Blake Edwards's 1982 sex comedy has the most beautiful range of tones of any American film of its period: it is a work of dry wit, high slapstick, black despair, romantic warmth, and penetrating intelligence.

One of the forgotten masterworks of Disney animation...No other Disney feature achieved this level of exuberant abstraction, or displayed the same sheer pleasure in the magic of the animator's art.

A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace.

The casting of Reeves in the lead role is inspired: who better than the star of "The Matrix" and its sequels, a trilogy that borrows heavily from Dick's sensibility and obsessions, to play a personality split through overindulgence in drugs and manipulation by outside forces he barely recognizes?

An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.

As emblems of sexual tension, divine retribution, meaningless chaos, metaphysical inversion, and aching human guilt, his attacking birds acquire a metaphorical complexity and slipperiness worthy of Melville. Tippi Hedren's lead performance is still open to controversy, but her evident stage fright is put to sublimely Hitchcockian uses.

There’s no denying that Cyclo is a visionary piece of work, shot through with passion and poetry.

A clarion call for freedom and collective action both hopeful and energizing, it qualifies as a generational statement as Rebel Without a Cause did in the 50s, but without the defeatism and masochism. Not to be missed.

Ties everything together with a dazzling synthesis of pagan animism, heroic quest mythology, orientalism, Pre-Raphaelite imagery, 1950s sci-fi creature features, and Hollywood war epics.

In many ways, the ultimate Billy Wilder film, replete with breathless pacing, transvestite humor, and unflinching cynicism. Most of it is hilarious, but there is something disquieting in the way Wilder dances around his sexual theme—the film never really says what it's about, which might be just as well

This 2005 masterpiece by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov transforms the story of Emperor Hirohito at the close of World War II into a melancholy meditation on power and its loss.

As with the earlier movie, this one turns in on its own morality like a Möbius strip, endorsing kindness by practicing slaughter, and pulls us along for the ride. Detractors will call its reasoning ridiculous, and they'll be right - though I doubt that will bother Goldthwait, who makes a living being ridiculous.

When the interrupters do succeed, the results can be riveting.

Directors Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV, brothers and native sons of Sidney, find poetry in images of the mundane.

Tarantino's mock-tough narrative--which derives most of its titillation from farcical mayhem, drugs, deadpan macho monologues, evocations of anal penetration, and terms of racial abuse--resembles a wet dream for 14-year-old male closet queens (or, perhaps more accurately, the 14-year-old male closet queen in each of us), and his command of this smart-alecky mode is so sure that this nervy movie sparkles throughout with canny twists and turns.

It's American filmmaking at its finest—clean, clear, and direct—and it's also the most optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against human ruin.

This powerful South African drama turns on the debut performance of young Presley Chweneyagae as the hood, and it's magnificent: a stone-faced killer in the opening scenes, he becomes an open book as the story progresses, as frightened, confused, and needy as the baby he drags around town in a shopping bag.

Its special effects are used so seamlessly as part of an overall artistic strategy that, as critic Annette Michelson has pointed out, they don't even register as such, and thus are almost impossible to trivialize, a feat unmatched in movies.

Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional... This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he's already clearly a master.

Time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again.

The movie gradually deepens from odd-couple comedy into Catholic-themed drama, but it remains marvelously funny throughout. Instead of hitting the easy notes of black humor, McDonagh skillfully modulates between broad character laughs and the men's piercing anguish as the story nears its bloody conclusion.

Three Times, one of the peaks of his (Hou Hsiao-hsien) career, may be your last chance to see his work inside a movie theater.

The three lead actors all manage to be terrific without showing off—Leigh, in the course of an exquisite performance, does one of the best impersonations of a country southern accent I've ever heard—and the use of Miami locations is a consistent delight. The late Willeford wrote four Hoke Moseley novels, and this crisp, funny, grisly, and perfectly balanced adaptation makes me yearn for Armitage to film a few more of them.

Strange and wonderful.

Holofcener's work is often classified as comedy of manners, but at her best she trades in something much more resonant--the comedy of mores. Here she dives into the fascinating matter of why some people impulsively give and others compulsively take, and how people are taught to second-guess and quash their own generous impulses.

It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.

Werner Herzog is a stranger in a strange land as soon as he gets out of bed in the morning: in this travelogue of Antarctica, his perverse curiosity and zest for the harshest extremes of nature transform what might have been a standard TV special into an idiosyncratic expression of wonder.

Let it suffice to say that if you've heard something about “montage” (the joining of filmed images to suggest an idea, create a mood, or evoke a theme), this is the work that defines it.

he Diving Bell and the Butterfly fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it’s deeply personal yet universal in its humanism.

The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling.

A film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn. Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality.

This is a masterwork by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old father of African cinema and one of Senegal's greatest novelists.

A knockout thriller that succeeds brilliantly at just about everything Scorsese's Cape Fear didn't.

A grand-style, idiosyncratic war epic, with wonderful poetic ideas, intense emotions, and haunting images rich in metaphysical portent.

Writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk collaborated on the formidable "Up and Down" (2004), and this 2006 feature, which takes its title from a Robert Graves poem, is equally impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters.

Its Paris opening in 1939 was a disaster: the film was withdrawn, recut, and eventually banned by the occupying forces for its “demoralizing” effects. It was not shown again in its complete form until 1965, when it became clear that here, perhaps, was the greatest film ever made.

Filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newhman do a superb job of telling this neglected story in vivid detail.

The action sequences are as suspenseful as any in the director's career; the most impressive scenes, though, may be the slower ones, which consider how humanity might evolve after driving itself to near extinction.

A masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's finest works. (Review of Original Release)

Beautifully composed and deftly delivered, it becomes the libretto to Potter's visual music, creating a remarkable lyricism and emotional directness.

It avoids all the maudlin cliches and blind alleys of examining the “meaning of life,” giving us instead a rare portrait of a man experiencing a genuine insight into what his wasted years have been leading to.

Huston's performance is spellbinding. And the naturally lit digital cinematography (by Rose and Ron Forsythe) is both poetic and harrowingly intimate in depicting Ivan's impending death.

A Chayefsky movie isn't hard to identify, but I think it's safe to say that these days a Charlie Kaufman movie is even more recognizable.

The songs don't advance the narrative lyrically so much as follow the two characters' uncertain relationship through the slow realization of their themes; in particular a scene in which they first jam together in the back room of a music store is a gem.

Dogtooth, a bizarre black comedy from Greece that won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2009 Cannes film festival, involves a conventional middle-class family--mom, dad, teenage son, two teenage daughters--that turns out to be warped beyond belief.

This is truly a great film, recently celebrated at length in "My Voyage to Italy," Martin Scorsese's documentary about Italian cinema.

Possibly the most daring and honest drama about sexuality I've ever seen.

Haggis's dialogue is worthy of Hemingway, and the three leads border on perfection.

Given the movie's slow, careful development, I was hardly prepared for the cold-sweat suspense of the last half hour.

I haven't seen the shorter version, but I would hate to lose one moment of the gripping 66-minute sequence-really the heart of the movie-in which Carlos plots and executes his spectacular 1975 raid on the meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna.

The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor.

Gremillon seems the master of every style he attempts, but his genius lies in the smooth linking of those various styles; the film seems to evolve as it unfolds, changing its form in imperceptible stages.

If "Ratatouille" taught the world that rats have feelings too, Persepolis teaches the same thing about the people of Iran, who in the current political climate are probably in greater danger of being eradicated.

As in all the best Fordian cinema, though everything changes and most things die or disappear, what remains in memory and in spirit triumphs—and what on the surface is a tender and sad film becomes instead joyous and robust.

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right," declares Hushpuppy, the fierce, nappy-headed girl at the center of this extraordinary southern gothic.

Shot on a year's worth of weekends on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work--conceivably the best single feature about ghetto life that we have--was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema, an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that has had virtually no distribution. It shouldn't be missed.

The intersections between sleep and waking, memory, cinema, and the Internet lead to a spectacular battle of titans who spring from the mind's darkest recesses.

The juxtaposition of liberal Jewish attorney Dershowitz (Silver) and von Bulow working together on the latter's defense makes for some engagingly offbeat drama, with some interesting insights into the legal process.

This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary.

That's as good a way as any of describing Zulawski's confounding masterpiece. Possession conveys the fear that some terrible rift—madness, war, apocalypse—might sever us from our own identity. Zulawski communicates this by perverting nearly every convention of narrative cinema—even the exterior shots, which we count on to provide a sense of geography.

Bridesmaids is hilariously funny, but what makes it exhilarating is how boldly it defies that conventional wisdom about what men and women like.

Conceivably the best picture Sam Goldwyn ever produced.

A great film but also one of the most upsetting films I know.

The one Welles film that deserves to be called lovely; there is also a rising tide of opinion that proclaims it his masterpiece.

A rapturously beautiful, lyrically dazzling work.

It's not a terribly disciplined exercise--the rehearsal dinner and wedding ceremony go on so long I felt like I was watching "The Deer Hunter"--but the performances are outstanding, especially Hathaway's and Debra Winger's in a small but devastating turn as her chilly, resentful mother.

The movie's dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll.

It's something of a masterpiece: a confessional experimental documentary with echoes, both conscious and unconscious, of filmmakers from Andy Warhol to John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage to David Lynch.

Most comedies start with a straight story and hang jokes on it; Solondz begins with a cosmic joke and takes his characters by the hand as they suffer through it.

Stylistically fresh and full of sweetness that never cloys, this is contemporary Hollywood filmmaking at its near best.

The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford.

Through it all Nader, as ruefully funny as ever, comments on his adventures.

Martin Scorsese transforms a debilitating convention of 80s comedy--absurd underreaction to increasingly bizarre and threatening situations--into a rich, wincingly funny metaphysical farce. A lonely computer programmer is lured from the workday security of midtown Manhattan to an expressionistic late-night SoHo by the vague promise of casual sex with a mysterious blond.

It's one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling.

Watts and Harring even turn out to be the hottest Hollywood couple of 2001. The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing stretches--but that's what Lynch is famous for. It looks great too.

The movie he (Wenders) went on to make with her Tanztheater Wuppertal is more than an elegy; his meticulous use of 3D endows the performances with a corporeality and intimacy hitherto unseen in a dance film.

All this edginess, combined with the grandeur and sweep of a classic western, demonstrates that Jones clearly knows how to tell a story -- and how to confound us at the same time.

The production design is superb, and the actors deliver their dialogue in subtitled Yucatecan Maya, but despite all the anthropological drag, this is really just a crackerjack Saturday-afternoon serial.

This seventh installment is utterly fascinating.

It's a damning indictment of a national disgrace, but it also reveals the incredible faith and resilience of people who have nothing to rely on but themselves.

A heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don't do.

Buñuel conjures with Freudian imagery, outrageous humor, and a quiet, lyrical camera style to create one of his most complex and complete works, a film that continues to disturb and transfix.

With his perfect pacing, elegant narrative design, and depth of characterization, Richard Lester has made as good a matinee movie as could be imagined: it's a big, generous, beautifully crafted piece of entertainment, with the distinctive Lester touch in the busy backgrounds and the throwaway dialogue.

An exquisite, haunting movie for grown-ups about love and family ties.

With a shamelessly cliched script by Amy Holden Jones (based on a novel by Jack Engelhard) that includes a speech plagiarized from Citizen Kane, the results are only for those who can take fare like "Valley of the Dolls" with a straight face and want to see Redford play Jay Gatsby again.

The real protagonist of Moneyball, however, is Beane himself, played with great charisma by Brad Pitt. (With this movie and "The Tree of Life" competing against each other, Pitt could wind up cheating himself out of an Oscar this year.)

Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the riots, but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down--much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis’s hand-wringing Oscar winner "Crash."

Arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most stylistically influential films of the 60s.

Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki perfects his trademark formula of deadpan humor and arctic circle pathos in this brilliantly ironic 2002 comedy.

The founding of Facebook becomes a tale for our times in this masterful social drama.

Orson Welles was so taken with this film that after seeing it he declared Kubrick could do no wrong; not to be missed.

Hitchcock's discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death.

An early voice-over segment about the Casbah itself, before Gabin makes an appearance, is so pungent you can almost taste the place, even though the filming was clearly done in a studio.

Duvall’s direction of a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, especially in the extended church sessions, is never less than masterful.

A triumph not of reporting but of synthesis.

This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.

So accessible and entertaining.

The effect is riveting and telling--not always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening.