In the hands of a lesser talent, this might have become a self-conscious stunt, but in Hitchcock's it has the tightly wound perfection of a flawless sonnet or sonata.

Smart and sumptuous.

It’s the ultimate time-travel movie into the future, a “flowing time sculpture,” in Linklater’s own words.

One of the great Bertolucci's most acclaimed films...Trintignant gives a legendary performance.

Everyone raves about this 1957 film -- and everyone's right.

Despite its length, it is one of the most consistently engrossing and powerful movies ever made.

So few unexploitative movies are made about young black men, especially young black gay men, that the overpraise for this frail, sweet, discursive fantasia is understandable – and forgivable. It’s a beautiful film around the edges.

The legendary Mifune leads a superb cast, and Kurosawa's kinetic camera keeps the adventure sizzling with energy and wit from start to finish.

This masterpiece of poetic realism features one of Gabin's most renowned performances, a smart subtext about French colonialism, and enough exotic atmosphere to keep your head in the clouds long after the final scene.

In tone, Pan's Labyrinth resembles a cross between "Alice in Wonderland" and H.P. Lovecraft, with some Buñuel thrown in for good measure. It is a tribute to - as well as a prime example of - the disturbing power of imagination.

The chief reason for its legendary reputation is the brilliant match between its timeless historical subject - the trial that required Joan to defend her faith before skeptical representatives of church and state - and Dreyer's decision to film it primarily in relentless close-ups, using the sharply etched faces of his performers to suggest the invisible spiritual struggles going on beneath the drama's human dimensions.

Metropolis has a place in world history as well as in the annals of fantasy. Adolf Hitler was said to have loved it, and Lang eventually fled Germany for Hollywood when the Third Reich wanted him to run its movie industry. Few movies of any era offer so much varied food for thought, cinematically and politically. Its new restoration is a major motion-picture event.

This is the only film Laughton ever directed, and he packed it with a mixture of eerie chills, ingenious suspense, and absurdist humor. It's a genuine classic.

Kubrick's great 1964 tragicomedy about superpowers on the nuclear brink continues to fascinate new generations of moviegoers, as its frequent reissues attest. A genuine classic.

Among the picture's many surprises is a superb robbery scene filmed in a near-total silence that contrasts exhilaratingly with the noisy flamboyance of more recent films in this venerable genre.

The New Wave of Romanian cinema is the most exciting in the world right now. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is its latest masterpiece.

As evocative and soulful as I found parts of this movie, I experienced these stylistics as more evasion than immersion. Cuarón is so careful to avoid overdramatizing the narrative that his steady-state underplaying ends up seeming equally coercive. But this is not how we are supposed to react to “Roma.” We are supposed to regard it as “real life.”

Too intense for the youngest viewers, but teenagers will enjoy it -- an ill-smelling "stink-god" character is almost worthy of a Kevin Smith gross-out movie -- and grown-ups should find it diverting, if not exactly deep.

A lyrical, yet intensely rooted, tragic vision.

This time capsule of a movie is timeless.

Godard brought to the screen the jagged, intuitive temperament of youth in a way that nobody else had ever done before.

I wish the truly searing moments in this film were not continually counterbalanced by an overall historical-reenactment stiffness in the presentation.

A movie about unremitting grief and yet it has a boisterousness, a comic twirl, that makes it much truer to the zigzags of life than most similarly themed movies that simply pile on the gloom.

Like all masterpieces, it speaks to later ages as powerfully and intelligently as to its own.

Wit, joy, imagination, and sensational mid-'60s music.

As was also true of Pixar's last movie, "Cars," Ratatouille is better at pleasing the eye than the other senses.

I almost wish Cuarón had cast nonactors, or unknown actors, in the lead roles. It’s jarring having movie stars work up their Hollywood histrionics against such a glorious backdrop. None of these arguments should dissuade you from seeing Gravity, if only because what’s good about it is so much better than what’s bad. Visually, if not imaginatively, it sends you soaring.

Every shot plays a part in the director's underlying scheme - to probe the actual and symbolic roles of money in society, and grander yet, to explore the relationship between matters of the flesh and the human spirit, as manifested by the struggle between aspiration and corruption. [22 March 1984, p.21]

Superbly acted, stunningly photographed, and edited with a rhythmic pungency that makes it irresistibly watchable even when the plot turns dark and scary.

The problem is, the geek in question, at least as Jesse Eisenberg plays him, doesn't have the emotional expansiveness to fill out a movie. Perhaps sensing this, the filmmakers play out the story line from multiple points of view and crowd the stage with a pageant of voluble supporting characters.

Alternately discursive, philosophical, agitprop, and accusatory, the film itself is a species of essay.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

Renner gives a full-bore performance of great individuality and industriousness, but essentially his character is as glamorized as any classic Westerner.

By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie – which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

A profound film by a legendary director in the greatest period of his career.

True, traces of his bad habits show through at certain moments, especially near the end, when a long and lachrymose scene plunges into Spielgerian sentimentality of the gooiest kind. But before that unfortunate point, Schinder's List serves up three full hours of brilliant storytelling. That's as humane and compassionate as it is gripping and provocative. [15 Dec 1993]

The story line for WALL-E is probably too convoluted for small kids, and sometimes it suffers from techie overload, but it's more heartfelt than anything on the screens these days featuring humans.

The problem is that there is very little chemistry between the actresses, and Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy are far too studied in their depiction of passion. The most impressive performance in the movie is given by Blanchett’s elaborately coiffed, cast-iron hairdo.

Before Midnight is the fullest and richest and saddest of the three movies in the trilogy. Make it a quartet, I say.

Dunkirk, with its scaled-to-be-a-masterpiece visual grandiosity, aims to be an epic of the spirit, but there is something weirdly underpowered about it. It’s a series of riveting tableaux, but the human center is lacking.

If 45 Days is a tragedy, it’s a tragedy without a summation. Despite the ineffably moving speech Geoff delivers to the assemblage at the anniversary party, perhaps the finest piece of acting in Courtenay’s long career, it is not at all clear where these people are headed, or what shoals await.

Yang favors a gentle and introspective style that shows how deep and strong everyday emotions can run. A memorable treat.

It’s a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

Without question, the bold Jeanne Dielman deserves to be seen by those curious about new directions in cinema or about the vigorous Belgian film scene of which Akerman is an important member. But it's a long shot that so challenging and demanding a work will have much widespread appeal. [31 Mar 1983, p.17]

The film may be too talky for action-minded viewers and too fantastic for more serious spectators, but it brings appealing twists - including a feminist sensibility - to the venerable martial-arts genre.

There’s real verve in the animation and wit in the byplay.

Not a masterpiece, but definitely one of the year's most entertaining movies.

Past Lives, the graceful debut feature from the Korean Canadian playwright Celine Song, stands a world apart from most of today’s slick movie fare.

It is quite likely the greatest Shakespearean film ever and, except for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s also Welles’s greatest film – which is saying something.

Add a lot of dull acting -- except Sir Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis -- and you have an uneven movie with yawns aplenty.

The sensuous atmosphere often preempts the drama. Neither Elio nor (especially) Oliver are quite rich enough as characters to outshine their surroundings, and, although it’s rare to see a movie of this sort that is so markedly nonjudgmental, the lack of sharp conflict doesn’t make for a terribly invigorating experience.

A plan for a perfect murder goes wildly wrong in this 1958 melodrama by one of France's great filmmakers.

The fact that neither Stone nor Gosling are tip-top song-and-dance artists is, in some ways, integral to their appeal. If they were Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, we might not feel as much of a kinship with them.

Frisky and oddball in ways that are sometimes annoying and more often ingratiating.

Barbet Schroeder directed the ingeniously made film, which weaves fact, hypothesis, and conjecture into a harrowing yet continually gripping and often highly amusing narrative. [12 Oct 1990]

High among the film’s many standout virtues is how fully Kapadia has captured the faces of this trio.

Masterly by any measure.

Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.

It’s all fitfully sharp and amusing but hardly a masterpiece.

Movies don't come more original, inventive, or outlandishly entertaining.

In top form, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up feel-bad experiences that, like fine blues medleys, make you feel good (although with an acidulous aftertaste). Inside Llewyn Davis is one of their best. So many movies are emblazoned with happy faces; this one wears its sadness, and its snarl, proudly.

Exhilarating doses of style, imagination, and sheer energy.

It's inexplicable that Wong's early masterpiece has been virtually absent from American screens since he completed it in 1991.

Sprawling yet cramped, There Will Be Blood may not be the best movie of the year, but it's certainly the strangest. It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.

With its ingenious camera style, keenly dramatic music score, and brash yet indomitable humor, Do the Right Thing is the richest and most thought-provoking portrait of underclass experience that Hollywood has ever given us.

This is as challenging as movies come, alluding to everything from philosopher Thomas Hobbes to the history of Western music.

Absorbing but disturbing documentary.

This extraordinary film, which, despite its tragic trappings, is often surprisingly playful, can be appreciated without knowing anything about Panahi or his long-term battles with the authoritarian regime.

Mastroianni gives what might be the greatest performance of his legendary career, making an ideal focus of attention for Fellini's cinematic pyrotechnics. [09 Apr 1999, p.14]

It plays out all the usual tropes of the investigative-journalism genre – the hot tips, the clandestine meetings, the hand-wringing about ethics, etc. – without adding a jot of novelty.

Stands with the greatest science-fiction movies ever made.

Superb performances by Setsuko Hara and the great Chishu Ryu also contribute to the film's impact, which is at once deeply moving and profoundly thoughtful about moral and spiritual issues. [10 Nov 1994, p.12]

This masterpiece of 1952 is one of the gentlest, subtlest tales from one of Japan's all-time-great filmmakers, combining the sweep of a novel with the intimacy of an elegy. [10 Jan 2003]

They don't make 'em like this anymore! [13 Nov 1998, p.B2]

In a film that overwhelmingly avoids happy-faced pronouncements, this one sticks out.

Wherever you were schooled, in public schools or private, in the slums or in the suburbs, you will recognize yourself in this film and laugh and beam and cower.

The movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

The credo of Italy's fabled neorealist movement was that movies rooted in real, unadorned experience carry more dramatic impact than studio concoctions can dream of, and this 1952 masterpiece exemplifies that argument brilliantly.

An astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists.

Sissako, a Muslim, frames his story as a cry against religious intolerance. One of the characters, speaking of jihadism, says, “Where is piety? Where is God in all this?” It is the central question of this movie – and of much more now than this movie.

The effect is intended to be ghastly – which it certainly is – but I was equally repelled by this film’s conceit. Oppenheimer allows murderous thugs free rein to preen their atrocities, and then fobs it all off as some kind of exalted art thing. This is more than an aesthetic crime; it’s a moral crime.

Doesn't make it a masterpiece, but it's fun. [2002 re-release]

The timeless fairy tale about a young woman who agrees to dwell with a mysterious monster, as interpreted in 1946 by one of cinema's most brilliant visual stylists and mythmakers.

The expanded "Redux" is even more resonant - partly because of its added material, and partly because the passage of time has increased the film's value as a key cultural document of the Vietnam War era and its aftermath. It's a movie not to be missed.

Far from the movie of the year, the first installment of the long-awaited Lord of the Rings trilogy is an all-around disappointment.

Yes, we can draw links between then and now, but, in a way, Glazer’s film contradicts his own public sentiments. His depiction of this agonized world is so enveloping and unrelenting that, at least for me, it stands wholly alone, untethered to our current traumas.

Leviathan is, in the widest sense, a horror film.

A glistening gem among caper movies, this impeccably elegant jewel-heist drama takes its title from Buddhist lore, its cast from France's great gallery of leading men, and its style from the unique blend of cinematic savoir-faire and brooding existential angst.

Toy Story 3, has more emotional power than either of its predecessors. Come to think of it, it also has more emotional power than most of the live-action movies out there.

The rock scene hasn't been the same since this hilarious 1984 comedy.

Stunningly acted. [21 September 1990, The Arts, p.12]

Oppenheimer may have thought that by giving these murderers center stage they would expose their bestiality for all to see (except themselves). But what comes across instead is something far more insidious: a showcase for depravity.

It builds slowly, and, at almost 2-1/2 hours, it occasionally drags. But it’s worth the time. This is a very knowing movie about the ultimate unknowability of people.

This sometimes harrowing, often delightful drama stands with his (Sembène) most compassionate, colorful, and artfully filmed works.

The film’s moral issues don’t come across as tacked on. They arise organically and register as both intensely personal to the filmmaker and much larger in scope. The film even offers up, against all odds – and a truly chilling final moment – a measure of hope.

This is a movie of high innocence, set at a time in life when romantic love is still a frolic and the seaside is a balm that quells all ills.

Its refusal to draw solid lines between "good" and "evil" characters is more sophisticated than the psychology of most current commercial pictures. It's well worth a trek to a theater adventurous enough to show it.