It's a simple-seeming but luminous movie, an intelligent, very funny and dead-on small-town comedy-drama adapted and directed by Robert Benton from Richard Russo's gently humorous 1993 novel. [13 Jan 1995, p.C]

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

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

Moore documents both the doomed effort to turn Flint into a tourist center and the sorry leadership of the United Auto Workers, born in Flint, which appears co-opted by management. The film uses humor to make the point that in the rush to make money in the '80s we have forgotten the common man. [12 Jan 1990, p.A]

Cooper knows he has an audience willing to listen, and what he says is so beautifully, powerfully open-hearted, vulnerable and loving it's overwhelming.

This is sublime work, with poetry and prose in unerring balance, thanks to writer-director Payal Kapadia.

Writer-director Robert Eggers' "New England folk tale" film isn't likely to go bonkers in the popular culture the way "Blair Witch" did. But it's an infinitely richer, more meticulous, more elegant and more unnerving horror film — the best since "The Babadook," and very likely a 21st century classic in its hardy yet malleable genre.

Extraordinary.

As written by Field and modulated, brilliantly, by Blanchett, Lydia becomes a rhapsody in contrasts, controlling, fastidious, witty, steely, imperious, hubristic. It’s a huge, showy role, and the beautiful paradox — one among many here — is that Blanchett has never been subtler.

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

Few Alfred Hitchcock movies are more fun to watch than To Catch a Thief. [15 Jun 2007, p.C7]

The Third Man is a film where everything works: script, direction, the performances of Welles, Cotten, Trevor Howard (the cynical police major) and Alida Valli (the enigmatic traveler), Robert Krasker's flamboyantly tilted black-and-white cinematography and the unforgettably spare and haunting zither score by Anton Karas. [5 Sept 1996, p.6]

Jafar Panahi of Iran is one of his country's great filmmakers, and Offside is his best movie to date.

Kubrick's contributions are his wit and his eye. The wit, too much at times, is as biting as in "Dr. Strangelove," and the production, while of another order, is as spectacular as in "2001." [11 Feb 1972]

It's a movie that's so personal, naked and vulnerable that you can understand why some of its humor seems rough, some of its visuals excessive. But Crooklyn has a quality not as obvious in any Lee film since "Do the Right Thing": the sense of a whole world opening, rich and real, before your eyes. [13 May 1994, p.A]

Moskowitz may soon find himself in the same boat as many of the artists he is analyzing, because Stone Reader is going to be one tough act to follow.

All the "Star Wars" movies will continue to entertain us for many years to come. They were grand fun, and this last one's a corker.

A timeless romantic thriller that steeps us in one of those great artificial movie worlds that become more overpowering than reality itself.

The wondrous cinematography is by Gokhan Tiryaki. It is not an easy picture. Not many masterpieces are.

It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.

This is one of the real finds of 2008.

The best of all cattle-drive westerns. [11 Oct 1998, p.16C]

This one is a winner. [27 Oct 1989, p.F]

This is an amazing movie, released at a frightening time and made under remarkable circumstances.

The transition from cinematographer to director can be a bumpy ride, but few have navigated it as well as British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. [08 Mar 2002, p.C6]

A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.

Swing Time, a Depression-era Manhattan ballad -- and best of the bunch by a hair over Top Hat -- has Fred as a threadbare gambler named Lucky, Ginger as a saucy dance teacher named Penny and a heart-stopping Kern-Dorothy Fields score that includes The Way You Look Tonight, A Fine Romance, Pick Yourself Up and their masterpiece farewell duet number, Never Gonna Dance. [23 Aug 2005, p.C3]

Altman's great kaleidoscopic ensemble comedy-drama about a frenzied few days in country music's capital, with an unlikely, quirky, explosive crowd of musicians, hangers-on and politicos all converging on a fateful concert crossroads.

David Lowery's film A Ghost Story is best seen a second time, though obeying the customary rules of time and cinema, you'll have the mysterious pleasure of seeing it a first time to get there.

A masterpiece. Davis' great naughty Southern belle role, co-starring Henry Fonda and Fay Bainter. [07 Jul 2006, p.C7]

25th Hour struck me as one of the best movies of 2002, but it's also a film that will strike some of its audience as ethically dubious or threatening.

A glorious work. [26 Dec 2008, p.C7]

My Left Foot celebrates the nurturing, healing power of the family unit while avoiding every cliche about the disabled. [2 Feb 1990, p.C]

A hard-core movie with a soft, light-hearted center and an edge like a knife.

Most important, several elements -- the film's tough, new ending; a sly, fleeting dissolve of a unicorn, not in the original; and a brilliant, trompe d'oeil flicker of life in a shot of a still photograph -- bring Deckard's existential dilemma into focus. [11 Sept 1992]

No succeeds, wonderfully, because it knows how to sell itself. It is cool, witty, technically dazzling in a low-key and convincing way.

The most purely enjoyable of all the great Ford films. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]

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

Georgia, written with rare honesty and economy by Leigh's mother, Barbara Turner, and very sensitively directed by Ulu Grosbard, is a tough-minded look at show business and families. [10 Jan 1996]

Noel Coward's much-loved thwarted romance. [14 Nov 2008, p.C7]

Still seems close to the pinnacle of film noir. [Director's Cut]

A British horror classic, filled with enough creepy imagery to keep "normal" children awake at night, and parents looking over their shoulders at the "little monsters" plotting away in the room down the hall. [29 Nov 2004, p.C4]

Though much of Naked Lunch is flip, hip and hilariously funny, it never wanders far from a profoundly melancholic undertone - Cronenberg's unshakable sense of loneliness, isolation and anxiety. [10 Jan 1992]

Day-Lewis... the role of a lifetime.

Based on a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar, and scripted by Wilder and his frequent collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond, One Two Three is all-Cagney all the time. [11 May 2001, p.C2]

A kinetic delight, Reprise comes from director Joachim Trier, born in Denmark but raised in Oslo, Norway, and it’s a highlight of the filmgoing year so far.

The closing shot of Charlie Chaplin's face in City Lights, his heart breaking: the highest form of screen acting, the most effective tear extraction exercise the medium has yet to offer.

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

Like most Godard, it can be watched repeatedly, always yielding new secrets and beauties. Most profound of all, perhaps, are those incredible black-and-white images of Paris.

It’s an unexpectedly emotional experience, seeing and hearing this luminous source of happiness again.

Moviegoers should be almost as entranced by the teeming, glorious landscapes and dark, bloody battlegrounds of Two Towers: astonishing midpoint of an epic movie fantasy journey for the ages.

"All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.

This is a great and necessary document in support of a two-state solution. Even those who don't believe in such a solution may find their minds changed by The Gatekeepers.

Fantastic, exciting, a real cinematic/theatrical feast. [15 Oct 1993, p.I]

It remains an anti-war masterpiece. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]

A picture that represents so much of what I want and rarely get from a movie -- a couple of hours filled with characters who are as exciting as the people I know in real life. [11 Dec 1981]

This is a sumptuous work, from its unconventional title sequence of a woman dancing hard in the streets to its provocative ending with conflicting quotes from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr .[30 June 1989, Friday, p.A]

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.

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.

It’s beautiful work, and not just because it’s beautiful.

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.

Audrey Hepburn is a physical wonder; Rex Harrison defines his role; and production designer Gene Allen is the hidden star. A big screen production for the entire family.

A movie about the passions of simple people, and it's done with such extraordinary empathy and commitment that it all but pulls you under. [29 November 1996, Friday, p.A]

The fans of their best work -- "Blood Simple, "Raising Arizona," "Barton Fink" -- now can add Fargo to the list, pushing the Coens to the first rank of contemporary American filmmakers. [8 March 1996, Friday, p.B]

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]

1966 French masterpiece -- the finest, most deeply personal work of a filmmaker who has been compared, justifiably, to both Dostoyevsky and Bach.

Extremely moving, exceedingly droll, flawlessly voice-acted.

A brilliant work of the imagination capable of truly seizing and igniting our fantasies.

Director Bob Rafelson, one of the leading lights of the 1970s ("Five Easy Pieces"), makes a terrific comeback in a stylish piece that is as beguiling and lush as its central character. [6 Feb 1987, p.AC]

Its sense of humor is more sly, more sophisticated and more interesting than most PG-13 or R-rated comedies at the moment. The film may be animated, and largely taken up with rats, but its pulse is gratifyingly human.

This is one of the great alternative masterpieces of the American cinema. In many ways, Cassavetes' most important film.

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]

Rousing, stirring, with a great cast: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn. McQueen's performance as "Cooler King" Hilts is undoubtedly his most archetypal. [10 May 2013, p.C6]

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.

Acted with transparent subtlety and grace, brilliantly written and beautifully shot from Ozu's customary low camera angles, this superb film is one of cinema history's now universally accepted masterpieces. [14 Jan 2005, p.C6]

David Cronenberg's The Fly is that absolute rarity of the '80s: a film that is at once a pure, personal expression and a superbly successful commercial enterprise. [15 Aug 1986]

Curtiz holds you in his master grip, creating one of those WW II-era California noirs that keeps swinging you from darkness to sunlight, love to hatred, happiness to the pits of despair and death. [18 Nov 2005, p.C6]

Based on Reginald Rose's legendary TV play, under Sidney Lumet's sympathetic hand, this is one of the great '50s actors' showcases. [16 May 1999, p.27]

A rare example of a literary film that preserves the best of its source while creatively filling up on it.

Stirred by the winds of nostalgia, lapped by its ocean of dreams, "The Secret of Roan Inish" is one of the loveliest surprises of the year. [03 Mar 1995, p.C]

Nobody ever gathered together a sharper, more pungent international "Golden Age" cast (including Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, S.Z. Sakall, Marcel Dalio, Leonid Kinskey, John Qualen and Curt Bois) in a more imperishable exotic movieland cabaret (Rick's) than Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz did in this greatest of all Hollywood World War II adventure romances.

Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]

Truly original and unique: genuine film poetry, full of spellbinding images and sequences. [20 Mar 1998, p.L]

This is a small, tight, starkly claustrophobic film, closer in impact to Elie Wiesel's first-person account of the concentration camps, "Night," than to the artful, slightly suspect emotional catharsis of director Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

This French documentary gives us unprecedented intimacy and sweep.

It's a glorious film, in large part because it is a reminder of in what low regard we often hold those of "a certain age." You'll come out of the theater full of respect and admiration for these people.

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.

This one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.

Beautifully wrought, darkly funny and finally devastating, My Own Private Idaho almost single-handedly revives the notion of personal filmmaking in the United States. [18 Oct 1991]

A lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned Passing into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional.

Stylish, ingenious and gleaming with charm, wit and malice, it's another expert blend of domestic drama and crime thriller, a vivisection of the bourgeoisie.

As magnificent as a high-masted 19th-century British warship, as explosive as a Napoleonic-era ocean battle seen above the cannon's mouth... probably the best movie of its kind ever made.

Despite all the limitations on her life, Rose-Lynn is one of the most free-spirited creatures to ever be put on film.

The stars are at their best and most rambunctious and so is Walsh. If you have any taste for Warner Brothers Golden Age studio classics--and want to catch a gem you may have missed--this one hits the spot. [17 Nov 2006, p.C6]