About Schmidt is billed as a comedy. It is funny to the degree that Nicholson is funny playing Schmidt, and funny in terms of some of his adventures, but at bottom it is tragic.

A visual poem of extraordinary beauty.

Shane wears a white hat and Palance wears a black hat, but the buried psychology of this movie is a mottled, uneasy, fascinating gray.

In this world, it seems as if every moment of happiness, every glimpse of a better future, is fraught with dangerous consequences.... But redemption and hope eventually shine through here and there, and when that happens, it’s a beautiful thing.

This is a very personal project for Rebecca Hall, whose grandfather was Black but passed for white, and she has delivered an exquisitely crafted gem.

Regardless of language, this film speaks volumes about the human condition. About childhood. About loss. About family. About unconditional love.

There's some kind of pulse of sincerity beating below the glittering surface, and it may come from Mitchell's own life story.

Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It's not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless. My notion is, few will be bored.

The film reflects a passing era even in its visual style.

The film's extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema.

"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.

Linklater introduces us to an abundance of characters, but it’s a tribute to his writing (and the performances) that each of the baseball players has a distinct personality and story thread.

The Past is an understated study of two marriages in transition.

I’m not going to pretend I always knew exactly what everyone was talking about as we plunged ever deeper into the weeds of double-crossing and triple-crossing among a batch of mostly iniquitous secret agents, but it’s a zippy and darkly funny ride every step of the way. The dialogue jumps off the page, and the performances are universally brilliant.

When those little mice bust a gut trying to drag that key up hundreds of stairs in order to free Cinderella, I don't care how many Kubrick pictures you've seen, it's still exciting.

Shines with a kind of inspired madness.

The film gathers fearful force.

The Sacrifice is not the sort of movie most people will choose to see, but those with the imagination to risk it may find it rewarding.

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

The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling.

The point is that for the soldiers, it's a dead zone, life on hold, a cheerless existence. And this plain-spoken old woman reminds them of a lifetime they are missing.

Typical Spielberg. Pulling on multiple heartstrings at the same time, to great effect.

This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope.

You do not need to know a lot about jazz to appreciate what is going on because, in a certain sense, this movie teaches you everything about jazz that you really need to know.

Max is played by Jean Gabin, named "the actor of the century" in a French poll, in Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a 1954 French crime film that uncannily points the way toward Jean-Pierre Melville's great "Bob Le Flambeur" the following year.

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

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

The movie has an unforced, affectionate sense of humor about its characters.