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.