It moves with a majestic pacing over the affairs of four generations, demonstrating that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.

Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid is a jolly and inventive animated fantasy - a movie that's so creative and so much fun it deserves comparison with the best Disney work of the past.

It’s not easy to make comedies that work as drama, too. But Carney’s acting is so perceptive that it helps this material succeed.

A Room with a View enjoys its storytelling so much that I enjoyed the very process of it. The story moved slowly, it seemed, for the same reason you try to make ice cream last: because it's so good.

The movie subtly darkens its tone until, when the horrifying ending arrives, we can see how we got there. There is a final shot that would get laughs in another kind of film, but May earns the right to it, and it works, and we understand it.

An endlessly surprising, very dark, human comedy, with a plot that cannot be foreseen but only relished.

T2 Trainspotting has one foot firmly planted in nostalgia and the other rooted in the present, and thanks in great part to Boyle’s unique, world-class talent, everything old feels new again, and everything new has the blazing look of an original and blazing piece of art.

This film is such a virtuoso high-wire act, daring so much, achieving it with such grace and skill. Minority Report reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place.

A grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin - not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.

This is one of the funniest films about coping with tragedy I’ve ever seen. Not that it’s a comedy, not for a second. It’s an immensely moving and beautifully resonant drama about the walking wounded and how they cope with a horrific event from many years past.

King of the Hill could have been a family picture, or a heartwarming TV docudrama, or a comedy. Soderbergh must have seen more deeply into the Hotchner memoir, however, because his movie is not simply about what happens to the kid. It's about how the kid learns and grows through his experiences.

Stagecoach holds our attention effortlessly and is paced with the elegance of a symphony.

What a simple and yet profound story this is.

To say this film doesn’t follow a conventional narrative is putting it mildly. One can understand how some viewers will be thrown off, maybe even put off, by the radical change in plot course midway down the stream. I found it to be a fresh and bold and immensely effective choice.

The first shot tells us 45365 is the zip code of the town." In this achingly beautiful film, that zip code belongs to Sidney, Ohio, a handsome town of about 20,000 residents.

The movie's ending is a little too neat for my taste. But in a movie like this, everything depends on atmosphere and character, and "Mona Lisa" knows exactly what it is doing.

Wolfgang Petersen's direction is an exercise in pure craftsmanship. [Director's Cut]

In films of this sort, too often the camera records the fun instead of joining in it. However, that is certainly not the case in this magnificently photographed, intelligent, very funny film.

The kind of movie you can see twice--first for the questions, the second time for the answers.

An emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation.

To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water.

This magical and elusive work, which always seems to place second behind "Citizen Kane" in polls of great films, is so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous, that you can't simply watch it, you have to absorb it.

It is nearly flawless.

It was Francois Truffaut who said that it's not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun. If Truffaut had lived to see Platoon, the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion. Here is a movie that regards combat from ground level, from the infantryman's point of view, and it does not make war look like fun.

On a pure pop level, as a piece of big-time mainstream entertainment, let us also celebrate this: Black Panther is one of the best superhero movies of the century.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a film of balance and insight--a civilized film, which even in a time of war celebrates civilized values.

Conveys the experience of being drunk so well that the only way I could improve upon it would be to stand behind you and hammer your head with two-pound bags of frozen peas.

Garland (adapting a novel by Jeff VanderMeer that is the first of a trilogy) does a masterful job of building the mystery, dropping plot hints like so many bread crumbs, jolting us with “gotcha!” moments.