These despairing, ambiguous pieces are always emotionally unsettling, and that is due in part to Kieslowski's complete assurance as a director. His spare, minimal visual preferences dominate each episode. The camera work is fluid and precise, and the films are so rich they seem to be feature-length though they're not.

The movie...remains perhaps the wisest of family dramas, an experience as wrenching as it is restorative.

Overflowing with life, rich with all the grand emotions and vital juices of existence, up to and including blood. And its deaths, like that of Hotspur in "Henry IV, Part I," continue to shock no matter how often we've watched them coming. [16 Mar 1997, Calendar, p.7]

Citizen Kane does occasionally sink to dullness because of its reiterations, notwithstanding it can be classified as, in a number of aspects, one of the most arresting pictures ever produced.

The film is a glittering triumph of personal expression at its most elegant and opulent.

An extraordinarily intimate portrait of a life unfolding and an exceptional, unconventional film.

Seems every bit the masterpiece it was when first released by Paramount. In this dazzling film, Bertolucci manages to combine the bravura style of Fellini, the acute sense of period of Visconti and the fervent political commitment of Elio Petri -- and, better still, a lack of self-indulgence.

An audacious, brilliantly twisted movie, infused with touches of genius and of madness. A disturbing meditation on the interconnected nature of love and obsession disguised as a penny dreadful shocker. [13 Oct 1996, p.C5]

A director in command of everything from the watchful eyes of his actors, to the beauty of a misty morning light, to the heart-stopping vectors of arrows and swords bursting across a widescreen frame, Hu creates cinema that's the definition of kineticism.

Never was Tati's mastery of sound effects more inspired than in Playtime, a commercial disaster at the time of its release that nevertheless may be Tati's true masterpiece. [14 May 1998, p.F18]

No amount of repeated viewings can dull the edge of its sinister ambience or soften the visual excitement Welles brought to this quintessentially cinematic film. [Director's Cut]

As someone who was part of the Resistance, Melville knew enough to neither melodramatically glorify nor cynically devalue the heroism he presents. This is people doing what needed to be done, Army of Shadows says, this is the way it was.

Its last few moments are among the most brilliant (and risky) endings in film history.

Moonlight is magic. So intimate you feel like you're trespassing on its characters souls, so transcendent it's made visual and emotional poetry out of intensely painful experience, it's a film that manages to be both achingly familiar and unlike anything we've seen before.

As a medium for expressing art, moving pictures may not stand the test of time, but Intolerance is greater than any medium. It is one of the mileposts on the long road of art, where painting and sculpture and literature and music go jostling eagerly along together.

On the surface, a lace of flirtations, insinuations and rejections compose the basic plotting. But Renoir uses flashes of accelerating drama to amplify his bigger points.

Every element in Pinocchio shimmers with the energy of young artists reveling in their newly discovered powers of creation.

If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling.

Beautifully crafted, movingly acted, still involving and entertaining, this is just the kind of film people are talking about when they say they don't make them like this anymore.

With Pan's Labyrinth, Del Toro has made his most accomplished film to date, a dark and disturbing fairy tale for adults that's been thought out to the nth degree and resonates with the irresistible inevitability of a timeless myth.

By focusing on the personal side of the city game, Hoop Dreams tells us more about what works and what doesn't in our society than the proverbial shelf of sociological studies. And it is thoroughly entertaining in the bargain.

Though this film is simple to summarize, to understand and experience the powerful emotional charge King in the Wilderness conveys, it simply must be seen.

This one you see for the pure love of great movie making. Its tough-minded, unsentimental writing and ferociously brilliant acting--across the board and especially at the top--manage to give a pretty good idea of what Christy Brown, the Dublin-born writer, poet and painter, was all about.

A powerfully cinematic modern allegory of love and fear. [20 Oct 1987, p.3]

Ran, which translates as "chaos" or "turmoil," is at once brisk and vital, elegiac and contemplative, intimate and epic, tragic yet shot through with humor. It combines the energy of youth with the perspective of maturity. It encompasses all of human nature in its folly and grandeur, and it does so in images as beautiful and terrifying as any ever captured on film and in performances that are impeccable.

The older it gets, and we with it, the more we're able to see in it. As few American films have, Gone With the Wind succeeds both as historical epic and as intimate drama.

Beyond the timelessness of the story itself, the film is beautifully shot and though early in Godard’s career already showcased his ability to capture emotional intensity in the very way he frames the shots.

After suffering through two screenings of Dr. Strangelove, I would sooner drink hemlock.... To me, Dr. Strangelove is an evil thing about an evil thing; you will have to make up your own mind about it.

Quo Vadis, Aida? re-creates history in the present tense, with a gut-clutching immediacy that Žbanić makes bearable through sheer formal restraint.

One of the great crime thrillers, the benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against, it's no musty museum piece but a driving, compelling piece of work, redolent of the air of human frailty and fatalistic doom.

This is a film with a commitment to reality unlike any we're used to seeing.

Parasite begins in exhilaration and ends in devastation, but the triumph of the movie is that it fully lives and breathes at every moment, even when you might find yourself struggling to exhale.

The most bravura 69 minutes in film history. [18 Mar 2011, p.D9]

Of the great American films -- and make no mistake, it belongs in that group -- A Streetcar Named Desire remains one of the most misunderstood, underappreciated and surprisingly forgotten. [26 Sept 1993, p7]

Though it takes the risk of appearing too quiet too long, Roma and its melding of the personal with a glimpse of a society veering toward collapse is incontestably persuasive, a film whose like we are not likely to see again.

Prepare to be astonished by Spirited Away.

Although its computer-generated imagery is impressive, the major surprise of this bright foray into a new kind of animation is how much cleverness has been invested in story and dialogue.

Many small things happen in Killer of Sheep, nothing of much consequence. But the enlargement of life itself is profound.

You may know Thompson as a member of the Roots and as the musical director for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” If you’ve read his book, “Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove,” you’re aware that he’s also inquisitive and a first-rate music geek, making him the perfect person to crate-dig through the musical and cultural history documented in this film. His respect and enthusiasm for the material jumps off the screen.

The onscreen chemistry between James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan was the stuff of legend, never better displayed than in this Ernst Lubitsch romantic charmer. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

This is impressive filmmaking, but it is not easy to take in.

Powerful, emotional filmmaking that leaves a scar, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By the Sea is heartbreaking yet somehow heartening, a film that just wallops you with its honesty, its authenticity and its access to despair.

Achieves its success through a combination of attitude and technique, uniting, to exceptional effect, a way of viewing the world morally while looking at it physically.

It enables us to recapture exactly the delightful sensations felt all those years ago when we and the world were young and exciting together.

A harrowing yet sublime work that has to do with the exceptionally cruel fate of an 11th-Century noblewoman, played by the incomparable Kinuyo Tanaka. [12 Aug 1985, p.2]

Ratatouille is as audacious as they come. It takes risks and goes places other films wouldn't dare, and it ends up putting rival imaginations in the shade.

Some of the subsequent Disney features--notably "Pinocchio"--are technically superior, but the animators never surpassed the emotional depth they achieved in Walt's "folly." "Snow White" carries her 50 years very lightly.

As a piece of romantic/dramatic cinema, its peers are few, its superiors simply nonexistent.

Mean Streets is a jazzy riff of a movie, zigging and zagging as if to the beat of snapping fingers. Its greatness lies in its leanness, with nary a word, a move, a gesture that's nonessential.

Preston Sturges was arguably the most gifted writer-director of sound comedies Hollywood has ever produced, and this Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda standoff is his masterpiece. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

Gravity is out of this world. Words can do little to convey the visual astonishment this space opera creates. It is a film whose impact must be experienced in 3-D on a theatrical screen to be fully understood.

Fantasia is caviar to the general, ambrosia and nectar for the intelligentsia. It makes no compromises; it is the noblest experiment of a wizard in his bright field of artistry and creativeness. [30 Jan 1941, p. 9]

Wised-up as well as traditional, with a striking and detailed look and a strong storyline, it is sure to charm a wide audience both now and for a long time to come.

It’s a delight to see the director cut loose, along with his gifted behind-the-scenes collaborators (including production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Jacqueline Durran) and his captivating stars.

As wonderful as the original was, this is one of the few times in cinema history when the sequel is even better. [21 Oct 1999, p.F54]

The movie remains a devastating portrait of grief, a master class in disjunctive editing and a haunting disquisition on the use of the color red.

Urgent investigative report and unforgettable drama, Virunga is a work of heart-wrenching tenderness and heart-stopping suspense.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn’t it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight?

Smartly written by Aaron Sorkin, directed to within an inch of its life by David Fincher and anchored by a perfectly pitched performance by Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is a barn-burner of a tale that unfolds at a splendid clip.

It’s the rare movie that can take something as ancient as myth and use it to break your heart anew.

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It’s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres, down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone.

What makes I Am Not Your Negro a mesmerizing cinematic experience, smart, thoughtful and disturbing, goes well beyond words.

Now, as ever, "Woodstock" is not just a great slice-of-time documentary but still the ultimate rock concert movie: A quarter-century of advances hasn't brought about any real improvements on the multiple-camera filming techniques or even significantly dated the split-screen effects and varying aspect ratio tricks. The advent of digital sound, on the other hand, has given the remixed soundtrack a theatrical glory unknown a generation ago. At this pristine volume, Jimi Hendrix's concluding bit may not be quite suitable for anyone with a heart condition, which would constitute more of the Woodstock nation than some of us might like to consider. [29 June 1994, p.F6]

A corrosive rage courses through this 163-minute odyssey that’s matched by a leavening absurdism, Jude aghast at the comical stupidity of our inauthentic, greed-driven world.

If Wells has assembled a note-perfect evocation of a highly specific chapter — the end of a millennium and possibly something else — it’s when she deliberately breaks with realism that this gently aching movie achieves an overwhelming emotional force.

Heartfelt but not cloying, Rocks is a radiant must-see.

A perfect storm of a motion picture, with an icy, immaculate director unexpectedly taking on deeply emotional subject matter.

Overwhelmingly tense, overflowing with crackling verisimilitude, it's both the film about the war in Iraq that we've been waiting for and the kind of unqualified triumph that's been long expected from director Kathryn Bigelow.

The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities. [14 Oct 1994]

One reason Boal makes such a potent combination with Bigelow is that her directing style moves us right along. She is so good with both action and creating a convincing look and feel for the film that the time it takes to get up to speed with the complicated plot does not feel like a problem.

The horrors of Collective are sickeningly specific; the implications, as suggested by its comprehensive indictment of a title, are universal.

A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised.

Sunrise reminds us that the silent film was reaching its artistic heights just as sound was arriving. [29 Apr 1985, p.2]

A brilliantly conceived epic fable.

Quietly devastating.

Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, Wall-E gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films.

Haynes understands that swooningly beautiful traditional technique bolstered by thrilling performances creates the greatest impact. He has made a serious melodrama about the geometry of desire, a dreamy example of heightened reality that fully engages emotions despite the exact calculations with which it's been made.

The films have only gotten better by letting the relationship marinate. "Midnight's" more disgruntled edge reflects what creeps up on couples as years pass, regrets stack up, kids factor in, real life intervenes.

Aretha Franklin didn’t transcend the gospel or gospel music; as first her album and now this marvelous documentary remind us, she did more than most to fulfill its potential for truth and beauty, devotion and art.

The surpassing accomplishment of Dunkirk is to make us feel an almost literal fusion with its story. It's not so much that we've seen a splendid movie, though we have, but as if we've been taken inside a historic event, become wholly immersed in something real and alive.

45 Years is a quietly explosive film, a potent drama with a nuanced feel for subtlety and emotional complications.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell reminds us that confusion is often a necessary first step toward enlightenment, and that bafflement and beauty often go hand in hand. This is a lesson that Thiên must learn as well. The gift of this movie is that it invites us to learn it alongside him.

Glaciers might be melting, the polar caps might be crumbling, but not even the passage of half a century has taken the frozen edge off this brilliantly icy film.

Wonderfully humanistic film. Yi Yi investigates the entire melody of life.

The Manchurian Candidate proves that its fascination is intact. [12 Jan 1998, p.C1; Re-Release]

Just as Turner's expressive, enthralling work changed the nature of painting, Mr. Turner, anchored in the rock of Timothy Spall's astonishing, Cannes prize-winning performance, pushes hard against the strictures of conventional narrative and ends up pulling us into its world and capturing us completely.

Astonishingly, instead of business as usual, The Irishman is a revelation, as intoxicating a film as the year has seen, allowing Scorsese to use his expected mastery of all elements of filmmaking to ends we did not see coming.

Jeanne Dielman belongs to the rare class of films capable of transforming the world around you, though it requires the kind of patience and dedication that can be hard to come by at home. [23 Aug 2009, p.D10]

Crouching Tiger's blend of the magical, the mythical and the romantic fills a need in us we might not even realize we had.

An enduring film of enchanting and provocative revelation. [09 Jan 2009, p.E15]

Inside Out manages to be honest and unafraid but never cheaply sentimental where emotion is concerned, evoking a largeness of spirit whose ability to be moving sneaks up and takes us by surprise.

“My Undesirable Friends” captures dark times with some of the funniest people you’d ever hope to have as sisters-in-arms. Defiant, emotional and life-affirming, the film presents us with endearing patriots who love their country but hate its leaders, sucking us into a riveting tale with a powerful undertow.

Exactly written, directed with a surgeon's precision and transcendently acted, Sideways brings emotional reality to a consistently amusing character comedy, making it something to be cherished like the delicate Santa Ynez Valley wines that are the story's vivid backdrop.

Sunset Blvd., directed by Billy Wilder, is an attack on Hollywood, especially its image-making fickleness and casual exploitation of all things shimmery. [20 Apr 1995, p.14]

A scathing, ingeniously funny 1960 portrayal of corporate corruption and backstairs sex. [18 March 1988, p.C24]

The atmosphere is unremittingly tense, the undercurrents poignant and grim. It's the best movie ever made by pastoralist Henry King. [26 July 1988, p.21]

An extraordinarily moving examination of how the AIDS epidemic both devastated and transformed San Francisco's gay community, this clear-eyed and soulful documentary brings us inside the contagion in a way that is so intimate, so personal, you feel like you're hearing about these catastrophic events for the first time.

Faces Places turns out to be a road movie in more than a merely literal sense. It is at once a roving journey into environments we rarely see in cinema and an incomplete but invaluable map of Varda’s memories.