Although it was not quite his last film, there can be little doubt that Limelight was Charlie Chaplin’s farewell. It is also probably his most personal, revealing film.

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

In virtually every scenario, director Wilde and the team of screenwriters serve up the material in a fresh and original manner.

This description no doubt makes the film seem like some kind of gimmicky puzzle. What's surprising is how easy it is to follow the plot, and how the coincidences don't get in the way.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle works so well because Eddie is played by Robert Mitchum, and Mitchum has perhaps never been better.

It "explains" nothing but feels everything. It reminds me of two other films: Bresson's "Mouchette," about a poor girl victimized by a village, and Karen Gehre's "Begging Naked," shown at Ebertfest this year, about a woman whose art is prized even as she lives in Central Park.

I am not British, was born 14 years before the subjects, and yet by now identify intensely with them, because some kinds of human experience -- teenage, work, marriage, illness are universal. You could make this series in any society.

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.

Tati is actually a silent comedian; his films are made with an amusing mixture of languages, but no one says anything very important and he doesn’t use subtitles because then we might read them and miss a sight gag.

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

Spacey, an actor who embodies intelligence in his eyes and voice, is the right choice for Lester Burnham.

It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story.

Simple, bold, and colorful on the surface, but very thoughtful.

It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled "Between Enemy Lines."

An enormously entertaining movie, like nothing we've ever seen before, and yet completely familiar.

Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert are called on to play characters whose instincts are wholly different from their own. By succeeding, they make their characters real, instead of stereotypes.

So good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.

It provides the most observant study of working journalists we're ever likely to see in a feature film. And it succeeds brilliantly in suggesting the mixture of exhilaration, paranoia, self-doubt, and courage that permeated the Washington Post as its two young reporters went after a presidency.

This is the most bizarre comedy in many a month, a movie so dark, so cynical and so funny that perhaps only Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner could have kept straight faces during the love scenes. They do.

The movie is like a low-rent version of the rock concert documentaries that would follow.

Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape...Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

The fourth entry is a worthy addition to the Toy Story library, bringing back some of the most beloved characters in the history of animated film and introducing us to a fantastically entertaining new bunch of toys — some of them adorable and huggable, some of them more reminiscent of a certain type of creepy, old-school doll usually seen in R-rated horror films.

(1) Shot for shot, Maddin can be as surprising and delightful as any filmmaker has ever been, and (2) he is an acquired taste, but please, sir, may I have some more?

The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.

The most unconventional biopic I've ever seen, and one of the best.

It would be a cliché to call In the Heights the Feel-Good Movie of the Year, but it would also be accurate. Perhaps for these times we might call it the Feeling-Better Movie of the year.

If you are squeamish, here is the film to make you squeam.

Oslo, August 31st is quietly, profoundly, one of the most observant and sympathetic films I've seen.