A small film that packs a big wallop.

Exquisitely captures the irony and hopefulness of the era.

Mankiewicz's classic Hollywood backstage tale of a tragic sex goddess/superstar (Ava Gardner), her gloomy, intellectual director (Humphrey Bogart) and the retinue of glamorous and/or exploitive movie types around them. [05 Nov 2004, p.C6]

The most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year...It's paced and designed for people who won't shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame.

Announces the arrival of an undeniable talent (Meshkini) that has come of age.

A sign of O's effectiveness is that it works regardless of whether you know Shakespeare's play.

The film is a remarkable experience on a purely sensory level, and the best of its archival footage - on the track, in private meetings with drivers before the races, from the white-knuckle, over-the-shoulder perspective of Senna himself - is pure gold.

There’s something of the harlequin in Leigh’s conception of this bright, manic young woman.

The film itself isn’t dorky in the least. It’s an elegant and witty rumination on one woman’s quest for romantic fire.

Marlon Brando returns to the movies with one of his funniest performances as, in essence, Don Corleone with a screw loose.

A powerful symbolic drama.

Second-best of the "Thin Man" series, after the unbeatable first entry, this sparkling sequel boasts a breezy San Francisco setting and an even better cast, topped by William Powell and Myrna Loy. [30 Dec 2011, p.C2]

One of the year's finest documentaries, a remarkable example of the conjunction of a burningly topical and newsworthy subject with a brilliant filmmaker.

It sneaks up on you and shakes you: a tale of the cold hell surging up beneath that windy, sensuous Wyeth landscape.

It is played out in such a special, gentle way that you will want to anticipate and savor it for yourself. [31 Jan 1986, p.30N]

As directed by the Briton Mike Figgis ("Stormy Monday"), "Mr. Jones" is a muscular sort of movie, imposing action on characters who are feeling much but actually doing very little. Figgis' constant camera cuts are almost as animated, as jazzy, as Jones' highs. The director shows a daring sense of rhythm in his edits and, for this story, anyway, it works. [8 Oct 1993, p.D]

A voluptuously shot horror movie, with Piper Laurie (as Carrie's fanatically religious mom) and some nasty teens played by Amy Irving, Nancy Allen and John Travolta.

Shooting largely on New Zealand’s South Island, Caro has a beautiful knack for fluid transitions: the witch entering the body of an unsuspecting traveler in silhouetted shadow, for example, or a simple, fixed composition of Mulan riding from one side of the screen to the other, in extreme long shot. The dizzying wuxia martial arts action, with warriors sprinting up, down and sideways, defying gravity, propel the action scenes without overwhelming them.

Manages to find the magic through its documentary style, and manages to find the erotic in the commonplace. Not since the glory days of Italian neo-realism has lust among the peasants looked so good.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter just keeps growing up. So do the Potter movies, in size, in ambition and in visual splendor - and with increasingly stunning results.

The courtroom scenes are terrific, with brittle dialogue expertly delivered. And Wilder milks Christie's surprise denouement for all it's worth. [21 Nov 1986, p.92]

The story is not sensationalistic, although its love scene could not be more emotional. It`s a gentle story of someone being brought in from the cold.

Think "Mad Max" in wheelchairs.

People always complain that movies aren't as entertaining, entrancing or outrageous as the best of the old Golden Age. Yet, memorably and magically, here's one that is. Don't let it dance away unseen. [22 Jul 1994, p.C]

A triumph that deserves a broad audience.

If The Image Book is just a great whatsit, like the thing everyone’s trying to find in the Mike Hammer picture, why is it bracing and finally very moving?

The Human Stain has those qualities we often want but rarely see in our films: intelligence and ambition, decency and humanity, poetry and pity, fire and ice. Watch it and weep.

I can't imagine Anvil! not appealing to anyone interested in any aspect of showbiz, and the drug of fame, and the lives people lead in pursuit of the next fix.

Schwartzman’s film is a strong, cogent examination of outrage, coolly and carefully documented, one text, tweet and reckoning at a time.

The film seems a mad mix of staid PBS bio-drama, flamboyant musical comedy and surreal cartoon nightmare.

The Watermelon Woman is quite smart, remarkably sophisticated filmmaking for a first-time director.

This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.

A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.

A weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going, an opus for film geeks that rang my personal bell. A bizarre minimalist epic that will either transport or infuriate, it's defiantly, exquisitely eccentric.

All of these folks are damaged souls, trying their best to find purpose and forgiveness.

The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.

One of the best of its streamlined, over-produced, double-clutch kind: a high-speed, slicker-than-slick car-chase movie with unexpected deposits of character and comedy.

Jenkins and The Visitor”make lovely music together. It’s a case of a veteran character actor slipping on a leading role like the most comfortable pair of pants in the world.

A mad, resplendent peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made during those giddy years.

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.

It’s a lovely sort of chemistry that develops in fits and starts over the course of the film, with both Helms and Harrison giving carefully modulated performances that are full of delightfully specific verbal tics and terrific comedic timing.

This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.

For its influence alone, this is a movie that more than deserves its classic status. [23 June 2000, p.M]

One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.

A highly satisfying miniature. Its subject may be adolescence, and some of its pot-smoking, kick-back humor is adolescent too--in a good way. But the film's calm and witty visual rhythm offers a rueful awareness of time passing and of time wasted, in ways that people tend not to appreciate fully until long after they've wasted it.

The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).

This is a film driven by what makes its characters and conflicts tick. It’s freely fictionalized, and some of it’s overpacked. But “The Woman King” feels human-made, not machine-learned.

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.

The Crow imbues its comic brutalism with emotion and satire. Too raw and pulpy, it probably shouldn't be regarded as a memorial to Brandon Lee. But as an obsessive rock 'n' roll comic book movie shocker of loony intensity, it stands, or flies, by itself.

It's a terrific, kinetic experience, and it's also a brilliant showcase for a crackerjack ensemble of great actors.

Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.

A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]

A true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year.

Sometimes, it's exciting to watch a movie formula jell on screen-and that's what you can see happening in The Client, the latest, and best, of three successive films adapted from legal thrillers by John Grisham.

If it doesn't make you laugh, nothing will. [28 June 1991]

Most of all, it's a film for moviegoers who love powerful stories and ravishing imagery: timeless, eternal, the kind of tales handed from one generation and culture to the next -- and alive in all of them.

There are many tragedies and accomplishments here, without the engineered uplift afflicting any number of lesser documentaries.

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

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's "Delicatessen" is an exuberantly wacky, perversely droll black comedy with an ample dose of gentle whimsy-"Eating Raoul" out of "Mr. Hulot's Holiday." [17 Apr 1992]

Nearly everything that is right about Smooth Talk would have been impossible to obtain by conventional Hollywood film- manufacture. The film's appeal, including that of the performances, is in nuance and intermediate shades. That appeal is considerable, another reminder of the possibilities of the American independent film. [9 May 1986, p.43]

It's the film for which Albright painted a series of progressively decaying portraits of Dorian, climaxing in a ghastly vision of venereal rot and putrescence. [27 Feb 1997, p.11B]

A perfectly balanced blend of romance in exotic settings (shipboard, in Italy) and the trauma-drama of accident and heartbreak. [08 Aug 1999, p.23]

The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress.

Lowery creates a spiritual cousin to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, torn between taverns and common folk and his highborn destiny. There’s a lot here, either on the surface or bubbling beneath it. In its Christianity vs. paganism square-off, The Green Knight lands on a note (and an event) very different from the poem’s.

The best material, however, keeps returning to the unstable power dynamic between Q-Tip and Dawg.

What it all comes down to is the basic question: Is this just a movie for children? Not really. It's more a movie for the childlike--of any age. [02 July 1986, p.3C]

A film of great spiritual intensity and haunting minimalism that enlarges your concepts of movies and of life. Like the monks of the Carthusian order, it distills something intoxicating through a style that's pure and rigorous.

Here's one of the strongest feature film debuts in a long time, in any genre.

Ablaze with poetry and danger, and suffused with an odd kind of intellectual kitsch.

It's a summit meeting between three brilliant leading men from three generations with three striking on-screen personas.

For any of you who've ever daydreamed of playing hoops with Jordan, Michael Jordan to the Max is almost certainly the closest you'll ever get.

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

Reynolds and Mendelsohn could not be more different actors, but in this pairing they are perfect.

Chalamet is excellent, saving his purest acting for the killer final shot several minutes in length, when we finally see what these weeks with Oliver have meant to him.

Mainly it’s a very solid dance picture, which is the point.

There isn't a better time at the movies right now than Earth Girls Are Easy, a delirious pop musical directed by Julien Temple as a widescreen swirl of color and high spirits.

Few directors are more adept at playing with all this anguish and exhilaration than Mike Nichols.

If "Nightmare" was a jazzy pop number, "Bride" is a waltz--an elegant, deadly funny bit of macabre matrimony.

Here's a funny, poignant oddball of a movie, existing on a galaxy far, far away from the likes of "Pacific Rim" or "World War Z" or anything whose computer-generated actions speak louder than words.

The movie finds what solace it can in giving voice to those who escaped this church's grasp.

A crackling good movie. [18 Dec 1992]

Vivid, assured and extremely suspenseful.

This is an exceptional film about nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. You will come out the other side of it a markedly enriched filmgoer.

Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth’s life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time.

Ruthless People contains some of the biggest laughs of 1986.

The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.

It's a film for specialized tastes, quiet, delicate. But it suits those tastes beautifully.

Directing his first feature film, playwright David Mamet has accomplished the seemingly impossible: His dark and gripping House of Games is at once perfectly faithful to the world of his stage work and a fully realized piece of cinema.

The Sea isn't just brooding Scandinavian domestic tragedy, a lesser Bergman-Ibsen pastiche. It's also hilarious and rowdy, and it plays with our sympathies and expectations in such surprising ways, with such brilliant actors, it's easy to see why it won the equivalent of eight Icelandic Oscars.

Strange is a word that pops up frequently in Claire’s Camera, a lovely doodle and the latest from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo. The strangeness extends to and suffuses most of the human interactions, which never go entirely smoothly.

A witty and psychologically perceptive look at the Parisian literary scene.

A brash, funny, action-packed bit of sci-fi ecstasy--and a giant raspberry to the execs who let "Firefly" fall out of the sky.

A noir with a smile, and after all these years, its deft mixture of darkness and light still makes us smile.

A bracingly honest, funny movie about death and family that skillfully sidesteps the usual pitfalls of sentimentality and mawkishness. It’s what you might call an awards season miracle.

You probably won't find two more fascinating camera subjects, two livelier conversationalists or two richer, more rewarding, more engaging and inspiring companions in any movie, fiction or non-fiction, this year.

A beautiful, intensely moving film.

As big-budget comic book adaptations go, this one's a gratifying freak--the right kind of conflicted, as well as quick-witted. It's a lot of fun.

It's a nice mix, an elegantly smoky and dangerous cocktail -- just like the old noirs, but in a more modern, shinier glass. And since the basic brew is Elmore Leonard's, it tickles as it goes down. [26 June 1998]