The notion that only whites can be racist barely survives this riveting 2009 documentary.

A key film noir of the 40s, this was Nicholas Ray's first film as a director, and the freshness of his expressionist-documentary style is still apparent and gripping.

The tense climax stretches the story's credibility to the breaking point, but for the most part this is noir of an exceptionally high caliber, its sequence of events revealing two complicated and compromised people.

This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."

Warren Beatty sounds off angrily and shrewdly about politics, delivering what is possibly his best film and certainly his funniest and livliest.

It's an inspired pairing. Wilson is electric as he seduces Chan into a partnership in this self-consciously crafted western, whose cleverness is only part of what makes it so funny.

This pared-away comedy-drama, which concentrates exclusively on the three characters, has plenty of old-fashioned virtues: deft acting, a nice sense of scale that makes the drama agreeably life-size, a good use of Seattle locations, fluid camera work (by Michael Ballhaus), a kind of burnished romanticism about the music, and a genuine feeling for the characters and their various means of coping. And Pfeiffer turns out to be a terrific singer.

Arnaud Desplechin's best movie to date.

Much of the film's potency derives from its personal edge -- the passion for precise period decor, the title dedicating the film to Leigh's parents (a doctor and midwife), and even the childlike classification of many characters as either good souls or villains.

The film is one of Donen’s most formally perfect works—innovative, involving, and, in case there’s any doubt, finally optimistic.

Peck's icy remove works for once—as a kid's idea of a parent, he's frighteningly effective.

The scenes are so dramatically cogent the characters' lives seem to stretch far beyond the concluding blackouts.

This may be the most literate of all the spectacles set in antiquity.

Its great distinction lies in re-creating an age when thoughts and feelings were to be carefully considered and precisely enunciated. The best costumers, set designers, and property masters can’t conjure up the mental and emotional spaces of a simpler era; that requires a filmmaker who knows the virtue of quiet, patience, and attentiveness.

Yuya Yagira, winner of the best actor award at Cannes this year, is superb as the protective eldest child; he and his other nonprofessional costars are quietly heartbreaking.

Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much better known.

Film is still an impressive piece of work, visually and rhythmically masterful.

An impressive mix of entertainment and social comment, spinning a great mystery even as it confronts an ugly world.

The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements.

The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs, graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre.

Though still realist in approach, its aura of bitter nostalgia places it squarely among Fellini's most personal and atmospheric works.

This incredible but true story marks the first time Eastwood's signature themes have found expression in a woman's experience, and the absence of any distracting machismo only heightens his sense of helpless rage at the perpetual anguish of victims' families.

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

Warmly recommended to viewers who like their romantic comedies small-scale but life-size.

His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one.

Not to be hyperbolic, but Richard Linklater's first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch.

The results are skillful, highly affecting, and ultimately more than a little pernicious.

Clint Eastwood's ambitious 1988 feature about the great Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) is the most serious, conscientious, and accomplished jazz biopic ever made, and almost certainly Eastwood's best picture as well.

A triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.

Impressive for its lean and unblemished storytelling, but even more so for its performances.

Impeccably crafted and utterly impersonal, Lasse Hallstrom's adaptation of John Irving's novel has many of the qualities Oscar is known to appreciate.

Writer-director Wong Kar-wai makes these five self-consciously idiosyncratic types--often seen through distorting lenses in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's somber, garish Hong Kong--fully and instantly believable.

Ford's admirers have rightly tended to play this down in favor of his later and more personal westerns, but there's much to admire here in Gregg Toland's sun-beaten photography and Henry Fonda's meticulous performance as Steinbeck's dashboard saint, Tom Joad.

It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films, but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.

Exciting not as ethnography but as storytelling, as drama, and as filmmaking.

I was floored by Cronenberg's mastery of the material. Fiennes gives one of his finest performances; Miranda Richardson, playing at least three characters in the protagonist's twisted vision, is no less impressive.

Action-adventure pictures have a lamentable tendency toward mindlessness, but Edward Zwick's epic story has numerous virtues apart from suspense and spectacle.

The outrages of pedophile priests have generated screaming headlines but relatively little understanding of the Catholic culture that permitted and concealed such crimes, which makes this informed documentary by Amy Berg all the more valuable.

It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did—certainly more fun than anything he made after it.

This 1973 feature is one of the finest examples of action montage from its period, a dynamite piece of work.

Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.

A lot more imaginative and entertaining than one might have thought possible, a feast for the eye and mind.

The Walt Disney animators returned to top form with this beautifully crafted and wonderfully expressive cartoon feature, the first major work to come out of the Disney studios in a decade. There are limitations to Disney's naturalistic style, but for every failure of imagination there is a triumph of craftsmanship.

The old surrealist created another masterpiece in this, his final film.

Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of his 1984 thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he's ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences.

An astonishing tour de force--especially for Irons, whose sense of nuance is so refined that one can tell in a matter of seconds which twin he is playing in a particular scene.

Richard Linklater goes Hollywood (1995) -- triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock.

Parents may not approve of this dark, violent 1981 children's film, which is what makes it such a good one. The film is resolutely, passionately antiadult, yet much of the humor has an adult sophistication and edge to it; this is one kids' movie that doesn't condescend.

Everyone concedes that this 1941 Hitchcock film is a failure, yet it displays so much artistic seriousness that I find its failure utterly mysterious—especially since the often criticized ending (imposed on Hitchcock by the studio) makes perfect sense to me.

The story unfolds at such length and over so many years that politics tend to fade into the wallpaper, leaving an exceptionally rich family story.

This movie restores genre elements to a level of potency that's disturbing, satisfying, and rare as hell.

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.

Director George Tillman Jr.'s screenplay covers an array of events in the characters' lives so replete with drama it could easily be too much, but the movie's humor is vibrant, the sorrow unexploitive, the sexuality character enhancing, and the love heartfelt--and Tillman is tremendously skilled at bridging the vast shifts in tone.

Made for less than $30,000, Lee's first feature poses him as a rival to Woody Allen, nearly equaling him in psychological authenticity, perhaps bettering him in virtuosity and sheer creative glee.

Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy.

This may not have gotten much publicity, but it's a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable.

He doesn't lose his stylistic identity either: in addition to the very Mamet-like delivery of unfinished sentences, his command of rhythm and flow remains flawless throughout.

The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.

A critic-proof movie if there ever was one: it isn't all that good, but somehow it's great.

A scene set inside the chicken-pie-making machinery proves that the Rube Goldberg formula is infallible.

As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism.

Chereau's film is both an observant portrait of class-bound London by a foreigner and an empathetic look at sexual passion that completely avoids cheap prurience.

The movie evokes Howard Hawks (in spirit if not to the letter) with its tight focus on a snug, obsessive world of insiders and camp followers where the exchanges between buddies and sexes have a euphoric stylishness and a giddy sense of ritual.

The miracle of Murnau’s mise-en-scene is to fill the simple plot and characters with complex, piercing emotions, all evoked visually through a dense style that embraces not only spectacular expressionism but a subtle and delicate naturalism.

A fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery.

Genuinely frightening...it's nice for a change to see some of the virtues of old-fashioned horror films—moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show—rather than the usual splatter shocks and special effects (far from absent, but employed with relative economy).

The skillful Patrick Marber (Closer) adapted this gripping drama from a novel by Zoe Heller, and it's both literate and urgently plotted, with a voice-over from Dench that cuts like broken glass.

While not nearly the musical it's cracked up to be, this 1951 film is absolutely required viewing for anyone who wants to see the studio system (MGM style) at its gaudiest, most Byzantine height. Art and technology have never been in closer harmony than in this Vincente Minnelli-directed rendition of George Gershwin's concert masterpiece.

A genuine rarity: a sex comedy with brains.

Like the first two movies, this is loaded with computer-generated imagery, but for the first time there's a sense of dramatic proportion balancing the spectacle and the story line.

Lee performs magic. He's preserved and expanded the experience of an adrenaline-pumping, uproarious night of racism-, classism-, and sexism-subverting humor.

Birmingham and coscreenwriter Matt Drake adapted a short story by Tom McNeal, elaborating on its plot but beautifully capturing its low-key poeticism.

Its intelligent characterizations make it one of the best movies I've seen this year.

The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.

Carpenter displays an almost perfect understanding of the mechanics of classical suspense; his style draws equally (and intelligently) from both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock.

This deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward's exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance as India Bridge, a frustrated, well-to-do WASP Kansas City housewife and mother during the 30s and 40s; and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the books.

This is absorbing throughout--not just a history lesson but, as always with Rohmer, a story about individuals

So fraught with unresolved issues of class, sexuality, and spiritual need, and so carefully observed by Pawlikowski, that it opens out like the movie's West Yorkshire countryside.

Some delicately interwoven and unresolved subplots help make the young character's rite of passage wholly, disturbingly compelling.

Writer-director Cary Fukunaga keeps the story lean while peppering it with realistic details.

This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it's an amazing and beautiful work just the same.

A wonderfully complex examination of sexual and material politics that's full of bravely provocative, gently funny, and warmly human encounters.

This 1971 thriller about a heroin bust is solid, slick filmmaking, full of dirty cops, shrewd operators, and slam-bang action. Friedkin's close study of Raoul Walsh pays off in the justly celebrated chase sequence.

Enchanting and impressively crafted.

Magical, visually exciting, affecting even in its sincere hokeyness, and extremely provocative.

Helen Mirren's flinty performance as Elizabeth II is getting all the attention, but equally impressive is Peter Morgan's insightful script for this UK drama, which quietly teases out the social, political, and historical implications of the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Despite a few narrative confusions, I found it pure magic.

Old-fashioned, beautifully crafted biopic of painter Jang Seung-up.

One regrets the pounding Muzak of Tangerine Dream, but this is on the whole a striking directorial debut, at once scary and erotic, with lots of sidelong touches in the casting, direction, and script .

Few things are more enthralling than unrequited love, as demonstrated by this drama.

The tragic tale that emerges is full of powerful lessons and impenetrable mysteries

While it doesn't have the soft-edged sense of wonder that the Travers books have, Walt Disney's 1964 version of the Mary Poppins story does manage to avoid the usual saccharine excesses of his live-action work.

You feel it in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaning.

Using archly staged interviews and reconstructions that draw attention to the components of the documentary form, Morris does justice to the complexity of hot-button issues by suggesting several layers of subtext at once, portraying the articulate Leuchter as both rational and prone to rationalize.

Based on a true story, Ken Loach’s powerful and disturbing British drama (1994) about a single working-class mother with four children from four different fathers is made unforgettable by stand-up comedian Crissy Rock’s lead performance and by the filmmakers’ determination to make the story as messy and as complex as life itself.

Propulsive and highly satisfying documentary.

This terrifyingly beautiful movie blends metaphor and stark social commentary to achieve a spontaneous grace.

Some have suggested that the whole story, including the emergence of Mr. Brainwash, is an elaborate hoax engineered by Banksy to satirize the commodification of art. If so, it’s a brilliant one.