Even when Disconnect follows the path we expect it to follow, it does so in a way that keeps us intensely engaged. There wasn't a moment during this movie when I thought about anything other than this movie.

LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors'' is to "In the Company of Men'' as Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction'' was to "Reservoir Dogs.'' In both cases, the second film reveals the full scope of the talent, and the director, given greater resources, paints what he earlier sketched.

We've seen this done before, but seldom so well, or at such a high pitch of energy.

Unlike "Saving Private Ryan" and other dramatizations based on D-Day, Overlord is an intimate film, one that focuses closely on Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), who enters the British army, goes through basic training and is one of the first ashore on D-Day. (Reviewed in 2004)

Beresford is able to move us, one small step at a time, into the hearts of his characters. He never steps wrong on his way to a luminous final scene in which we are invited to regard one of the most privileged mysteries of life, the moment when two people allow each other to see inside.

The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.

Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk INTO the theater humming the songs.

It's one of the best films of the year.

What Tarantino has is an appreciation for gut-level exploitation film appeal, combined with an artist's desire to transform that gut element with something higher, better, more daring. His films challenge taboos in our society in the most direct possible way, and at the same time add an element of parody or satire.

To our great benefit, the material is handled beautifully, even tenderly, without becoming maudlin.

This is one of the best movies of the year.

In a movie with the energy of this one, we're exhilarated by the sheer freedom of movement; the violence becomes surrealistic and less important than the movie's underlying energy level.

It’s a brilliant character study, a devilishly confounding murder mystery, a legitimately haunting psychological thriller, a hell of a ghost story — and one of the most memorable viewing experiences I’ve had in the last few years.

Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He has no shame. He's an anarchist; his movies inhabit a universe in which everything is possible and the outrageous is probable, and Silent Movie, where Brooks has taken a considerably stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly, made me laugh a lot.

This is one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema.

The strength of Leigh's film is that it is not a message picture, but a deep and true portrait of these lives.

This was for me the best film at Cannes 2004, a story vibrating with urgency and life. It makes a powerful statement and at the same time contains humor, charm and astonishing visual beauty.

Shines with a kind of inspired madness.

No director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.

Man on Wire is about the vanquishing of the towers by bravery and joy, not by terrorism.

The message is boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity than anger or resolve. It's a message movie, but not a recruiting poster.

Prince of the City is a very good movie and, like some of its characters, it wants to break your heart. Maybe it will. It is about the ways in which a corrupt modern city makes it almost impossible for a man to be true to the law, his ideals, and his friends, all at the same time. The movie has no answers. Only horrible alternatives.

May be the most intimate documentary ever made about a live rock 'n' roll concert. Certainly it has the best coverage of the performances onstage.

Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has those handkerchief moments, but the laughs far outnumber the hard and sad punches. This is a movie that’s grounded in reality, has just enough whimsy and soars to the stars. It’s one of the best films of 2015.

Helena Bonham Carter may be Burton's inamorata, but apart from that, she is perfectly cast, not as a vulgar fishwife type but as a petite beauty with dark, sad eyes and a pouting mouth and a persistent fantasy that she and the barber will someday settle by the seaside. Not bloody likely.

A visionary roller-coaster ride of a movie.

David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.

The impersonation of Welles by Christian McKay in Me and Orson Welles is the centerpiece of the film, and from it, all else flows. We can almost accept that this is the Great Man.

Astonishing things happen and symbolism can only work by being apparent. For me, the film is like music or a landscape: It clears a space in my mind, and in that space I can consider questions. (Review of Original Release)

The information they eventually dislodge about Rodriguez suggests a secular saint, a deeply good man, whose music is the expression of a blessed inner being. I hope you're able to see this film. You deserve to. And yes, it exists because we need for it to.

Made with sublime innocence and breathtaking artistry, at a time when its simple values rang true.

The story in the jungle moves ahead neatly, economically, powerfully.

Camelot, then, is exactly what we were promised: ornate, visually beautiful, romantic and staged as the most lavish production in the history of the Hollywood musical. If that's what you like, you'll like it. I'll just crouch in the corner here and gnaw my haunch of beef and send the wench to fetch more ale.

Harakiri is a film reflecting situational ethics, in which the better you know a man the more deeply you understand his motives.

This is a viewing experience to be treasured. It is one of the very best films of 2019.

There is the sense they're fighting for each other more than for ideology.

The movie has an emotional payoff I failed to anticipate. It expresses hope in human nature. It is one of the year's best films.

A beautiful and haunting film that tells this story, and then tells another subterranean story about the seasons of a marriage.

This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well, and Russell Crowe's contribution is enormous.

Out of the Past is one of the greatest of all film noirs, the story of a man who tries to break with his past and his weakness and start over again in a town, with a new job and a new girl.

The underlying seriousness of MacLaine's performance helps anchor the picture--it raises the stakes, and steers it away from any tendency to become musical beds.

The film is astonishing in its visual beauty; cinematographer Greig Fraser ("Snow White and the Huntsman") finds nobility in this arduous journey.

It is the kind of experience you simply sink into.

Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting over the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance.

It is not an anti-war film. It is not a pro-war film. It is one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made.

Alive and daring.

Writer-director Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River is a stark and beautiful and haunting 21st century Western thriller, filled with memorable visuals and poetic dialogue — and scenes of sudden, shocking, brutal violence.

Like "United 93" and the work of the Dardenne brothers, it lives entirely in the moment, seeing what happens as it happens, drawing no conclusions, making no speeches, creating no artificial dramatic conflicts, just showing people living one moment after another, as they must.

One of those movies where "after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again." Yes, but it redefines "nothing."

Zootopia is brimming with silly, slapstick humor and terrific one-liners — and yes, some simple yet valuable lessons about tolerance and prejudice and learning to embrace our differences. There’s nothing wrong with a lesson or two when those lessons are packaged within such a great and memorable film.

In the hierarchy of great movie chase sequences, the recent landmarks include the chases under the Brooklyn elevated tracks in "The French Connection" down the hills of San Francisco in "Bullitt" and through the Paris Metro in "Diva." Those chases were not only thrilling in their own right, but they also reflected the essence of the cities where they took place. Now comes William Friedkin, director of "The French Connection," with a new movie that contains another chase that belongs on that short list.

Without question, Broadway producer Amanda Lipitz’s brilliant feature film directorial debut is deeply moving and inspirational, but unlike most documentaries it also makes for very entertaining viewing.

The Bounty is a great adventure, a lush romance, and a good movie.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club is, quite simply, a wonderful movie. It has the confidence and momentum of a movie where every shot was premeditated -- and even if we know that wasn't the case, and this was one of the most troubled productions in recent movie history, what difference does that make when the result is so entertaining?

Few actors on the planet can shift gears as effortlessly as Chastain, who perfectly captures Molly’s chameleon-like ability to adapt to situations and to rationalize her worst behavior.

Hail, Caesar! is pure, popcorn fun — a visual treat, a comedic tour de force and a sublime and sly slice of satire.

Tilda Swinton hasn't often been more fascinating than in Julia, a nerve-wracking thriller with a twisty plot and startling realism.

Mazursky's films have considered the grave and funny business of sex before (most memorably in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Blume in Love). But he's never before been this successful at really dealing with the complexities and following them through.

Using period songs and decor to create nostalgia is familiar enough, but to tunnel down to the visual level and get that right, too, and in a way that will affect audiences even if they aren't aware how, is one hell of a directing accomplishment.

Babygirl works primarily as an unapologetically and outrageously bold and sexy thriller.

Bale has given a number of memorable performances, but this just might be his best work to date.

It's so rare to find a film in which the events are driven by people, not by chases or special effects. And rarer still to find a story that subtly, insidiously gets us involved much more deeply than at first we realize, until at the end we're torn by what happens - by what has to happen.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action.

It’s a brilliant slice of life.

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie; it earns its comparison with On the Waterfront. And it's an extraordinary directing debut for Paul Schrader, whose credits include Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder.

In countless ways visible and invisible, Sirk's sly subversion skewed American popular culture, and helped launch a new age of irony.

An experience so engrossing it is like being buried in a new environment.

As well-directed a film as you'll see from America this year, an unsentimental and yet completely involving story of a young man who cannot see a way around his fate.

As he is played by Gene Hackman in The Conversation, an expert wiretapper named Harry Caul is one of the most affecting and tragic characters in the movies.

I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters.

Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.

A tense, taut and expert thriller that becomes something more than that, an allegory about an innocent man in a world prepared to crush him.

The best of three Star Wars films, and the most thought-provoking. After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.

A compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.

One of the glories of True Grit is that it recognizes Wayne's special presence. It was not directed by Ford (who in any event probably couldn't have been objective enough about Wayne), but it was directed by another old Western hand, Hathaway, who has made the movie of his lifetime and given us a masterpiece. This is the sort of film you call a movie, instead of the kind of movie you call a film.

Nolte and Coburn are magnificent in this film, which is like an expiation or amends for abusive men. It is revealing to watch them in their scenes together--to see how they're able to use physical presence to sketch the history of a relationship.

Even as Greengrass’ signature kinetic style renders us nearly seasick and emotionally spent from the action, it’s the work of Tom Hanks that makes this film unforgettable.

What a magical movie.

A quiet movie, shaken from time to time by ripples of emotional turbulence far beneath the surface.

If you have never seen a single film by Agnes Varda, perhaps it is best to start with The Beaches of Agnes.

Directed with great flair and pitch-perfect timing, brimming with sparkling visuals, filled with first-rate voice performances, thrilling adventures and unforgettable moments, Inside-Out is an instant classic.

This movie is one of the most relentlessly nonstop action pictures ever made, with a virtuoso series of climactic sequences that must last an hour and never stop for a second. It's a roller-coaster ride, a visual extravaganza, a technical triumph, and a whole lot of fun.

Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended.

Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years, and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful.

Broadcast News has a lot of interesting things to say about television. But the thing it does best is look into a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of relationship.

A towering landmark of film, quite simply because it tells a good story, and tells it wonderfully well.

A voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I longed for a freeze frame to allow me to savor a shot.

Thanks to the clever, docudrama style direction by Matt Johnson, a crackling good screenplay by Johnson and Matthew Miller and searingly good performances from the ensemble cast, the scenes where BlackBerry crashes and burns are just as enthralling as the triumphant moments when an unlikely team of ragtag techno geeks based in Waterloo, Ontario, briefly revolutionized the mobile device world.

Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.

It’s funny as hell in a drive-in splatter movie kind of way, smart and insightful and respectful in its depiction of modern-day teens, brimming with sly and satiric social commentary — and legitimately profound.

But I'm making Welcome to the Dollhouse sound like some sort of grim sociological study, and in fact it's a funny, intensely entertaining film.

A perplexing and disturbing film of great effect.

The splendid cast embodies the characters so fully that the events actually seem to be happening to them, instead of unfolding from a screenplay.

It is like no other film you've seen, and yet you feel right at home in it. It seems to be going nowhere, and knows every step it wants to make. It is a constant, almost kaleidoscopic experience of discovery, and we try to figure out what the film is up to and it just keeps moving steadfastly ahead, fade in, fade out, fade in, fade out, making a mountain out of a molehill.

The film is a glorious experience to witness, not least because, knowing the technique and understanding how much depends on every moment, we almost hold our breath.

A masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true...The best film of the year.

A film that with quiet confidence creates a fragile magic.