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.