You may not like Beau Travail - which is, after all, a quintessential "critic's film" - but I think you'll have to admit it's been almost perfectly executed.

It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

The film works best in its most acutely observed details of daily life in the trenches.

A late classic that revisits old territory with masterly serenity and acceptance. [29 May 2009, p.C4]

It’s not perfect, but Anora is a touching comic and dramatic odyssey, driven by a terrific performance by Mikey Madison in the title role.

The result is a splendid black comedy that marks a stylistic leap for its director. Second only this year to the upcoming “Roma,” it’s a reminder of how the movies can imagine a highly specific yet deeply idiosyncratic vision of the past.

Don't see Halloween in an empty theater on a weekday afternoon. See it on a weekend night in a packed house. Halloween is a film to be enjoyed with a boisterous crowd; it's an "audience picture," a film designed to get specific reactions from an audience at specific moments. With Halloween, the most often desired reaction is screaming. It's a beautifully made thriller -- more shocking than bloody -- that will have you screaming with regularity. Halloween was directed by John Carpenter, 30, a natural filmmaker and a name worth remembering. [22 Nov 1978]

Masterpiece is the right word for The Sweet Hereafter. It is extraordinary: a poem of familial pain, a song of broken embraces. [25 December 1997, Tempo, p.1]

What I did like unreservedly was the acting. Enid, as enacted by the sometimes astonishing Birch, is one of the more convincing, no-nonsense teens in recent movies.

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.

The Brutalist is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable.

This is a romance with minimal physical contact and sex--and that's part of what makes it work so well as a love story.

The movie suffers a bit from the sentimental, violin-underscored valentine approach favored in Selznick movies, but the characterizations, particularly in delivering Dickens' cartoon grotesqueries, are plum. None is better than W. C. Fields, who might be faulted for bringing his own legendary screen persona to Mr. Micawber, but he does so superbly, without sacrificing Dickens' own creation. [13 Aug 1989, p.20C]

A watershed picture, for both Spielberg and war movies.

It’s a beautiful film to soak up as a visual and musical memory of a place that remains, and a time long gone.

A crackling good movie. [18 Dec 1992]

Lean's masterly film of the classic Charles Dickens novel of success, romance and their dark underpinnings. [18 Jun 2010, p.C3]

In Reichardt films ranging from “Wendy and Lucy” to “Meek’s Cutoff” to “Certain Women,” the lives of outsiders are defined by the natural world, economic circumstance and by their own dreams of connection. First Cow is one of her very best.

The creator of the original "Mad Max" trilogy has whipped up a gargantuan grunge symphony of vehicular mayhem that makes "Furious 7" look like "Curious George."

It is a story of eerie beauty, overpowering fear and almost no solace at all -- save perhaps for a few jazzy chords on the night club piano and the chirp of the bullfinch in that empty, empty room. [06 Jun 1997, p.C]

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.