The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well … this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.

The film goes pretty easy on the royals in the end, and it's a flattering portrait of Blair. But it's not credulous. Frears may swim in the political mainstream with The Queen but he does so like a champion channel crosser.

All of Us Strangers is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal — though one key scene takes place around Christmastime — but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant.

This magnificent 1974 sequel, the centerpiece of Coppola and writer Mario Puzo's 20th Century gangster saga, is still one of the most ambitious and brilliantly executed American films, a landmark work from one of Hollywood's top cinema eras.

Rossen treats the jousts at the pool tables here like mythic battles waged by legendary knights on a playing field composed of nicotine, dirty felt and wasted dreams.

By re-imagining a pivotal, terrible 24 hours, Greengrass has made a must-see film that is timely - and timeless.

An improbable masterpiece -- a bizarre mixture of grandly operatic visuals, grim brutality and sordid violence that keeps wrenching you from one extreme to the other.

Without playing with anyone’s life, A Photographic Memory makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries.

Even with its limitations it's one of the necessary films of 2013.

Such a stylistic inconsistency might be bothersome in another film, but here it's just part of the texture.

The movie feels both expansive and confining, depending on the story chapter. Anderson’s visual facility by now has become so intuitive, so fluid and effortlessly right, if you’re at all susceptible to the allure of a moving camera you’ll fall headlong into Phantom Thread.

Tati's fabulous comedy about a bumbling French vacationer in Brittany -- the first appearance of his hilarious pipe-smoking alter-ego Hulot -- is almost a silent movie done in sound, with spare dialogue, affectionate characterizations, sunny beach scenes and complex sight gags that recall the genius of Chaplin and Keaton. [19 Dec 1997, p.T]

It's a scintillating comedy-drama and one of Altman's most richly moving and entertaining pictures.

The things that make me love the movie are the mood, the hardboiled but good-hearted morality, Hawks' consummately professional eye-level style and those wonderful characters. [28 Jul 2006, p.C7]

Finding Nemo and its Pixar predecessors tap into the shared gene among the kids and adults that delights in imagination-engaging, eye-tickling and wit-filled storytelling. You connect to these sea creatures as you rarely do with humans in big-screen adventures. The result: a true sunken treasure.

Some movies delight you. Some stimulate and provoke. Some enlighten and inform. And some simply hand you a rousing good time-- does all of that and more.

Ferocious action saga about an old samurai (Mifune) taking a stand against his lord's cruelty and injustice. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

Delivers the perfect union - a vivid, sublime parody and valentine to the superhero genre.

A Prophet pushes its protagonist into circumstances he did not choose but in which he watches and learns and kills and eventually becomes all he can be, albeit criminally. Certainly Muslims living in France have embraced the movie and Malik, played by Rahim

I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you.

The results are pretty gripping and occasionally brilliant; its peaks, particularly when Nolan suddenly changes gears, cuts out the sound and reveals the full weight of Oppenheimer’s tormented psyche, reach higher than anything this filmmaker has scaled to date.

Paths of Glory is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's The Green Berets or Sylvester Stallone's Rambo. [25 Feb 2005, p.C2]

Kulig comes with everything the role of this sullen, reckless siren demands, and then some.

Gangster classic. [21 Jan 2005, p.C6]

Superb crime thriller. [07 Sep 1998, p.1N]

Delicately subversive, hypnotically sardonic, full of terror, banality and wafer-thin lyricism.

It's a very small piece, working in a deceptively casual storytelling style. But it's my favorite music film since "Stop Making Sense," and it's more emotionally satisfying than any of the Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations made in the last 20 years.

A joy to behold, a complex film that never loses either its sense of purpose or sense of humor. [7 February 1986, Friday, p.33]

As Assayas himself has pointed out, the passing years have magically transformed a movie made in 1994 into a seeming product of post-1968 cultural turbulence and unresolved matters of the heart. It feels honest, in other words.

It sounds slightly absurd, but McCarey was a master of on-set improvisation, and Going My Way has the easy-going rhythm, humanity and warmth of life itself. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

Filmed in black-and-white and shockingly well acted by De Niro, Raging Bull suggests that if you are looking for the source of evil in the world, you don't have to look any further than yourself. It's inside you or it isn't. And it comes out or it doesn't. [19 Dec 1980]

The funniest -- and almost the saddest -- silent comedy. [20 Apr 2001, p.C1]

The superb United 93, from the British writer-director Paul Greengrass, does not waste time defining the undefinable. Nor does it strain for poetry when, with this story, prose is enough.

The more you learn, the more questions you have about life in that Great Neck house. Leo Tolstoy wrote that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own fashion," but not even he could have invented the Friedmans.

The whole movie, a feast of ensemble wiles and stunning hair, is juicy, funny and alive.

Still packs a wallop. It's also a movie with no easy passage to its dark heart.

Star Wars is not a great movie in the sense that it describes the human condition. It simply is a fun picture that will appeal to those who enjoy Buck Rogers-style adventures. What places it a sizable cut about the routine is its spectacular visual effects, the best since Stanley Kubrick's "2001." [27 May 1977]

Without significantly changing the books’ content, they bring in a wealth of emotional tones--particularly a playful, wry humor.

It's a beautiful story that extends past the boundaries of time. [1 Oct 1993, p.M-2]

What distinguishes The Deer Hunter most is its many rich characters and the size of its vision. This is a big film, dealing with big issues, made on a grand scale. Much of it, including some casting decisions, suggest inspiration by "The Godfather." [9 Mar 1979]

Always engaging, never boring. You constantly appreciate Kaufman's intelligence and Gondry's lively filmmaking.

A major cinema event of the year, a masterpiece of Italian film traditions in social/political realism and historical family epic.

A rich and troubling documentary highlight of the year.

Whiplash is true to its title. It throws you around with impunity, yet Chazelle exerts tight, exacting control over his increasingly feverish and often weirdly comic melodrama.

Based on Leonard Gardner's California-set novel, full of brilliant low-key acting, accurate vernacular and precise low-life observation, it stars Stacy Keach as a nearly over-the-hill old pro and Jeff Bridges as a young pug starting out. [19 May 2006, p.C7]

Works beautifully, both as a social and psychological drama and as a taut, tightly wired thriller.

While some of the second-generation road movies are interesting, few have retained the hypnotic force of Two Lane Blacktop, an intense curio of a troubled era.

It's as thrilling and lushly beautiful a movie as has been released all year, matched only by Zhang's epic "Hero." And I think this film is the more powerful.

Minding the Gap is an exceptionally reflective examination of the 29-year-old filmmaker’s life, and surroundings, and it works because the movie concerns so much more.

An uncommonly good sports film about an uncommon sport as far as film is concerned - chess. [13 Aug 1993, p.C2]

As is, Cotillard (nominated for best actress) scrupulously avoids melodrama. There's enough without it, in watching a story of an ordinary woman argue for her dignity, her colleagues' better instincts and her own livelihood.

Scorsese has rendered a tragic, forlorn piece of American history, indebted equally to classical Hollywood craftsmanship and the director’s own obsessions with honor, guilt, family, criminal codes and America’s centuries of greedy bloodshed.

The film itself is perfectly poised between artistry and audacity. It's beautiful.

Raunchy, smart, ebullient, melancholy, insightful, surprising, funny, frank and sexy as all get-out.

Perhaps the roughest of the classic gangster movies, with a climax that almost blows the theater down. [24 Jul 2009, p.C3]

Kurosawa's 1958 classic samurai comedy adventure; George Lucas used it as the model for Star Wars, in which Mifune and the two squabbling farmers are transformed into Han Solo, C-3PO and R2-D2. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]

Borat is a rarity: a comedy whose middle name is danger, or as the Kazakhs say, kauwip-kater.

Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung is telling his own story here. The rough outlines and even some of the specific details are autobiographical and filtered through his memories of childhood. But he’s also considering these themes from his perspective now as an adult with a child of his own . . . and he straddles the two sides of this line so well, with wit and nuance, but also with such cutting precision.

Kubrick's beautiful adaptation of the William Thackeray novel follows a young Irish gambler, rogue and romantic adventurer (Ryan O'Neal) though a painterly 18th Century English landscape of frozen elegance and upper-class hypocrisy.

Crucially, Wang and company found all the right actors to populate a semi-autobiographical tale of familial deception.

Marty Supreme is a truly staggering American epic about finally learning that hustle is never going to love you back — even if chasing it can be a thrill, at least for a moment. In this anxiety-riddled portrait of the corrosive nature of American capitalism, sports is merely the vessel, but it’s still the kind of movie that will make you want to stand up and cheer.

It's good for the soul, and composer Joe Hisaishi's themes are so right they sound as if they came straight out of the ground with the girl in the bamboo.

It's a Rafael Sabatini pirate movie with almost everything: galleons, high seas, Olivia de Havilland and a fantastic Errol Flynn-Basil Rathbone swordfight. [15 Aug 1996, p.9A]

May be the best and saddest film of the year so far.

The most well-loved of all Christmas movies.

Blessed with a biting script by playwright Alan Bennett, a veteran of the old satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, Hytner's Madness rollicks through its tragi-comedy of royal humiliation and political maneuvering, winking at the follies of today's royals and anti-royals as it does.

The acting's so true, and Bahrani's so observant, you find yourself caring about everyone onscreen.

For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time, because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly.

An old nightmare, made shiny new.

The movie is beautiful without wasting its time on cliched beauty. Kogonada, who edited as well as wrote and directed, collaborates intuitively with cinematographer Elisha Christian, who’s as good with faces as he is with sharp modernist edges etched in concrete.

The Artist may not be great art, but it's pearly entertainment.

Zama is a patient, delicately strange film chronicling an increasingly impatient man and a destiny beyond his control.

In Jan Campion's The Piano, the emotions are deep, fierce, primordial. Sexuality overwhelms the film's characters like ocean waves blasting against a cliffside. [19 Nov 1993]

For anyone who wants to see pure cinema, it should be an experience both wrenching and inspiring. [22 Jan 1999, p.H]

German emigre Dupont directs all this with the style, flair and tension he brought to his 1925 Emil Jannings classic, "Variety." But it is Wong, shimmering with charisma, who gives Piccadilly its unforgettable center.

James Dean's ultimate movie, Rebel Without a Cause is both a great teen picture--full of front-seat romance, fast-car thrills, adolescent alienation, nightmare suspense and all the nervy grace director Nicholas Ray could muster--and a perfect memento of the edgier side of the '50s. The sublime supporting cast includes Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Dennis Hopper and Jim Backus; together, they create one memorable scene and incandescent moment after another. [03 Jun 2005, p.C8]

The word masterpiece costs nothing to write and means less than nothing in an age when every third picture and each new Clint Eastwood project is proclaimed as such. After two viewings, however, Letters From Iwo Jima strikes me as the peak achievement in Eastwood's hallowed career.

The Seventh Continent is a calm chronicle of hell, a clinical look at how commonplace people can erupt into despair or violence. Bleak, cool, beautifully controlled, liberatingly intelligent, it chills our hearts as it opens our minds. And it establishes Haneke as one of the more remarkable young contemporary filmmakers.

That sort of depth is rare in most movies; it's the trademark, however, of John Cassavetes.

It's Chekhovian screwball, a perfect little tale of love (or thereabouts) in bloom among the weeds of an ordinary life. It feels like a classic already.

Whatever its flaws, Funny Girl is one star vehicle that works perfectly for its subject.

Fredric March plays the split personality doctor/killer in this stylish early version of Robert Louis Stevenson's shivery classic. [06 Apr 2007, p.7]

One of the most beautiful of all recent films on the problems of old age -- and on the interplay of theater and life.

Bi, not yet 30, has made a movie that feels like a visual sigh and, yes, a dream. It’s a reminder of just how expansive the cinema’s boundaries remain.

It bears repeating that The Lion King is quite entertaining as children's fare goes these days. But Disney has established a standard so high on animated features that anything less than a classic leaves you feeling that something's missing.

The movie, beautifully written, photographed and acted, remains Bergman's most characteristic work, alternating between terror and charm, sentiment and humor. It has one of the loveliest last scenes in any Bergman film. [10 Dec 2004, p.C5]