As completely real on the psychological level as its up-to-the-moment visual effects have on the physical.

Guadagnino’s storytelling is overpoweringly intimate but never narcissistic. He directs our gaze both inward and outward, toward the treasures and mysteries buried within this Italian paradise, and also toward the unseen, unspoken forces that have threatened bonds like Elio and Oliver’s for millennia.

Hypnotic and sprawling five-hour-plus piece of cinematic genius.

Heartbreaking, haunting and unexpectedly heartening, First Cousin Once Removed is an uncommonly moving documentary portrait of a mind in disarray.

Sophy Romvari’s luminous debut feature “Blue Heron” is a loving and studious act of remembrance.

Marriage Story is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Fanny and Alexander,” to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.

Surely one of the most exciting -- and brutal -- movies ever made...This is slam-bang, suspenseful, sardonically funny, furious-paced melodrama culminating in the justly famous chase sequence. [21 July 1985, p.5]

Once again, Ozu's script, co-written with constant colleague Kogo Noda, is a marvel of organic detail and deceptive naturalism. Ozu's late style -- the serene, easy flow, the smooth succession of floor-level interior shots, the quietly restrained acting, the mastery of intimate psychology and the subtle portrayal of Japanese society in transition -- are all in place. [24 Mar 1989, p.23]

A consummate entertainment rich with the romantic atmosphere of Paris in the 1950s. Coming at a turning point in French cinematic history, it drew upon several major talents - director Louis Malle, star Jeanne Moreau, cinematographer Henri Decaë, musician Miles Davis - and achieved near-legendary results with all of them.

For a movie that all but demands that you swoon into its arms, La La Land doesn’t always seem to know exactly how to surrender to itself.

Petite Maman generates continual surprise and delight, paradoxically, by treating even the strangest circumstances with a wry matter-of-factness.

As warm as it is smart — and it is very smart — Lady Bird marks actor/screenwriter Greta Gerwig's superb debut as a solo director and yet another astonishing performance by star Saoirse Ronan.

An elegiac saga of the decline and fall of a rich small-town American family, based on a Booth Tarkington novel.

The performances of Close and Silver are flawless, but it is Irons' portrait that remains behind, an enigmatic after-image… Reversal of Fortune is a delectable tour through facets of the lives of the rich and famous that Robin Leach wouldn't touch with a forked stick. [17 Oct 1990]

A miraculously subtle piece of work.

American Utopia arrives 36 years after Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense,” which documented three shows the Talking Heads played at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in 1983 and just might be the greatest concert movie ever made. Until, that is, American Utopia. Rank them 1A and 1B.

This witty and tender 1966 gem remains as timeless and fresh as ever.

This wise and insightful film is delicate, poignant and unexpectedly powerful.

These four, like so many others, opened up to Claude Lanzmann, and the results speak eloquently for themselves.

Ade has an unusual gift for planting more than one idea in each frame; I don’t think there’s a single one of the movie’s 162 minutes that can be reduced to a single emotional beat or narrative function. That hefty running time isn’t a sign of indulgence, but integrity.

Far from seeming dated, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie seems timelier than ever, downright prophetic, for that matter.

No Other Land’s sense of grim futility is very much the point — it’s what the strong count on in order to suppress those who oppose them. Anyone who sees this devastating film may share in that sense of hopelessness. But we can no longer say we had no idea what was going on.

Directed with relentless tension and diamond-hard intelligence by Josh and Benny Safdie (who earlier this month won directing honors from the New York Film Critics Circle), Uncut Gems is a thriller and a character study, a tragedy and a blast.

While the bleak, funny, exquisitely made Inside Llewyn Davis echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and becomes a singular experience, one of their best films.

The wonderful thing about Band of Outsiders is that the daring elements that jazzed audiences then have the same power to intoxicate all these years later.

It seeks to demystify the bodies we see, normalize the act of seeking medical intervention and remind us of the great swath of humanity — of different ages, colors, genders, shapes and sizes — passing every day through this ward and others like it.

Wonderfully atmospheric and culturally enriching, The Burial of Kojo truly qualifies as a spellbinding experience.

Director Wong is at his best in this rerelease of the 1991 film.

Because each moment serves at least two purposes — "Tár" is both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building — you may well find yourself marveling at Field’s economy.

A documentary whose visual magnificence is more than matched by unforgettable characters and political urgency.

It's important to remember that Sinclair was as much a committed socialist as a novelist, someone who probably wrote for political purpose more than for dramatic effect. So while Day-Lewis' gorgeous acting largely disguises it, the people in "Blood" tend to be schematic and the film as a whole has a weakness for the didactic.

The film, which came out in 1970 after a censorship battle with the Franco regime, catches — and releases — all the tension of shifting sexual mores. You can almost sense the director's pleasure in taking apart the duplicities of a patriarchal Spanish society. [21 Feb. 2013]

President is in-the-moment documentary storytelling of the highest order, and what it’s showing is what the threat to democracy everywhere looks like and will continue to look like.

Stirred up impassioned debate everywhere; it would seem the greatest compliment that could be paid a stunning entertainment. [30 June 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

In between the semi-funny slippings and slidings of the plot are a handful of memorable dance routines, reaching an apex with the well-known "Cheek to Cheek" sequence near the movie's end. Rogers is no Astaire, but she keeps up smartly enough, even in those tall heels. [21 Jul 1994, p.18]

In addition to leaving a question mark around the issue of Delbert's guilt or innocence, Brother's Keeper, which Berlinger co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky, opens up several complex areas of debate. Among them: the differing codes of behavior governing city and country life; the inaccurate, stereotyped beliefs each realm has about the other; community loyalty; incest; the socializing effects of media and the manner in which we acquire language.

Sankofa unfolds as a kind of oratorio--the film’s music in itself is incredibly rich and intoxicating--in which people deal with terrible cruelty through ritual and incantations of the African gods. It is a celebration of the strength of black people, in drawing upon their spiritual roots, to defy their oppressors--past and present alike.

This quietly powerful film is a way for Harkness to reopen some of his family’s wounds, but always with the understanding that the more he pokes and digs, the longer it may take to heal.

When it comes to unflinching, riveting looks at a compulsive artist who can't be other than who he is, nothing comes close to Crumb.

The realities of the situation are grim enough that a lesser work might have paled into insignificance, but No Bears — the best and bravest new feature I saw last year, a work of extraordinary emotional power, conceptual ingenuity and critical force — somehow manages the opposite.

Its reflection of the Westerns makes it more accessible to an American audience than some of his other movies and, although his characters have complicated moral shadings typical of Kurosawa films, Yojimbo can be enjoyed on a surface level. The simple plot moves and carries you along. [11 Apr 1991, p.13]

Spotlight doesn't call attention to itself. Its screenplay is self-effacing, its accomplished direction is intentionally low key, and it encourages its fistful of top actors to blend into an eloquent ensemble.

A dazzlingly imaginative work with awesome production values and special effects that bear comparison to those of "2001."

Like “Stray Dog” and “Drunken Angel,” it illuminates a reeling society while telling a story of deep human emotion.

Salazar’s deliberateness of image and tone can sometimes feel like its own archly overemphasized meaning, but it’s never less than an artfully sincere companion to the drama of missing years and reconsidered choices that fortifies Sunday’s Illness.

The aesthetic that Dominik has crafted is a pitch-perfect expression of Cave’s grappling with matters of time and space. It’s gorgeous and ghostly.

Despite studio indifference, this was perhaps the one time in his career Sam Peckinpah enjoyed an uncomplicated, nearly universal critical response: The movie was instantly hailed as a modern Western classic. [18 May 1997, p.81]

If Memoria is a gorgeous reassertion of form, it is also a bold excursion into new territory.

Simultaneously uplifting and melancholy, suffused with an unexpected sense of possibility as much as the inevitable sense of loss.

It's not hard to see why this paranoid fable on the dangers of conformity would prove irresistible to generations of storytellers, given its capacity for alternative interpretations and double meanings, its ability to reflect a larger cultural and political relevance no matter the period.

Close-Up is perhaps the emblematic work of the so-called Iranian New Wave, summing up its methods and preoccupations and also bringing together two of its key figures, Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

The reality of François' classroom is so intense that it holds our interest even while the film's dramatic focus is building so quietly under the surface that we don't notice it at first.

[Stone] succeeds with an immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon is at ground zero.

An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could. That's because No Country escorts you through a world so pitilessly bleak, "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it.

For 20 years, Claire Denis has been among France's foremost filmmakers with her acute yet subtle observations of the ebbs and flows within relationships. Her perception and understanding seem to grow only richer over the years, and her newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, is surely one of her finest -- and thereby one of the best films of the year.

The story, like "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," has taken on the significance of a modern folk tale, layered with obvious moralizing and as familiar as personal history.

Creates magic of a completely different sort. It makes the unlikeliest subject unforgettable, finding drama, beauty, even poetry in simple things and simple lives.

If film means anything to you, if emotional truth is a quality you care about, this is an event that ought not be missed.

It’s the tension between hardscrabble realism and buoyant fantasy — and the understanding that they are both, in fact, vital aspects of the same experience — that makes The Florida Project so powerfully unresolved.

The screenplay — by the French Mauritania director and Malian co-writer Kessen Tall, in her feature debut — is a mesmerizing blend of the horrific and the humorous as it boils ideology down to the personal level.

It’s a tale of profound isolation and thrilling connection, alert and alive and gorgeously sensual even as every moment carries a bittersweet reminder of time’s inexorable passage.

It's a mind-bending film, devastating and disorienting, that disturbs us in ways we're not used to being disturbed, raising questions about the nature of documentary, the persistence of evil, and the intertwined ways movies function in our culture and in our minds.

Part Frederick Wiseman-esque medical study, part endoscopic-horror tour de force, it is a thing to be experienced, ideally in a theater — a movie theater, not an operating one, though the filmmakers have a particular genius for blurring the difference.

Seeing E.T. again reminds us of how much we've remained the same, how gratified we still are by a film that connects so beautifully to our sense of wonder and joy. [2002 re-release]

What was impressive 22 years ago seems even more so now; what was problematic seems less important. Changes in us as an audience, changes in filmmaking fashions, changes in the times we live in, they've all combined in making this "Apocalypse" feel more impressive, more of a revelation than it did before.

The movie’s sympathies, much like its political convictions, couldn’t be clearer. But paradoxically, what makes “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.

Made with intelligence, imagination, passion and skill, propulsively paced and shot through with an aged-in-oak sense of wonder, the trilogy's first film so thrillingly catches us up in its sweeping story that nothing matters but the vivid and compelling events unfolding on the screen.

The conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, The Zone of Interest leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.

"Let It Fall" understands the value of allowing its interview subjects to talk at greater, more involving length than is usual for documentaries, a technique that illuminates the complexities of reality and gives listeners a sense of the emotional textures of these people's lives.

So it is an especial triumph that Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford and written by Paul Attanasio, turns that footnote of television history into a thoughtful, absorbing drama about moral ambiguity and the affability of evil. Sticking moderately close to the facts and using real names whenever possible, it succeeds by pulling back and looking at the situation through an unexpectedly subtle and wide-ranging lens.

A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes.

This film becomes the kind of love note to movies we want and need.

If The Souvenir seems to move assuredly to its own unconventional rhythms, it’s because Hogg isn’t telling a straightforward story; she’s showing us, piecemeal, how an artist’s sensibility comes into being.

That rare comedy that is as completely entertaining now in its re-release...as it was back then.

GoodFellas is "Raging Bull" squared. [20 September 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Alphaville is more than quintessential Godard. Despite its age it's that rare science fiction film that doesn't seem to have dated at all.

Maitland’s experimental approach to a tricky subject leaves viewers with a deeper understanding of a terrible moment in American history.

If Mendonça Filho overstuffs his accomplished picture, it’s a fitting rebuke to a violent regime that would have tried to tamp down his voice. He finds a worthy partner in Moura, who embodies the rugged sex appeal and muffled anguish of a principled individual in a world gone mad.

Burning is a character study that morphs, with masterly patience, subtlety and nary a single wasted minute, into a teasing mystery and eventually a full-blown thriller.

Nearly every scene of this richly novelistic movie — which won the festival’s screenplay prize — teems with ideas about grief and betrayal, the nature of acting, the possibility (and impossibility) of catharsis through art, and the simple bliss of watching lights and landscapes fly past your car window.

There's such a rich sense of the fullness of life in Moolaadé that it sustains those passages that are truly and necessarily harrowing.

If It Was Just an Accident lacks the conceptual audacity of Panahi’s This Is Not a Film or 2022’s No Bears, the film’s straightforward narrative proves to be just another feint, disguising the writer-director’s anger and sorrow at his own mistreatment and that of so many Iranians

It may seem like nothing much is happening on-screen, but by the time A Summer's Tale is all over, it feels like everything important has been said and done. Welcome to the magic of Rohmer, one final time.

With remarkable stealth and concentration, Diop rewires the generic circuitry of the courtroom drama, avoiding its natural inclination toward sensationalism and grandstanding. She also preserves, through a seamless meld of fiction and nonfiction, the contours and complexities of a terrible true story.

Nearly three hours long, and deliberately paced at that, this first feature ever in the Inuit language is a demanding experience. But the rewards for those who risk the journey are simply extraordinary.

L.A. Confidential, with an exceptional ensemble cast directed by Curtis Hanson from James Ellroy's densely plotted novel, looks to be the definitive noir for this particular time and place.

Time can make you weep for a hundred reasons, from joy, pain or recognition, but its wounds and its glories are finally inextricable from one of the paradoxes of moviemaking itself. Cinema can magically compress decades into hours and transform lives into narratives, but what it erects here is ultimately a monument to something irretrievable. Cherish every moment of this movie, because each one stands in for all the others that have been lost.

A story of implacable grief, unlikely companionship and stunning landscapes, Gavagai is as beautifully singular a movie as I’ve seen all year.

The pleasures of theatrical performance become more pronounced, playful and complex in Part Two: Walk With Me a While, which, as its title hints, takes a meandering but fascinatingly surreal turn.

When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers go into their dance, everything else fades into insignificance. The pair made 10 films together, and, with sequences like Pick Yourself Up and Never Gonna Dance, this is the consensus pick for their best. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

The fact that this kind of serious material ends up playing puckishly funny as well as poignant is a tribute both to Coppola and to her do-or-die decision to cast Murray in the lead role.

In its examination of what is fleeting and what remains, "After Life" is not only perceptive, it leavens everything it touches with a surprisingly sly sense of humor. Few films about death, or about life for that matter, leave you feeling so affirmative about existence.

Son of Saul is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind, an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many Holocaust films you've seen, you've not seen one like this.

Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne are perfectly cast in this four-hankie weepie. [03 Dec 1998, p.F48]

Acerbic, emotional, provocative, it's a risky high dive off the big board with a plot that sounds like a gimmick but ends up haunting, odd and a bit wonderful.

More than anything, this is a film in love with its characters’ passions, a rich and effortlessly vibrant examination of the four March “little women” (so called by their father) and the ways, at least initially, they’re practically bursting with the innocent it’s-happening-right-now joy of being young and alive.

A great poetic epic that blends the stirring visual daring of Russia's cinema of revolution with an intoxicating Latin sensuality. [21 Jul 1995, p.F8]

It’s a dazzling, tune-filled collage of images, words and sounds, recounting the moment during the Cold War when Congolese independence, hot jazz and geopolitical tensions made a sound heard around the world. But also, how that music was muffled by lethal instruments of capitalism and control, still a factor on the global stage.