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.

This is at once the loftiest and the most grounded love story I’ve seen in some time, a movie that feels lingering and contemplative in the moment but is over as quickly (too quickly) as a drink with a long-absent friend.

A meditation on aging, friendship, betrayal and coming to terms with life's profound contradictions, interspersed with antic humor and some of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed. [01 Jan 2016, p.E4]

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.