There’s joy in watching a movie like You, the Living. It is flawless in what it does, and we have no idea what that is. It’s in sympathy with its characters. It shares their sorrow, and yet is amused that each thinks his suffering is unique.

Apart from its pure entertainment value - this is the best American crime movie in years - it is an important statement about a time and a condition that should not be forgotten. The Academy loves to honor prestigious movies in which long-ago crimes are rectified in far-away places. Here is a nominee with the ink still wet on its pages.

To describe the story is to miss the nuances that make it tantalizing.

Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does.

Few achievements in the world of cinema can equal it.

If I were asked to say with certainty which movies will still be widely known a century or two from now, I would list "2001,'' "The Wizard of Oz,'' Keaton and Chaplin, Astaire and Rogers, and probably "Casablanca'' ... and "Star Wars,'' for sure.

Grey Gardens, one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.

This is a grown-up movie, in its humor and in its wisdom about life. You need to have lived a little to understand the complexities of Tobias Allcott, who is played by James Coburn with a pitch-perfect balance between sadness and sardonic wit.

Here is a film of great beauty and attention, and watching it is a form of meditation. Sometimes films take a great stride outside the narrow space of narrative tradition and present us with things to think about. Here mostly what I thought was, why must man sometimes be so cruel?

Out of Africa is a great movie to look at, breathtakingly filmed on location. It is a movie with the courage to be about complex, sweeping emotions, and to use the star power of its actors without apology.

Forget about the plot, the characters, the intrigue, which are all splendid in House of Flying Daggers, and focus just on the visuals.

Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé is as much a work of art as the monolithic concert production itself. The documentary-concert film brings into detailed view the blood, sweat and tears that went into creating the pop star’s most enigmatic tour to date and, in the process, reveals that even Queen Bey can sometimes grapple with the duties of wearing the crown 27 years into her career.

Sounder is a story simply told and universally moving. It is one of the most compassionate and truthful of movies, and there's not a level where it doesn't succeed completely.

This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.

I was stirred by the lush and pristine sounds of the band, including of course Eddie Vedder’s oft-imitated but never really duplicated guttural growl of a voice, and I was greatly impressed by the gorgeous visuals in the concert sequences. This is one of the most vibrant-looking rock performance films of recent years.

What distinguishes Personal Best is that it creates specific characters--flesh-and-blood people with interesting personalities, people I cared about. “Personal Best” also seems knowledgeable about its two subjects, which are the weather of these women's hearts, and the world of Olympic sports competition.

Ozu is one of the greatest artists to ever make a film. This was his last one.

This movie soars on the strength of the screenplay. Monahan gives Hedlund and in particular Isaac dozens upon dozens of rich, intricate lines, and they’re both up to the task and then some. Isaac is an actor who is not afraid to go big or go home, but in Mojave, his finest moments are relatively quiet and sublime. Every inch of his performance is pure excellence.

What distinguishes My Fair Lady above all is that it actually says something. It says it in a film of pointed words, unforgettable music and glorious images, but it says it.

Nosferatu the Vampyre cannot be confined to the category of "horror film." It is about dread itself, and how easily the unwary can fall into evil.

No movie has had a greater impact on the way people looked. The music of course is immortal.

Arnold deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.

I saw Tarzan once, and went to see it again. This kind of bright, colorful, hyperkinetic animation is a visual exhilaration.

Stone and his editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, have somehow triumphed over the tumult of material here and made it work - made it grip and disturb us.

W., a biography of President Bush, is fascinating. No other word for it.

It is smart without being smug, insightful without being condescending, funny without being mean-spirited and genuinely moving. It’s unique and original and fresh and wonderful, and can you tell I loved it?

A whirling, uplifting, thrilling story with a heart-touching message that emerges from the comedy and song.

It all works. All of it. The music, the performances, the twists and turns in the plot, the sheer energy and life force of the movie.

With first-rate production values and a gloriously memory-drenched 35mm cinematography, Licorice Pizza is a visual feast brimming with razor-sharp dialogue, hilarious comedic vignettes, brilliant performances from Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim as well as the veteran, star-studded supporting cast, and some genuine heart. This is one of the very best movies of 2021.

Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

Gifted isn’t the best or most sophisticated or most original film of the year so far — but it just might be my favorite.

The most harrowing movie about mountain climbing I have seen, or can imagine.

The patter is always fascinating, and at right angles to the action. [Mamet]'s like a magician who gets you all involved in his story about the King, the Queen and the Jack, while the whole point is that there's a rabbit in your pocket.

Weird. Brilliant. Stunning. Under the Skin is by far the most memorable movie of the first few months of 2014.

Fantastically powerful despite its flaws. (Review of Original Release)

This movie is NEW from the get-go. It could be your first Bond. In fact, it was the first Bond; it was Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, and he was still discovering who the character was.

The movie crackles with energy and life, and with throwaway slang dialogue by Mamet, who takes realistic speech patterns and simplifies them into a kind of hammer-and-nail poetry.

A red-blooded adventure movie, dripping with atmosphere, filled with the gruesome and the sublime, and surprisingly faithful to the novel.

The Revenant is a visceral sensation, filled with unforgettable visuals and memorable set pieces.

When interesting people have little to say, we watch the body language, listen to the notes in their voices. Rarely does a movie elaborate less and explain more than Tender Mercies.

It's a real movie, full-blooded and smart, with qualities even for those who have no idea who Stan Lee is. It's a superhero movie for people who don't go to superhero movies, and for those who do, it's the one they've been yearning for.

The result is one of the smartest, funniest and most visually captivating movies of the year.

Damage, like "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," is one of those rare movies that is about sexuality, not sex; about the tension between people, not "relationships"; about how physical love is meaningless without a psychic engine behind it. Stephen and Anna are wrong to do what they do in "Damage," but they cannot help themselves. We know they are careening toward disaster. We cannot look away.

It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story.

Seibei's story is told by director Yoji Yamada in muted tones and colors, beautifully re-creating a feudal village that still retains its architecture, its customs, its ancient values, even as the economy is making its way of life obsolete.

What we have here is a superior historical drama and a powerful personal one.

Singin' in the Rain is a transcendent experience, and no one who loves movies can afford to miss it.

Like a flowering of talent that has been waiting so long to be celebrated. It is also one of the most touching and moving of the year's films.

This is an inclusive, diverse, multi-level, multi-layered, funny, warm, cool, richly detailed, lovingly rendered, friendly neighborhood instant classic.

Why should anyone care about a movie about two scabrous vulgarians? Because the subject of a really good movie is sometimes not that important. It's the acting, writing, and direction that count.

A lot of rock stars and other showbiz heroes have the notion that because they’re successful in other areas, they can direct a movie, too. Usually they’re wrong. But Mellencamp turns out to have a real filmmaking gift.

The movie has been both attacked and defended on feminist grounds, but I think it belongs somewhere outside ideology, maybe in the area of contemporary myth and romance.

Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice is an enthralling piece of mainstream entertainment that captures the essence of Fischer’s mad genius, perfectly re-creates the tenor of the times AND works as a legit sports movie about the great game of chess.

It probably is unforgivably bourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case of The Last Emperor the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy.

"Batman" isn't a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That's because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production.

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to.

It confronts the relationship between Fonda and Voight with unusual frankness -- and with emotional tenderness and subtlety that is, if anything, even harder to portray.

In “Banshees,” Gleeson and Farrell once again are pure movie magic together, with Gleeson’s gruff and rugged and imposing persona the perfect counterpart to Farrell’s handsome and wide-eyed transparency, which at times borders on the, well, the not-too-bright. Earnest, but not too bright.

Rango is some kind of a miracle: An animated comedy for smart moviegoers, wonderfully made, great to look at, wickedly satirical, and (gasp!) filmed in glorious 2-D.

What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make Lawrence of Arabia, or even think that it could be made.

This movie is awake. I have seen so many films that were sleepwalking through the debris of old plots and second-hand ideas that it was a constant pleasure to watch House of Games, a movie about con men that succeeds not only in conning the audience, but also in creating a series of characters who seem imprisoned by the need to con, or be conned.

Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah is built on Tommy Lee Jones' persona, and that is why it works so well. The same material could have been banal or routine with an actor trying to be "earnest" and "sincere."

This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.

Like the work of David Lean, it achieves the epic without losing sight of the human, and to see it is to be reminded of the way great action movies can rouse and exhilarate us, can affirm life instead of simply dramatizing its destruction.

It is a thriller, not a documentary. It's my belief that the nature of the neocon evildoing has by now become pretty clear. Others will disagree. The bottom line is: This is one hell of a thriller.

Following the path of “Three Billboards” is a little like driving down an unfamiliar road in beautiful but forbidding country late at night, and alternately marveling at the scenery and gripping the steering wheel tightly when yet another steep drop or sudden change of direction presents itself.

Through Gerwig’s wonderfully creative prism, it’s as if we’re meeting the March sisters for the very first time, and we’re immediately swept away in a gorgeously filmed, wickedly funny, deeply moving and, yes, empowering story with themes still relevant some 150 years after the time period of these events.

Someday it was inevitable that a great film would come along, utilizing the motorcycle genre, the same way the great Westerns suddenly made everyone realize they were a legitimate American art form, Easy Rider is the picture.

These astronauts are still alive, but as long as mankind survives, their journeys will be seen as the turning point -- to what, it is still to be seen.

After the curtains close on The Long Day Closes, its special light lingers, sending us back to the beginning for another "hearing." Such is the singular intensity of Davies' vision; even the rug has much to say. [30 July 1993, p.40]

Every character in To Leslie feels “lived-in.” Every scene rings true, sometimes in surprising ways.

It is astonishingly original.

Eastwood’s two-film project is one of the most visionary of all efforts to depict the reality and meaning of battle.

It moves us on a human level, it keeps us guessing during scenes as unpredictable as life, and it shows us how ordinary people have a chance of somehow coping with their problems, which are rather ordinary, too.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is a reminder of what movies are for. Most movies are not for any one thing, of course. Some are to make us think, some to make us feel, some to take us away from our problems, some to help us examine them. What is enchanting about "E.T." is that, in some measure, it does all of those things. [2002 re-release]

Uncut Gems is part psychological thriller, part black comedy, part thriller and part dysfunctional extended family drama — and it clicks on all those cylinders.

Savoca's subject is larger: She wants to show how, in only three generations, an Italian family that is comfortable with the mystical turns into an American family that is threatened by it. And she wants to explore the possibilities of sainthood in these secular days. That she sees great humor in her subject is perfect; it is always easier to find the truth through laughter.

The film is a visual feast of palaces, costumes, wigs, feasts, opening nights, champagne, and mountains of debt.

This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.

Here is a movie that was made more than 25 years ago, and it feels as if it were made yesterday. Not a moment of The Manchurian Candidate lacks edge and tension and a cynical spin. [Re-release]

The film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.

Like Malick's "Days of Heaven," it is not about plot, but about memory and regret. It remembers a summer that was not a happy summer, but there will never again be a summer so intensely felt, so alive, so valuable.

With brilliant, innovative, claustrophobically effective directing choices by Mendes, Oscar-worthy cinematography from the living legend Roger Deakins and strong, raw performances from the two young leads, 1917 is a unique viewing experience you won’t soon shake off.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is Sam Peckinpah making movies flat out, giving us a desperate character he clearly loves, and asking us to somehow see past the horror and the blood to the sad poem he's trying to write about the human condition.

Take a moment to absorb and interpret and appreciate the vibrant and gorgeous and sometimes brutal and mind-bending and occasionally incomprehensible hallucinatory epic that is Blade Runner 2049, which stands with the likes of “The Godfather Part II” and “Terminator 2” and “Aliens” as a sequel worthy of the original classic.

Rarely has a film attended more carefully to the details of politics.

A collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.

Skyfall triumphantly reinvents 007 in one of the best Bonds ever. This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon, with Daniel Craig taking full possession of a role he previously played unconvincingly. I don't know what I expected in Bond No. 23, but certainly not an experience this invigorating.

Cage and Shue make these cliches into unforgettable people.

Arriving in theaters almost exactly 50 years since the Detroit riots of late July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is a searing, pulse-pounding, shocking and deeply effective dramatic interpretation of events in and around the Algiers Motel.

The first hour of this movie belongs among the great filmgoing experiences. It is described as an epic, and earns the description.

This is an uncommonly intelligent film, smart and amusing too, and anyone who thinks it is not faithful to Austen doesn't know the author but only her plots.

Strangers on a Train is not a psychological study, however, but a first-rate thriller with odd little kinks now and then. It proceeds, as Hitchcock's films so often do, with a sense of private scores being settled just out of sight.

Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life.

Keith Maitland’s Tower is a stunningly powerful and gripping documentary.

Here is a film that engaged me on the subject of Christ's dual nature, that caused me to think about the mystery of a being who could be both God and man. I cannot think of another film on a religious subject that has challenged me more fully. The film has offended those whose ideas about God and man it does not reflect. But then, so did Jesus.

Now we have an American film with the raw power of “City of God” or “Pixote,” a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave.

This is a movie that surprises you. The setup is such familiar material that you think the story is going to be flat and fast. But the screenplay by John Lee Hancock goes deep. And the direction by Clint Eastwood finds strange, quiet moments of perfect truth in the story.