it evokes the mystery, wit, and eroticism that Peter Strickland’s sumptuously claustrophobic fable of women in love does. All without nudity, bad dialogue, or the requisite wooden acting.

It's a meditation on life and death, but it's less somber and more light-handed, subtle, and mischievously funny.

Schreck matches the wit and fire of her writing with a riveting performance that often does not feel like a performance at all, but rather a cri de coeur wrenched up from a deep place where the personal, the historical, and the universal have met and merged.

A cruelly precise, often bleakly comic account of upper-middle-class privilege coming unglued when the cosmos throws a curveball.

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

The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.

Subtlety and irony are not among the film’s virtues.

As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.

Room unfolds with the privilege of seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time, which is maybe the best we can ever expect from a medium like the cinema.

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.”

Once the case comes to trial, Anatomy of a Fall becomes an engrossing courtroom drama, but not for the reason you think. The French court is a vessel for grandstanding and verbal sparring matches; it’s far less stodgy than the American ones we see in even the most absurd courtroom movies.

In a year of movies with bloated runtimes, Kaurismäki keeps his at a brisk and welcome 81 minutes, not one of which is wasted.

It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

Moore's conception of the character is compelling. She rivets us. She's assisted by the superb performances Redford has elicited from her co- stars, Sutherland and Timothy Hutton, who plays Conrad, the guilt-ridden surviving brother of the dead boy. [26 Sep 1980]

Mesmerizing and unforgettable.

The more I consider it, the more I realize the best elements of this film make it worth seeing, if only marginally so. There is enough to, dare I say, marvel at while you are beaten senseless with plot.

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]

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]

More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.

A miracle of data retrieval as the grown schoolchildren are measured against their footage from the earlier films.

At once riveting and heartbreaking. This youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy has the good sense — far rarer among documentarians than you’d like to think — not to get in the way of her material.

Krisha sucks you into its gradually worsening family dynamic with a confidence of style and a maturity of observation that is remarkable in a home-brewed Kickstarter movie. At times you laugh in horror. At other times you shrink from the screen. There are truths here.

The Inheritance is a welcome reminder of film’s flexibility as a medium of protest, a vessel of cultural history, and an agent of change.

The Babadook remains a potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood. The ending, remarkably, gets to have it both ways, reminding us that some of the scariest monsters are the ones we learn to live with.

Sachs doesn’t push the tragic aspects of Little Men, but they’re there, looming behind the life-goes-on vibe of the final scenes and waiting for you to work it out on the way home.

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

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

A haunting experience, one that requires patience (and then some) but that offers spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic rewards beyond the immediate power of words to describe.

Cinema's greatest caveman meets his ancestors. For us, it's a reassurance: The creative process is astonishingly old and its fruits still surprisingly fresh.

The ending is deeply moving.

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.

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

The surehandedly wrought, beautifully acted, almost unbearably tense In the Bedroom is a rare film, not to be missed.

It works well as a documentary, and I can’t deny that Presley gave 110 percent to his audience at every show. That in itself is impressive. (If you’re a fan, add an extra star to my rating.)

What Hoss is asked to play - and does play with great skill - is the fine line between self-protection and hauteur.

Like the best spiritual movies, of whatever faith, "Of Gods and Men" moves us toward a union with the infinite, and when we come to the monks' last supper, the moment is staggeringly powerful.

Museo is slightly frustrating on first watch, as its themes lie partly hidden behind Bernal’s intentionally abrasive performance and the mix-and-match filmmaking of Ruizpalacios: Bursts of faux-epic movie music in Tomas Barreiro’s score, camerawork that can be ironically portentous, scenes that flit along the edge of the surreal. The connective tissue is sometimes hard to discern.

Newman is an American classic, one of the few actors Hollywood has allowed to age and deepen. He and Nobody's Fool don't so much shine as glow softly and steadily. [13 Jan 1995, p.73]

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.

The movie is also more extraordinary than a mere scenic slideshow.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

It’s clear To is striving to keep the action gripping and creative. Modestly inspired is more like it.

[Gyllenhaal’s] direction is unemphatic without ever being tentative, and she’s made a film with a relaxed, easy rhythm — but not too easy.

Trust me on this: Go.

Argo is absurdly suspenseful for both of its hours. I've never been this stressed-out watching people shred documents.

The movie unfolds like something out of E.M. Forster, but Assayas isn't all that interested in family dynamics. Instead, he's made a chronicle of how the children will handle the sale of the house and its treasures.

It's the best drug-busting movie since ''The French Connection.''

Odd, moving, strained cinematic poetry.

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.