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]