Rear Window lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of foreplay.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.

In America is not unsentimental about its new arrivals (the movie has a warm heart and frankly wants to move us), but it is perceptive about the countless ways in which it is hard to be poor and a stranger in a new land.

David Fincher’s The Killer is a meticulously crafted and masterfully rendered film about a meticulous and masterful assassin, and with Michael Fassbender in the lead role, you just couldn’t have a better triangle of material, director and actor.

I liked these characters precisely because they were not designed to be likable -- or, more precisely, because they were likable in spite of being exasperating, unorganized, self-destructive and impervious to good advice.

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997]

What makes the movie so memorable, so good, so strong, is the unvarnished, warts-and-all perspective.

Mr. Turner is far more than merely an explosion of color and toned nuance for the eye. The real reason to make this a must-see of this holiday season is to wallow in the Oscar-worthy acting talent of Leigh’s veteran player Timothy Spall.

The remarkable thing about Wadleigh's film is that it succeeds so completely in making us feel how it must have been to be there. [2005]

The filmed version of the Broadway sensation makes for immersive, exhilarating, magnificent cinema, almost sure to thrill first-time viewers as well as diehard fanatics who have seen the stage production once or twice or a dozen times.

With spectacularly haunting original songs by Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club accompanying the journey, Schrader expertly captures the equal parts exciting and depressing worlds of casinos, where the slots are always jangling and the bar is always open.

The trouble with Funny Girl is almost everything except Barbra Streisand. She is magnificent.

The movie is funny, but it's more than funny, it's exhilarating.

A powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and secret desires.

The movie is so accurately acted, especially by Jim Metzler as Mason and Matt Dillon as Tex, that we care more about the characters than about the plot. We can see them learning and growing, and when they have a heart-to-heart talk about going all the way, we hear authentic teenagers speaking, not kids who seem to have been raised at Beverly Hills cocktail parties.

The film works as well as it does due to the genius of Benedict Cumberbatch and the way he has inhabited Alan Turing’s persona.

Warren Beatty's production of Dick Tracy approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip.

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.

He’s a real smoothie, Warren Beatty, and when he plays one in a movie he is almost always effective. But his title role in Bugsy is more than effective, it’s perfect for him - showing a man who not only creates a seductive vision, but falls in love with it himself.

It is a spellbinding enigma, and one of the damnedest films Morris has ever made.

The Band’s Visit has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.

No one is better at this kind of performance than Nicolas Cage. He's a fearless actor. He doesn't care if you think he goes over the top. If a film calls for it, he will crawl to the top hand over hand with bleeding fingernails.

Finian's Rainbow is the best of the recent roadshow musicals, perhaps because it's the first to cope successfully with the longer roadshow form.

Ida reaches spiritual depth through affecting performances rendered in sublime black-and-white compositions.

This is one of those rare docs, like "Hoop Dreams," where life provides a better ending than the filmmakers could have hoped for. Also like "Hoop Dreams," it's not really a sports film; it's a film that uses sport as a way to see into lives, hopes and fears.

Scorsese tells his story with the energy and pacing he's famous for, and with a wealth of little details that feel just right.

Director Sheridan and his co-writers Charles Leavitt and Michael Koryta (whose novel is the source material) have fashioned a thoroughly engrossing tale filled with memorable characters, dryly funny dialogue and show-stopping, often brutal confrontations in which the weapon of choice varies from semi-automatic firearms to a deer rifle to a fire extinguisher to handguns to an axe to bare fists, depending on the circumstances.

Up in the Air takes the trust people once had in their jobs and pulls out the rug. It is a film for this time.