Ingrid Bergman makes a charming and beautiful refugee and Paul Henried gives a convincing performance in the role of the ardent anti-Nazi leader. Claude Rains gives one of his best performances as the police chief and Conrad Veidt is properly menacing as the Nazi officer. Sydney Greestreet is wonderful as the slick proprietor of the Blue Parrot and Rick’s rival in the cafe business.

This bold movie may sound like a stunt, but it’s so much more than that. Linklater is an effortless, genial auteur, and his passions are woven through “Dazed and Confused,” “School of Rock” and the “Before Sunrise” trilogy. Here, his mellow groove becomes an everyday rhythm.

An artistic triumph for the master of mystery.

In this picture, the screen’s greatest dancer contributes some of his art of choreography for the special pleasure of movie audiences.

It's a white-knuckler all the way, with most of that tension coming from the smallest facial expressions exchanged in uneasy silence between compatriots who knew what they were getting into, but were nevertheless unprepared for the moral and emotional fallout of their patriotic actions.

We're exhausted because we laughed so much and so heartily at City Lights that we feel considerably weakened. Here's praying that we fast regain our strength so that we may journey to the George M. Cohan theatre to see Charlie again - and again - in this new heart-breaking masterpiece of comedy which he offers pantomimically to a worldful of movie-goers...City Lights is excruciatingly funny and terribly, terribly sad. It makes you chuckle hysterically. You have the greatest time imaginable, and yet, occasionally you find little hurty lumps in your throat.

Even when the storytelling falters - several crucial scenes take place in between the various segments, with major events happening off-screen - Jenkins' sharp eye and his film's beautiful cinematography keeps us watching.

Walt Disney has waved his magic wand over Collodi's world-famous fairy story, Pinocchio, and presto! he has changed it into the most enchanting film ever brought to the screen.

It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.

The movie elevated the basic gangster picture into what became known as the niche genre of poetic realism. And, aside from Garbo, never have key lights on a star's face caused so much swooning among fans.

A critic trots out the word "masterpiece" at his own peril, but there it is.

The funniest comedy I’ve seen in years. There aren’t many of the hundred and four minutes of running time that doesn’t find the audience laughing its head off at the antics of Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

All About Eve is not only a brilliant and clever portrait of an actress, it is a downright funny film, from its opening scene to the final fadeout.

It took the German restorers four years to ready this print using dupe negatives and old prints found in archives around the world. Their work speaks for itself. Each frame of this classic is drop-dead stunning, the more so now that the movie no longer hiccups its way across the screen.

The picture is real, full of vitality and of so much human waywardness and nobility of spirit that it tears your heart out in sympathy with its tender and tragic passages and makes you want to shout with joy at its hearty humor.

Remains funnier than almost any comedy made in this generation. And since we are, once again, embarked in global warfare, it's as timely as it has ever been. [24 Apr 2004, p.67]

The obvious thing to say is that Hitch has done it again; that the suspense of his picture builds up slowly but surely to an almost unbearable pitch of excitement. Psycho is a murder mystery. It isn’t Hitchcock’s usual terrifier, a shocker of the nervous system; it’s a mind-teaser.

This year’s foreign language Oscar scandal – there is always at least one – is the snub of director Cristian Mungiu’s disturbing, masterful realist drama following two college roommates as they carry out plans for one’s black market abortion in Communist Romania.

Turns everything we know about the contemporary world on its head, and substitutes it with one in which spirits, monsters, magicians and animals mix it up in a carnival of energy, good humor and freewheeling illusion.

McQueen has made a film comparable to “Schindler’s List” — art that may be hard to watch, but which is an essential look at man’s inhumanity to man. It is wrenching, but 12 Years a Slave earns its tears in a way few films ever do.

Despite his draw to tragic subjects, Lonergan holds onto a sharp, dark, Irish sense of humor, and a feel for the absurd that comes out at the most unexpected times. A playwright's sense of what actors do, too. Affleck gives a career-best performance here.

As joyously energetic now as the day it arrived.

Polanski’s direction is smooth and the film itself happily understated. The tension created is practically unbearable.

A gorgeous, wonderfully inventive computer-animated comedy.

Perfectly delightful screen entertainment. The film is as charming as it is novel in conception and execution and it is so bound to appeal as strongly to grown-ups as to youngsters.

A thrill ride with a brain.

The movie is set in a gloriously creepy and crumbling Venice. It's the off-season, and every deserted canal and alleyway reeks of bad vibes. Roeg plays masterfully with this menacing atmosphere, jangling the nerves with quick cuts and quixotic possibilities. [16 Oct 1998, p.72]

A work deeper than its nickname, "The Facebook Movie," hints at - coils around your brain. Weeks after seeing it, moments from it will haunt you.