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.

What gives the film its tension, apart from Hitchcock's masterly manipulation of suspense as he sends them into a wine cellar used to conceal uranium, is his way of connecting with Bergman's masochism and Grant's stoniness as they circle one another, mutually attracted but holding back. [03 Apr 1992, p.94]

The most fascinatingly self-revelatory Hitchcock film of all...Vertigo is so dreamy, so druggy, that when it does actually introduce a dream scene, it seems excessive, jarring. And if Hitchcock was able to pick up on Stewart's capacity for relentlessness, he also exploited that side of Stewart's persona that told America it was watching a decent, homespun, plain-spoken guy. Stewart's character gets away with telling Novak who and what to be because he is able to convince us he is, at bottom, an innocent himself - and a victim. [25 Oct 1996, p.C10]

One of his (Bergman's) most life-affirming films.

Why revisit Shoah 25 years after it was first released? Because it matters more a quarter century on, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and - if it and we survive - a thousand.

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

The results bear witness to a time when sacrifice was bleached of everything but itself.

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

In its quietly radical grace, it’s a cultural watershed — a work that dismantles all the ways our media view young black men and puts in their place a series of intimate truths. You walk out feeling dazed, more whole, a little cleaner.

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.

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.

Foreign intrigue is raised to an art form.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

Hoop Dreams is without peer among sports-oriented documentaries to the extent that it's about people before it's about athletic feats. It respects its subjects' complexity and tenacity while nailing the problematic, double-edged influence of sports in America. In fact, no film has ever combined sports and family values as powerfully as Hoop Dreams. There's simply nothing like it. [21 Oct 1994, p.47]

Rashomon truly is a warhorse of US art-house cinema, and by any yardstick it's the film that opened the door for Asian filmmaking in this country. [23 Apr 2010, p.12]

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]

In Ran, color plays a role not unlike that of language in "Lear": a kind of ground bass of beauty, a product of pure imagination, that both affirms life and surpasses it. Yet Kurosawa uses that beauty more as negation: a reminder not of what man is capable of but how puny he is in comparison.

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.

The phone scene, in which he's on the hot line to his Russian counterpart, is a classic of prevarication, a masterpiece of nothingspeak in the face of disaster. [28 Oct 1994, p.48]

Quo Vadis, Aida? has the narrative beats and the intensity of a classic thriller: a cornered protagonist, an implacable villain, a breathless pace, hair’s-breadth escapes.

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

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people.

Parasite becomes a social satire of almost breathless audacity, a three-dimensional chess game of Darwinian one-upmanship that is by turns hilarious, terrifying, and brutal.

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]

Like all the best films, Roma is achingly specific while constantly opening up to the universal.

A marvel of energy, wit, and visual imagination, The Man With a Movie Camera remains one of the most exhilarating movies ever made. [06 Feb 2015, p.G5]

Delivers chunks of ''Yellow Submarine'' and ''The Phantom Tollbooth'' -- a vividly timeless oddity suitable for many children and most stoners.

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]

Killer of Sheep is a drama that’s hardly at all dramatic, which makes it all the more moving. It’s quiet, unhurried, understated, unblinking. Mood matters more than style, dailiness more than incident. All movies are about other movies. A few are also about life. “Killer of Sheep” is one of them.

Summer of Soul captures a moment of the past that was launching itself into the future in a way that feels wholly relevant and inspirational to the present. The movie is a gift.

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]

12 Years a Slave is to the “peculiar institution” what “Schindler’s List” was to the Holocaust: a work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself. If there’s no Oskar Schindler here, that’s partly the point.

Manchester by the Sea is an experience worth having, not for the magnificence of its impact or the far-flung grandeur of its settings but for the way it illuminates with quiet, unyielding grace how you and I and our neighbors get by, and sometimes how we don’t.

The Battle of Algiers is a thinking person's action film in which there are winners -- but no heroes.

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.

All the voice work here is excellent, especially Oswalt's. He sounds like Paul Giamatti but with a greater capacity for confidence.

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]

The movie’s an astonishingly detailed, visually painstaking state-of-the-art production that advances what the cinema can show us—even as the human story at its center feels a little thin after a while.

Chaplin's sentimental politics and peerless comic invention dovetailed more perfectly in this film than in any other he made.

The one aspect of the original Producers that still stuns is the roaring, over-the-top, in-your-face thereness of its two lead performances.

Walt Disney meets classical music with a film that didn't become famous until it was re-released in the '60s and became the ultimate drug film for folks fond of LSD. It is a wonderful animation trip for adults but children might be a bit bored by the lack of story and long running time. Treat it like MTV - a few bits here and there instead of one sitting. [01 Nov 1991, p.35]

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

Contrary to Gil Scott-Heron’s song, the revolution of “One Battle After Another” feels more televised than live. After 161 minutes of it, I was tempted to turn the channel.

On the level of craft, the movie's just absurdly enjoyable. Sorkin's dialogue dazzles; the photography is burnished and sleek; the editing confidently sorts out a complex narrative.

Céline Sciamma’s extraordinary fourth feature and a movie of body, heart, and mind.

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.

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

What happens between two people? Only the chemistry that keeps us from stumbling through the chaos by ourselves. Is that an illusion, too? Amour says it doesn't much matter. There is no dignity in life except love.

In The Hurt Locker, the thrill is unexpectedly contagious. You don't realize how riveted you are until you're back on American soil observing James in civilian life.

It's a movie made with the same coolly fanatical attention to craft the lead character displays in her work. Bigelow is now recognized as one of our true filmmaking naturals.

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.

Freshly viewed, the movie's melancholy seems to fit uncannily well in the moment we find ourselves now. In the film there are mentions of nuclear annihilation and worries that heedless lust and wanton partying could bring Rome a second fall.

The best American film of the year to date.

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

If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul.

Both in spite of and because of the dichotomy, Amazing Grace demands to be seen, preferably in a crowded, testifying theater. The movie allows us the great, rare privilege of seeing (and hearing) the Queen of Soul reclaiming her soul, by herself, for herself, for her God.

Taken as a whole, Dunkirk invites comparisons to the works of Kubrick and Spielberg, but it’s neither as scalding as “Full Metal Jacket” nor as clear-eyed, as aware of war’s terrible randomness, as “Saving Private Ryan.” Instead, a streak of honest sentiment, earned under the most hellish of circumstances, courses through this movie and provides it with spine and a soul.

I emerged from the movie in a white-out haze of emotions, synapses overloaded, grateful beyond words to an actress who can convey so much with such subtlety of means.

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.

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

Watching it is a nonstop high.

Nearly four decades after its release, The Wild Child remains startling for its humane clarity, for Nestor Almendros's brilliant black-and-white photography, and for the sense that Truffaut is achieving filmmaking mastery on a very small scale.

But as good as it is, the film falls short of translating the exaltation and near-gospel music feel of the band in full flight. [2 Nov 1984]

Hitchcock at his cynical best. [18 Sept 1988, p.87]

It is a joy for audiences seeking entertainment, an ingenious work of craft for those paying close attention, and a wallop of feeling that’s still too rare coming from a cartoon.

It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.

Smashing drama of the old-fashioned kind, plus elegant perceptive characterization of the modern school, combined to make Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest films of the decade. [22 Sep 1950, p.12]

The documentary is an absolute delight, but it has a faith in everyday folks that feels both stalwart and melancholy, aware that these are exactly the people being swept away by the tides of modernity. It’s a sociopolitical cri de coeur disguised as a vacation.

Song masterfully simplifies things on an emotional level, allowing us to switch back and forth between feelings or simply to meditate on the outcome we wish for, and to understand why it’s OK if we don’t get it.

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.

Badlands is one of the great banality-of-evil films. [29 May 1998, p.C9]

A richly detailed sexual and emotional coming of age story, the movie’s based on a novel and it unfolds novelistically, through glances and asides and slowly accreting observations.

Carlos moves like a greyhound out of the gate, fleet and assured and focused on the business at hand. It's a subtle, ultimately staggering portrayal of a bloody-minded ideologue who convinced only himself.

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.

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.

The film's look makes a divine accessory for its music, which Miles Davis composed. There's not even 20 minutes of it in the film, yet it still defines the atmosphere, transforming a crime yarn into a bebop noir.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers they ain’t. Stone’s singing voice is a soulful wisp of a thing. But this is the moment that convinced me the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, knew exactly what he was doing. What his stars lack in training they make up for in relatability. They sing and dance just a little better than we would.

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

As debuts go, Lady Bird is as strong as they get: funny, ferocious, and wise. It does, however, drape its restless energy and witty observations atop an overfamiliar framework of coming-of-age movies.

This is a very patient movie, filled with equally patient performances, lyrical camerawork and some stunning images of its characters residing within the frame.

Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt.

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

It’s the classic modern dynamic of lefty parent and tightly-wound yuppie spawn, but Toni Erdmann takes it out of sitcom territory and into something longer, richer, weirder, and ultimately a great deal more affecting.

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

Because Howard never stops moving, neither does the movie, and the effect is both exhausting and electrifying. Watching this latest bulletin from the Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh, is like grabbing hold of a high-voltage line: It doesn’t feel that great, but good luck letting go.

A transporting cinematic experience with a churl at its center, and how you feel about the movie may depend on how you feel about the churl.

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]

Days of Being Wild shows Wong discovering his own cinematic language, and he's as astonished as we are.

TÁR is ambitious, unusual, forceful, and ultimately frustrating, an emotional epic that’s also a nose-against-the-glass view of classical music and unconventional take on the #MeToo movement in that world.

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.

As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]

The vividly realized squalor, cruelty, and ugliness engulf everything, including the narrative.

The film, dazzling and poignant and five years in the making, retells the ancient Indian epic "The Ramayana" from a gentle but insistent feminist perspective.

Part courtroom drama, part murder mystery, part social anthropology, Brother's Keeper is nonstop fascinating. [19 Sep 1992, p.29]

Panahi deftly juggles his stories, merging them together in the devastating final minutes of No Bears.

One of the reasons that Spotlight is so deeply, absurdly satisfying to this newspaper writer — is that Tom McCarthy’s movie doesn’t turn its journalists into heroes. It just lets them do their jobs, as tedious and critical as those are, with a realism that grips an audience almost in spite of itself.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

He even calls the majestic view from one of the hospital landings his Cinecittà, after the legendary Italian film studio. The movie is a Cinecittà of the mind.