A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

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

Offers a surprising and revealing look at Russia's past and present.

Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.

This is one of the year’s best films, and the most fun you’ll have at the theater this summer.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

Gas Food Lodging is a film about nourishment on a financial and emotional shoestring. It's a delight. [19 Sept 1992, p.29]

Burning, from South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, is a beautifully cryptic slow burner that lingers long in the senses. It’s the kind of film where you obsess over what it means, the better to avoid thinking about how it makes you feel.

A masterpiece.

Fresh is urgent, impressively thought out, tightly coiled. Written, directed and acted with invigorating subtlety, there's nothing stale about Fresh. It's an original, and it's terrific. [31 Aug 1994, p.27]

Not only exhilarating and cathartic. It's too funny to be ignored.

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.

Implicitly acknowledges and celebrates the glorious chicanery and self-delusion of this most American of businesses, and for that reason it may be the most oddly honest Hollywood document of all.

A milestone of eloquent understatement that captures the daily life of have-nots as few American movies have.

Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, an effortless display of poise from its camerawork and costumes to the characters and the things they say.

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

A subtle, often very funny, ultimately touching tragedy of royal manners and meaning.

As a star-studded (and highly fictionalized) history lesson, Air is massively entertaining and one of the best films of 2023 so far. It also works as a nostalgia piece for people like me who, in their youth, lusted after the pricey footwear.

“[Dance] gives you nothing back,” says Cage. “No manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Kovgan’s film comes close to capturing that moment.

With Carrey hitting a career peak, this Grinch doesn't steal Christmas; it restores the season by helping energize us enough to make it through the whole thing.

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

This is the kind of film that reminds you of what movies, at their best, are capable of.

The impact of this stunning film - and the lessons to be learned from it - are as remarkable as when it was first released 30 years ago.

The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.

It’s about spycraft, but it goes to the source. If for no other reason, it deserves to be seen for arranging decades of events in the Middle East into a chronology that, to an outsider, makes dreadful sense.

When all is said and done, Goodbye to Language may simply be about Jean-Luc Godard exploring 3-D filmmaking, in the same way “The Shining” is really just about Stanley Kubrick wanting to fart around with a Steadicam. Which, honestly, is fine. Great artists use new tools to discover new vehicles for seeing, understanding, living. Be thankful we get to come along for the ride.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.