The picture’s reason for being is Bacall, whose Marie “Slim” Browning slinks onto the screen asking Harry for matches and walks away with the entire movie.

Silent Friend ponders ideas of connection and consciousness with a touch that can only be called botanical: slow, serene, sensuous.

By making Frank the quiet focus of the movie, Mangrove becomes a document of both history and humanity—the story of a man rightly radicalized by the institutions oppressing him.

By the time Oppenheimer ends, it becomes more about the interpersonal problems of two miniscule men—miniscule, at least, against the backdrop of the cataclysmic, world-destroying questions and implications it had been exploring.

Hardly a flattering portrait of the military machine, Paths of Glory suggests a soldier’s best hope often is to survive the chaos that his or her own army causes.

Intricate blocking keeps these early scenes visually engaging, but there’s no doubt High and Low takes off once the exec agrees to pay and we’re treated to an elaborate money-drop sequence, with the kidnapper staying one step ahead of the police.

Remarkably deft for a feature debut—in terms of construction, tone management, and performance—Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby defies definition.

Mostly the movie registers as a comedy flag being planted, a claim being made. Anything your average clown could do, Chaplin could do better.

Minding the Gap honors the pain of these young men’s lives so fully, it earns the right to conclude with the equivalent of a perfectly executed flip—audacious, improbable, and liberating.

Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto manage cinematic flourishes that tell us everything we need to know in a particular moment.

A shockingly raw combination of first-person reporting and personal video diary.

White Heat is smart enough to give nearly every audience member whatever they could possibly want.

With its epic setting and visual grace, The Hidden Fortress also is a precursor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Watching the movie, though, you’ll be struck less by its influence than by an awesome artistry that’s all its own.

Rather than take a histrionic approach, Lee trusts his four-hour running time, allowing the evidence of governmental indifference and incompetence to quietly pile up until it becomes cumulatively enraging.

A tender, fictionalized memoir anchored by two stellar performances.

Barry Lyndon is a costume epic that pokes fun of other costume epics even as it outdoes them.

The Farewell resists any temptation to be a wacky, extended family comedy and instead stays true to the sadness of its central premise.

Like Marty, the movie wants to impress us. And like Marty, there’s something about it I don’t trust.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, Captain Blood is much more than a showcase for one of Hollywood’s legends. The action sequences at sea crackle with excitement (and surprisingly intricate special effects), while the well-navigated narrative, based on a book by adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini, has the fatalistic scope of Charles Dickens.

Garland and Mason don’t exactly generate sparks as a couple, and her histrionics in the dialogue scenes eventually overwhelm the picture. But early on, this has a a lot of Technicolor/CinemaScope magic.

It’s all incredibly immersive, to the point that these everyday farm animals—the sort that usually only receive a passing glance—begin to seem fascinatingly alien.

Cumberbatch makes every moment he’s onscreen mesmerizing—entertaining and terrifying at the same time.

This is a creature flick, yes, but Alien is also on par with a genre masterpiece such as Jaws. The craftsmanship is that sound, the inventiveness that clever, the characterization that strong. And then there is the not-small matter of Alien being a seminal feminist action flick.

The definitive zombie picture.

A bit ham-fisted in its call to arms, Foreign Correspondent also fails in trying to force a romance between McCrea and Day. But there are plenty of signature Hitchcock sequences to recommend it.

With Zama, Martel no longer hints at that past, but actively exhumes it, unleashing ghosts in the process.

Works of art like these are more than creative endeavors. They function more as testaments: to the lives of their subjects, to the awfulness of death, and to the inspired ways we cling to the former, even in the face of the latter.

A Woman Under the Influence made me wonder: What’s the point of only showing a mentally challenged character’s distress? Is it fair to reduce Mabel to her rock-bottom experiences?

Wyler is smart enough to plant the camera fixed on Streisand, from the shoulders up, for her final number, “My Man.” Always willing to let his stars be the star, Wyler may have been the perfect choice to center her, for the first time, on the big screen.

For much of The Conversation you think you’re watching a person unraveling, but then the horrifying ending—where the editing and sound design become really sinister—reveals that the movie has been deconstructing the audience as well.

The bitter has not yet overpowered the sweet in this early film from writer-director Ingmar Bergman.

How Green Was My Valley thrums with an indomitable confidence in a better day, one that’s rooted in the memory that life in this valley – before the mine hollowed things out – was once very good.

As The Death of Stalin goes on, its cleverness withers into something more wearying.

There isn’t a boring frame in the film, even when the scenes involve little more than long conversations between two people.

Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark.

There’s joy in watching Cooper, for the most part, actually pull this off—including the gamble of casting an acting novice in the crucial title role.

As for Hopkins, he gives a precisely observed performance, capturing Anthony’s confusion without limiting the character to that single quality. He’s dazzling, for example, when turning on the charm for a potential new caregiver.

Overall, this is an uneven work of adaptation.

Leave No Trace, Debra Granik’s first fiction feature since 2010’s masterful Winter’s Bone, is a movie that’s willing to whisper. If you don’t listen (and watch) closely, you might miss out on the deep wells of emotion beneath its placid surface.

Of course, Cruz is luminous—especially as she embraces a maternal side that is at once nurturing and ferocious.

Mildred Pierce is a somewhat reckless mixture of film noir and soap opera. It opens with a murder and then proceeds to run on revelations and betrayals and wild swings of fortune. Yet the high-wire act works, largely because Mildred Pierce has the right trapeze artist dangling in the air.

It’s a signature achievement and utterly exhausting.

Lean stages the events with an expert sense of suspense, then leaves us wondering what to make of the mythologizing that came before. Was all that whistling really the sound of legendary British resolve, or were those soldiers only whistling past their own graveyard?

There is a lot of joy in Faces—John Cassavetes’ second real “Cassavetes” film, 10 years after Shadows—and there is also a lot of anger. Often there’s a drunken combination of the two. But no matter what emotion dominates, the movie itself has the same edge, the same itchiness. It’s constantly scratching its own skin.

Yun’s portrayal of Mija has a novelistic richness to it, acutely observed in its details (the way she carries her purse), yet expansive enough to encompass the character’s long psychological journey.

If Beale Street Could Talk is less interested in railing against systemic racism than lamenting the everyday goodness that is lost when racism carries the day.

Directed by Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? has its funny moments—Richard E. Grant proves to be a sublime comic partner as Jack Hock, a fellow alcoholic who gets roped into Lee’s scheme—but mostly the movie is immensely sad, the story of a woman who deep down desires companionship but just isn’t wired to accept it.

Stewart, Wolfwalkers borrows something from werewolf mythology, another thing from Irish history, and more than a few things from the animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and emerges with a dazzling feature that ultimately establishes its own distinct pattern.

Directed by James Whale, The Invisible Man is missing the gothic poeticism of his Frankenstein films, but offers its own sense of unease, especially when the invisible Griffin smashes another cop’s head with a bench. The effects in these trick shots are incredibly sophisticated for the era, as are the moments when Griffin unravels his bandages to reveal … nothing.

The Long Goodbye is cheeky and often cheerily meta, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a lark.

What begins as a sympathetic, almost neorealist portrayal of a mentally and physically challenged newspaper peddler named Qinawi (played by Chahine) eventually warps its way into a slasher film, complete with sex-as-death overtones.

Pain and Glory is one of Almodovar’s least exuberant productions. It’s also one of his best.

When it remains focused on Ruth’s subjective perspective, it offers something special, and tough.

While some are hailing Mission: Impossible — Fallout as something truly special, I wouldn’t go quite that far. It does, however, offer as many thrilling dance numbers—I mean, action sequences—as any of the other installments.

The movie stands apart from the French New Wave in that it is very much the story of a woman, not about a woman.

If both Ma and Levee are ultimately sympathetic, it’s due to the layered performances and the full stories that Wilson gives the characters.

Whenever someone wants to downplay historical atrocities, Descendant suggests, it’s because they’re also trying to cover up injustice in the present day.

Sandy is heartbreaking in the lead role, as his face registers surprise, then betrayal at the way the adults in his life—including, at times, his parents—fail him.

It’s another astounding assemblage of dryly humorous, immaculately designed, fixed-camera vignettes, if an even more morose collection than the previous ones.

By its bittersweet ending, Nomadland delicately suggests that Fern’s experience is a choice, but one born out of hardship. The “choice” represents the potential of the United States. The “hardship” is the nation’s capitalist curse.

It’s Farrell who truly makes the dialogue sing, polishing off the punchlines (or responding to them) with facial reactions that add a few more laughs to every scene. Then, as the seriousness sets in, Farrell brings a deep sadness to the performance that’s staggering.

Collette anchors all of this supernaturality with a powerhouse performance.

The definition of a satisfying Hollywood action drama.

It’s as if a mid-century work of Italian neorealism took a nap in a field and had a dream.

A work of astonishing tactility, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt reminds us that what we remember—what might matter most as corporeal beings—is not word or even story, but touch.

The visual design is a trip, combining a comic-book aesthetic (not just the use of panels and dialogue balloons, but also digital tricks that mimic the hand drawing and paper printing of an actual comic) with the dynamism of state-of-the-art animation.

So what is a Coen brother movie like? Imagine a work of German expressionism as filtered through the stark spirituality of Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Scales glisten, legs scuttle, antennae unfurl, all in a symphony of exquisite shapes and inhuman motion. Watching the movie is like peering into a living kaleidoscope.

Harrowing, certainly, but also a beautiful promise of renewal.

The movie is both vile and risible.

Good One is a crafty feature debut from writer-director India Donaldson, in that its unassuming air and “small” story create little ripples that eventually coalesce into something shattering.

The central romance of I Know Where I’m Going! may be a bit of a drip, but swirling around it are filmmaking flourishes of the sort that the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would lavish on the cinema throughout the 1940s, under the name of The Archers.

Diane is brutally honest about the losses that can define this stage of life.

The Remains of the Day belongs in the same conversation as Wong Kar-wai’s lush, masterful In the Mood for Love. Both swoon in secret.

Perhaps the best lead performance of 2023 belongs to Hüller, who is achingly sincere as Sandra, while never pleading for an ounce of audience sympathy. It’s her purposeful performance, more than anything else, that opens the door to doubt.

The movie won’t change your world—but it’s nice watching two lost people experience a hopeful change in theirs.

The film is an admirable argument for the legitimacy of psychotherapy, especially for the time, played out in an affluent Chicago suburb.

Led by directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, the animators lend clarity and excitement to the action, humanity to the characterizations, and—above all—a distinct vision for each of the worlds we visit.

Disorientingly glorious and thrilling, it’s a beguiling mixture of believability and artifice, of the sort that only the movies can manage.

Certainly the movie’s two nods toward the grim reality of warfare – the shooting of one prisoner and an offscreen mass execution at the end of the film – carry less weight than they should because of what surrounds them. Such glibness makes The Great Escape an enduring entertainment, not a classic.

Showing Up is an argument for valuing the artistic process over the art—and each other, above all else.

The whodunit plot is a bit laborious and uninvolving, but William Powell and Myrna Loy are so delightful together—slurrily sexy in the manner of the 1930s, when words and glances had to do all of the work—that it hardly matters.

While pop culture will never replace our need for genuine connection—for a relationship that both gives and receives—a movie like this, with a welcoming weirdness that communicates in a subliminal way, offers sustenance to anyone who has felt misunderstood, ostracized, and unsure of themselves. Even amidst the movie’s horror, there’s a glow here that feels warm.

There’s only one word for the power games going on between the two main characters in May December: delicious.

Vitalina Varela is a work of astonishing visual richness, boasting a depth of dark and light, a fullness of color, and an exquisite care for composition.

Writing and directing her first feature, which she adapted from an Elena Ferrante novel, Maggie Gyllenhaal employs an intensely intimate camera, one that’s so tight on Colman’s face that at times her features are a blur.

During much of Black Mother, the top of the next frame can be seen peeking from the bottom of the current one. The effect is a certain cinema verite bleariness, but also the suggestion that the person upon whom the camera is focused has a story that not only matters in this moment, but will go on.

Reinsve and Skarsgard work repressed magic in each scene they share—exploding on occasion, but still never directly confronting the deeper issues involved.

First Reformed manages to be ascetic, poetic, and prophetic. It’s at once centering, thrilling, and disturbing.

All of these sequences have an unshowy effortlessness that represents the pinnacle of Hollywood glamour.

For me, the distinguishing factor is the sense of humanity director Jonathan Demme brings to this inhumane material.

There are unknown, uncontrollable, and perhaps even metaphysical forces at work in that water. Watching Atlantics harness them in the name of justice is a spooky thrill.

At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal.

It’s all immensely entertaining, revealing, and moving—especially the occasional silences, when they sit comfortably together and the shared years fill the open space.

Educational, intimate, and transcendent, Dahomey is a minor treasure of its own.

During the production numbers, Spielberg’s camera is almost always on the move, but not in a distracting way. Usually it’s trying to keep up with the dancers and give them as much of the frame as they need; at other times it winds its way among them, increasing our sense of exhilaration and intimacy.

Ash Is Purest White starts as a crackerjack, Bonnie and Clyde-style crime movie, then slows down into something more akin to Antonioni’s L’Avventura. It eventually ends as a mesmerizing mood piece about personal alienation and national dislocation. That’s quite a shift, but writer-director Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart) finesses it effortlessly.

In its eagerness to please, Eighth Grade does go for some sunnier touches that feel good in the moment but don’t necessarily ring true upon closer inspection.