It's my favorite movie...Chinatown is a complex reminder of how movies were made when filmmakers held the cards - before product placement, marketers, and agents assumed control of the business. Before movies had to be sold to studios on the basis of zippy one-liners. I dare say that the movie wouldn't stand a chance of getting the green light today unless Julia Roberts was interested in playing Jane Gittes. [5 Nov 1999, p.D5]

In nerve, guts, heart, and mind — one of the finest films of 2017.

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.

From the first bracing hint of self-mockery in its title to its smoky, after-hours resolution, it's a grabber and a delight, constantly surpassing our expectations. [13 Oct 1989, p.35]

A grand, dark, grave, severe piece of first-rate cinema.

It's the only film that exists of the Ghetto, and it's both revelatory and profoundly suspect.

An eloquent ecological warning.

A heart-rending account of people trying to dodge the hurdles that politics puts in front of them. By the end of this humanist epic, some are ennobled by their struggle. Most are exhausted.

The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.

All sword and sorcery movies are parodies, but Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is the best intentional parody that hardware-heavy genre has ever seen, piling conventions from other genres on top of it until the screen seems a multilayered deli delight...Entertaining and ingeniously resourceful, it's a virtuosic comic-strip movie. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.

This is Spielberg’s most personal film, and it’s intriguing to watch him pay homage to the directors who made up his group of friends in the early 1970s.

Simple, but loaded. It celebrates the humanity and humanism at the heart of Iran's remarkable flow of films, but it's also more of a rebuke to materialistic values than any ideologue could ever hope to be.

Barbie knows it can be construed as a giant Mattel commercial. Look at how it highlights Barbie’s outfits by having them stop in midair for product identification, or how even the discontinued Barbies have houses in Barbie Land. That self-awareness is part of the charm, along with the clever way the plot unfolds and the genuine love Gerwig has for her characters.

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.

What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?

As Anthony, a blustery London widower whose grip on reality slowly comes unglued over the course of the film, Hopkins does it again. This is a magnificent and harrowing performance: A lion in winter slowly coming to ground.

Longer on atmosphere and observation than on story, but you don't mind: Coppola maintains her quietly charged tone with a certainty that would be unbelievable in a second film if you didn't suspect genetics had a hand.

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

A hugely entertaining and emotionally resonant pleasure for audiences of all ages.

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.

By giving his actors a three-dimensional world, del Toro sparks their imaginations — and ours. The result is a beautiful, bittersweet, and occasionally horrific look at what it means to be human.

An invigoratingly mordant comedy that proves that Alexander Payne's rambunctious debut, "Citizen Ruth," was no fluke.

Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.

Generous in its emotions as well as its visuals, it makes its healing energies real because it takes the trouble to make its characters' pain believable. It's a big, bold, slightly old-fashioned film carried by its heartfelt conviction, by Barbra Streisand's painstaking direction and self-effacing acting, and by Nick Nolte. [25 Dec 1991, p.47]

Ex Libris has no narration and it lasts three hours and 17 minutes, which sounds like torture (or, alternately, 3½ episodes of “Game of Thrones”). Somewhat surprisingly, the movie rushes by at the speed of life.

First and foremost, Good Will Hunting is a film riding young, exuberant energies.

Broadcast News grows in your memory. It recalls an era when movies were made by, for and with three-dimensional characters you cared about. Let's hope it doesn't take James L. Brooks another four years to make another one. We can't wait that long. [25 Dec 1987, p.53]