Sharp, entertaining, and convincing--discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn't achieved since.

What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were?...Kane is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take "Ambersons," "Falstaff," or "Touch of Evil"), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles - or for that matter about movies in general.

Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock's greatest movie.

The film's superb first two hours, which weave social and historical themes into rich personal drama, turn out to be only a prelude to the magnificent final hour--an extended ballroom sequence that leaves history behind to become one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema. (Review of 1983 Release)

Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified.

The virtuoso sequences—the long kiss, the crane shot into the door key—are justly famous, yet the film's real brilliance is in its subtle and detailed portrayal of infinitely perverse relationships.

A thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema.

The result was one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.

One of the shining glories of the American musical, this 1952 feature was fabricated (by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green) around a collection of old songs written by producer Arthur Freed and brought to bright, brash, and exuberant life by directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The setting is Hollywood's troubled transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to structure the film's superb selection of numbers.

The most visually inventive film of the 60s is also one of the funniest.

As masterful as Welles's filming is, what makes Touch of Evil a staggering masterpiece is the global quality of his style, which causes every image to echo almost every other in the film.

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

A beautiful example of Chaplin's ability to turn narrative fragments into emotional wholes. The two halves of the film are sentiment and slapstick. They are not blended but woven into a pattern as eccentric as it is sublime.

One of the great breakthroughs—the Ulysses of the cinema—and a powerful, moving experience in its own right.

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.

Along with Dumbo, which immediately followed it, this 1940 classic, the second of the Disney animated features, is probably the best in terms of visual detail and overall imagination as well as narrative sweep.

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.

Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.

This is vintage Hitchcock, with the pacing and superb editing that marked not only his 30s style but eventually every film that had any aspirations whatever to achieving suspense and rhythm.

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.

John Huston was rarely in better form than he was directing this 1948 study of gold fever and worse obsessions among an unlikely trio of prospectors... Bogart is outstanding as the pathetic bully Fred C. Dobbs.

Unlike most horror movies, this chiller gives equal prominence to reality and fantasy, though the reality is far more frightening. The only precedent that comes to mind in terms of a lyrical treatment of a child's experience of terror is "The Night of the Hunter."

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

A great film, and certainly one of the most entertaining movies ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock at his peak.

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

Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory.

The dialogue is sharp and justly famous, though writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has trouble putting it into the mouths of his actors: nothing sounds remotely natural, and the film is pervaded by the out-of-sync sense of staircase wit—this is a movie about what people wished they'd said. The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.

Departing from a masterful manipulation of space, Lang transforms the futuristic city of the title into a field of dreams centered on death and sexuality.

With this 1961 film Truffaut comes closest to the spirit and sublimity of his mentor, Jean Renoir, and the result is a masterpiece of the New Wave.

Day-Lewis's performance is necessarily a bit showy—one has to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the character's contorted features—but he puts on a terrific drunk scene, and for all his character's travails the film as a whole winds up surprisingly upbeat.

An enduring masterpiece--dark, deep, beautiful, aglow.

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

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

It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content.

Yet some of the laughs come too easy and linger too long; for the film's message to have maximum impact, the laughter has to stick in your throat.

The opening half-hour--the burglary of a jewelry store, filmed in meticulous detail--is as good as its inspiration in The Asphalt Jungle, but the film turns moralistic and sour in the last half, when the thieves fall out.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece blends a brutal manipulation of audience identification and an incredibly dense, allusive visual style to create the most morally unsettling film ever made. The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure. It's a deeply serious and deeply disturbing work, but Hitchcock, with his characteristic perversity, insisted on telling interviewers that it was a "fun" picture.

In a truly great movie the form becomes indistinguishable from the story, and that’s certainly the case here.

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.

They are also great performances, and Hawks could have taken heart from Kim Hunter's work, which provides superb, understated balance to the famous fireworks of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Kazan's direction is often questionably, distractingly baroque, swelling up the considerable subtlety of the Tennessee Williams play, but if the hothouse style was ever justified, this is the occasion.

The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?

A brilliant work of popular art, it redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity and established a new narrative style, with locale replacing plot, that has since been imitated to the point of ineffectiveness.

Mechanically written, but within its own middlebrow limitations, it delivers the goods.

Though it was made during a bitter artists' strike in 1941, it's one of Disney's most charming and perfectly proportioned films, uninflated by the cultural pretensions Uncle Walt was fond of slipping in.

Just a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways.

Enchanting and impressively crafted.

Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios join forces on an entertaining computer-generated, hyperrealist animation feature that's also in effect a toy catalog.

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.

Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense.

Shot on a shoestring and none the worse for it, Jean-Luc Godard’s gritty and engaging first feature had an almost revolutionary impact when first released in 1960.

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

Lester serves up a helping of what, on this side of the pond, we came to think of as kicky, mod British filmmaking

A technical masterpiece replete with self-consciously allegorical overtones rising to a politically simpleminded din. A rare and puzzling movie: beautiful and cruel, passionate but strangely shallow.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift star in Howard Hawks’s epic 1948 western—one of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle.

A very sophisticated, very effective piece of work spun from primal images, with an excellent cast.

George Cukor gives it the royal treatment with a splendid supporting cast.

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.

Superbly rendered CGI animation.

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.

Though the film isn't as psychologically penetrating as some of Disney's later work, it retains the Freudian ferocity of the Grimm brothers fairy tale, as well as a fair measure of the scatological humor of the Disney shorts. David Hand was the supervising director, but Uncle Walt passed on every frame.

A breathtaking study of the relationships between life and theater, mime and tragedy, the real and the imagined, sound and silence. It runs 187 minutes, and it's worth every one of them.

Martin Scorsese's intrusive insistence on his abstract, metaphysical theme—the possibility of modern sainthood—marks this 1973 film, his first to attract critical notice, as still somewhat immature, yet the acting and editing have such an original, tumultuous force that the picture is completely gripping.

Preston Sturges extended his range beyond the crazy farces that had made his reputation with this romantic 1941 comedy, and his hand proved just as sure.

Charlie Chaplin finally got around to acknowledging the 20th century in this 1936 film, which substitutes machine-age gags for the fading Victoriana of his other work. Consequently, it's the coldest of his major features, though no less brilliant for it.

A masterpiece of the art of animation. The concept and some of the episodes are tainted with kitsch, but there's no other animated film with its scope and ambition—it is, in Otis Ferguson's words, “one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world.”

Whale added an element of playful sexuality to this version, casting the proceedings in a bizarre visual framework that makes this film a good deal more surreal than the original.

A frightening and consistently inventive horror story... It's busy on the surface and empty in the center, but somehow it works.

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

Cukor doesn't try to hide the stage origins of his material; rather, he celebrates the falseness of his sets, placing his characters in a perfectly designed artificial world. Every frame of this 1964 film bespeaks Cukor's grace and commitment—it's an adaptation that becomes completely personal through the force of its mise-en-scene.

Such is the extraordinary achievement of The Hurt Locker: it has the perspective of years when those years have yet to pass.

A prime contender for Otto Preminger's greatest film—a superb courtroom drama packed with humor and character that shows every actor at his or her best.

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.

The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy.

Wilder trades Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives.

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.

The film was hugely successful and widely praised in its time, though it's really nothing more than the old C.B. De Mille formula of titillation and moralizing--Roman orgies and Christian martyrs--with only a fraction of De Mille's showmanship.

Spielberg does an uncommonly good job both of holding our interest over 185 minutes and of showing more of the nuts and bolts of the Holocaust than we usually get from fiction films. Despite some characteristic simplifications, he's generally scrupulous about both his source and the historical record.

The movie's first half is largely free of dialogue, playing like silent comedy, while the second act offers a breathtaking tour of the cosmos.

Hawks’s great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways.

A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous.

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.

Perhaps the most formally ravishing-as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic-film ever directed by Martin Scorsese.

Yang seems to miss nothing as he interweaves shifting viewpoints and poignant emotional refrains.

A veritable salad of mixed genres and emotional textures, this exciting black-and-white cold war thriller runs more than two hours and never flags for an instant...A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.

By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.

Rivals the films of Hayao Miyazaki in elevating anime to the level of fine art.

The first Ang Lee film I've seen that I've liked without qualification.

One of Francois Truffaut's best middle-period films, albeit one of his darkest and most conservative.

It's 88 minutes of solid, inventive music, filmed in a straightforward manner that neither deifies the performers nor encourages an illusory intimacy, but presents the musicians simply as people doing their job and enjoying it.

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.

Payne's entertaining but familiar comedy lacks the insolence of his "Election" and the freshness of his work with Kathy Bates in "About Schmidt."

Vincente Minnelli created one of his masterpieces with this loosely plotted but tightly structured 1944 story of a middle-class family waiting through spring, summer, and fall for the opening of the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904.

A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder’s better efforts.

I wouldn't call this 1960 picture one of Billy Wilder's best comedies—it's drab, sappy, and overlong at 125 minutes.

One of the earliest and best antiwesterns, made before the subgenre became self-conscious about critiquing the standard myths. Some that followed are merely contrary; this has the ring of truth.

The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.

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

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.