What does it mean to be a knight, or even just to be human? It isn’t an easy question, and The Green Knight, in taking it seriously, isn’t always an easy film. But by the time Gawain reaches his journey’s end, in as moving and majestically sustained a passage of pure cinema as I’ve seen this year, the moral arc of his journey has snapped into undeniable focus.

L’Innocente is the kind of opulent, passionate drama that risks folly to attain the sublime. Giannini and Antonelli are equal to the challenge while O’Neill, who looks ravishing, provides a dispassionate counterpoint.

You are advised to pay close visual attention, especially to Robert Frazen’s pinpoint editing and Melissa Toth’s subtly shifting costumes, even as you lean in to catch every word of Kaufman’s torrential dialogue and each detail of the mercurial, tinnitus-evoking sound design.

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

One of the more delightful surprises of “The Souvenir Part II” is that it’s both a sadder, heavier film than its predecessor and a looser, funnier one.

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.

In a season not noted for adult diversions, Mona Lisa could hardly be more welcome: a glorious, heart-shaped box of bittersweet chocolates for the grown-ups in the house.

With a head-shaking plot so foolproof it was remade twice, this romantic fantasy starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer was so beloved by Cary Grant he convinced director Leo McCarey to remake it with himself as the star (as An Affair to Remember). [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

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 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]

As the current Emma testifies, Jane Austen continues to knock them dead but nothing beats the high gloss of impeccable studio craftsmanship that elevates this Laurence Olivier-Greer Garson vehicle. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

No one, with the possible exception of Bruce Lee, conveyed as much onscreen energy as Jimmy Cagney, and this musical biopic of George M. Cohan has that in spades, culminating in a dance down the White House stairs that is unforgettable. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

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]

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

The Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside of the Arkansas governor’s presidential campaign, with Carville playing Huck Finn to Stephanopoulos’ Tom Sawyer, these lively presences lit up Clinton’s drive to the White House and turn The War Room into a tiptop political documentary that offers a candid and entertaining backstage look at a most unlikely electoral Juggernaut.

A great gangster film...Shanghai Triad is one of the lushest-looking, most stunningly photographed (by Lu Yue) films of the year, but its depiction of unabashed material splendor is instantly eclipsed by the natural beauty of this island retreat with its swaying pampas grass, magnificent skies and modest structures of simple beauty.

This 1946 version became a key film in postwar Hollywood film noir. Directed by Tay Garnett, it remains one of Lana Turner's (right) very best films. [02 Feb 1997, p.78]

It has the subtlety and devastating impact of Renoir’s prophetic classic Rules of the Game, and it is suffused with the calm, detached tragic irony and inevitability of the ancient Greek plays.

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.

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.

An offbeat and life-affirming triumph, “Limbo” is the kind of original work of art that moves the needle on an issue by interrogating the human factor rather than hanging out on the impersonal surface. A movie born of our times but destined to outlive them, it deserves to cross the threshold from festival darling to audience favorite.

The brilliance of MLK/FBI lies in how effortlessly conversant it manages to be with the injustices of the present, without ever deviating from the injustices of the past.

There is cruelty here but also tenderness, and hellish images that are followed by glimpses of a terrestrial paradise.

Scarface is one of best of the early gangster movies; its wit and building velocity speeds it past Little Caesar and keeps pace with Public Enemy.

Swinton manifests, with magnificently nuanced modulation, an emotional tangle; at times, it is raw with a cathartic force, while enmeshed with meekly conciliatory moments of codependence. Wielding a hatchet with violent purpose or begging for a final rendezvous, Swinton’s every scorching word cuts deep.