I can't wait to see Borat, which has twice as many laughs as all of this year's other movie comedies combined, for a fourth time.

It’s hard to imagine audiences being more glued to another movie this year, so sexy and stirring the story is from start to finish.

It’s cinematic Mountain Dew. You’ll be wired for the entire 2½ hours.

Happy Feet is not only the year's best animated movie, it's one of the year's best movies, period. Go.

The climactic shootout, which goes on for 15 minutes and has an astronomical body count, is a masterpiece of its kind.

All great films have imagination; this one also has the sense of experience.

Four stars simply aren't enough for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which just may be the most entertaining movie I've ever labeled a masterpiece in these pages.

Simultaneously funny and frightening, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece. [25 Apr 2004, p.3]

May not have the starry casts of the Coens' more recent films, but it has plenty of heart and soul.

You have never seen a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because there has never been a movie like it.

Bruce Brown’s 1966 documentary, perhaps the greatest surfing movie ever made, follows California surfers as they travel the globe in search of the perfect wave.

An absorbing, deeply affecting, well-acted --and remarkably evenhanded -- antiwar statement. It's also incredibly suspenseful and very blackly funny.

It’s that priceless dialogue, the bitter ironies, the magnificently skeevy cast of characters and even the overall structure that make The Seven Five “Goodfellas” in blue.

The moral alertness of the film is of the level normally confined, in military pictures, to talky courtroom scenes, yet Eastwood skillfully works dilemmas into propulsive and suspenseful action.

A hilarious and touching animated masterpiece that takes a gloriously imaginative, sometimes scary leap into the mind of a girl on the cusp of adolescence.

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film combines allegory, brutal melodrama, black humor and strikingly beautiful compositions, each frame dense with meaning. Leviathan stays absolutely gripping, right up to the O. Henry twist that slams the film shut.

A rare case of an American remake that actually improves on a European movie.

Brilliantly acted and directed, Ava DuVernay’s towering Selma is Hollywood’s definitive depiction of the 1960s American civil rights movement — as well as perhaps the most timely movie you’ll see this year.

24-karat stuff, even if it has a soul of tin. With the voices of Ewan McGregor, Robin Williams and Mel Brooks, Robots is a giddy erector-set update of "Toy Story" with a splash of "The Wizard of Oz."

Russian Dolls is itself a delightful mini-trip to Europe. Its overly cute bits are like cinematic tourist traps, but it's the beauty that stays with you.

Coco is packed with terrific original tunes such as “Remember Me” (by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez of “Frozen”) and “Proud Corazón” (co-written by Adrian Molina, the film’s co-director). But it’s not your average musical, in which characters wail their wants and feelings. That’s a refreshing change.

This flick is fast and ferocious, his (Sidney Lumet) sharpest and best since "Prince of the City" (1980) - and surely one of the year's finest.

The year’s best film so far.

You won't see any film this year as beautiful, and plain thrilling as Apocalypse Now Redux. Watching it after sitting through this summer's record number of dumb, dreadful movies is almost a painfully good experience. [3 Aug 2001, p.30]

It’s a breathtakingly human film — about a bird and a bot.

Pure magic.

A sublime variation on the buddy road movie, infusing the midlife crises of the two main protagonists with hope and poetry.

As he did so ingeniously with “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the Spanish Civil War, del Toro explores fantasy, myth and childhood in a time of oppressive fascism; the specks of light that escape the darkness.

Comes as close to perfect as any movie I've seen lately.

Each scene is breathtaking, such as a long shot of a river at a key moment, and an unforgettable soccer game played with no ball. Timbuktu deserves every accolade it gets.

I was reminded, at times, of the painstakingly detailed beauty of “The Triplets of Belleville,” but Moore has a more ethereal, rounded aesthetic all his own. They don’t make movies like this anymore — except when, lucky us, they do.

Brilliantly acted by the year’s most carefully assembled cast, Spotlight is one of the year’s best films, showing just how hard it is to uncover painful truths.

Hands-down the best movie of the year.

Breakneck, raucous and thoroughly exhilarating.

56 Up is as good a point as any to get hooked on the magnificent half-century series of documentaries, beginning in 1964 with "7 Up."

So consistently involving because the excellent cast delivers their lines with the kind of utter conviction not seen in this kind of movie since the first "Star Wars."

It's like watching Alfred Hitchcock try to solve a Rubik's cube in a roadside diner.

Making a movie this warm, funny, and rigorously truthful about lovers trying to remain partners is even harder.

Compared by some to “2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ Cuarón’s relatively intimate space epic is equally groundbreaking in the spectacular way it depicts space.

Darkly hilarious, brilliantly acted.

It's a wistful yet penetrating film, shot through with magic realism and life-affirming humor, that gets you deep down where you live.

The final shot of Apatow’s movie is the iconic Staten Island Ferry, bringing to mind “Working Girl,” “Manhattan” and countless other New York City classics. The King of Staten Island joins that list.

Sharp, funny and as mesmerizing as the master’s notoriously languorous suspense scenes.

If she (Paltrow) were the only good thing about Shakespeare in Love, it still would have been worth seeing; that she is the crown jewel in a glittering tiara of a film studded with writing and acting gems testifies to the deep pleasures to be found in this remarkable movie.

At turns sexy, ultra-violent and sweet, it will infiltrate your brain long after you've seen it.

You'll laugh, you'll cry -- the year's best movie.

It’s a creepy little gem, and its imagery will stay with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Director Christopher Nolan’s seismic Oppenheimer is that rarest of things: a sophisticated and bracing movie that’s made for adults and makes nobody say, “I’ll wait till it’s on streaming.”

No adventurous filmgoer will want to miss Tony Takitani.

The tale is so bizarre that it’s sometimes comical, and often disturbing. The unrelentingly intense BlacKkKlansman can be very hard to watch.

Vividly re- creates TV news icon Edward R. Murrow's historic face-off with Sen. Joseph McCarthy in devastatingly low-key detail -- is the right movie at the right time.

An unqualified triumph.

The cumulative impact is devastating, and very far from a simple Western condemnation of another country’s brutality. In forcing viewers to hear the boasts of genocide’s perpetrators, The Act of Killing puts a harsh spotlight on all celebrations of bloodshed, from Hollywood to the op-ed pages.

The script by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn is hysterical, but director Shawn Levy must’ve sold his soul to the devil to secure this cast.

Despite being set in the late 1970s, 20th Century Women feels like the perfect movie for this moment.

This isn't a war movie. Rather, it's a powerful, heart-tugging portrait of the innocent victims of conflict.

It’s one of the funniest movies of the year.

Without any preachiness, this magically beautiful film urges us to take better care of the bees, and honor the irreplaceable things that they do for us.

It ranks among Robert Altman's best work ever, and that its many satisfactions derive in large part from a superbly written screenplay by Julian Fellowes that has no equal this year.

Chance encounters and fated love are the stuff of fairy tales, which is what makes the deliriously romantic sequel Before Sunset a small miracle.

It’s very funny and sweet and even a little weepy, and it has maybe the best scene ever filmed of dirty talk gone wrong. In other words, it’s a Schumer/Apatow production — may there be more of them to come.

That the story has largely gone untold is a shame, and Kennedy (daughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy) has done a service to the country in reminding us.

Take note, Lars von Trier: This is how you do a truly funny, subversive movie about a woman’s obsession with the human body and sex.

An exquisite work of cinematic art that also happens to be the funniest, most touching, most exciting and most entertaining movie released so far this year.

It was always going to be an emotional experience watching the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman make his acting debut. His father, an Oscar-winning genius, died in 2014...What we never could have imagined, though, is that Cooper’s freshman performance (he’s so green, his IMDB page doesn’t have a photo yet) would be one of the best of the year in what is easily the best film of 2021, Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant Licorice Pizza. This wonderful kid should be in the Oscar race, but we’re too predictably infatuated with big names. Let’s fix that.

Like a bomb exploding in a fireworks factory: It's fierce and shocking and dazzling and wonderful.

In Raoul Walsh's potent portrayal of a criminal gang roving backroads America, Cagney permanently redefined psychopathic criminality in the movies. [22 May 2005, p.25]

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

Someway, somehow, it’s the funniest movie to hit theaters in a long time.

One of the year's best films and so tapped into the zeitgeist that it's positively scary.

From the Hitchcockian opening credits to the final frame, Almodovar has Hitch on his mind.

Delightfully unpredictable, hilarious comedy with wonderful performances that tug at your heart in ways that utterly transcend gender labels.

Deserved an end-of-the-year prestige release, is a true work of art in a marketplace filled with velvet paintings. It's positively magical, the reason we loved movies in the first place.

An extraordinary experience: an original and brilliant combination of comedy, action and sophisticated political comment -- the best American movie of the year thus far.

A majestic conclusion to a nine-plus-hours epic that stirs the heart, mind and soul as few films ever have.

1917 is a modern war classic and one of the best movies of the year.

This is a serious movie overflowing with memorable acting, unforgettable images, searing tragedy, unexpected humor and an eloquent plea for international understanding. And while it's by no stretch of imagination light entertainment, it's fundamentally a more optimistic work than either "Amores Perros" or "21 Grams."

Chomet's wacky tale is so crammed full of eye-popping images, it's impossible to forget afterward.

A spectacularly rendered tale of a family of superheroes, takes the art form to a whole new level.

Those with the stomach to sit through Decline will be rewarded with a lively, masterful documentary.

Porumboiu, who also produced and wrote, elicits remarkably deadpan performances from Teo Corban (as the show's host), Ion Sapdaru (the professor) and - especially - Mircea Andreescu, as the old man. Even the subtitles cracked me up.

Here’s a franchise you’d think had been done to death (wasn’t the last webslinger reboot, like, two years ago?), and yet Spider-Man: Homecoming feels fresh and new, an endearingly awkward kid brother to the glamorous “Wonder Woman.”

Christopher Nolan's dramatically and emotionally satisfying wrap-up to the Dark Knight trilogy adroitly avoids clichés and gleefully subverts your expectations at every turn.

Call this movie by its name: Masterpiece.

Break out the popcorn and prepare to be blown away. King Kong is the most pulse- pounding and heart-stirring romantic adventure since "Titanic."

Masterful, atypically political - and flawlessly acted.

The year's best foreign-language movie an absolute must-see.

A thrilling and propulsive drama.

Old-school filmmaking at its best.

Walk the Line superbly combines music and two of the year's most riveting performances to tell one of the screen's great love stories.

Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.

As we face yet another summer of brooding superheroes, it's Magic Mike to the rescue! He's got the civilian alter ego and the acrobatic skills to rival Spidey or Batman.

A film of such cyclonic visual and emotional power, of such dazzling virtuosity and shattering humanity, that it is difficult to endure, yet alone describe. Savagely beautiful and savagely true, Saving Private Ryan is an excruciating masterpiece.

Tomlin and Elliot relive their characters’ pain and anger so deeply that they could very well both end up with Oscar nominations.

Scorsese is at the top of his game here. His film is never boring, and it explores some unexpectedly deep themes for mafiosos.

A flat-out masterpiece, surely the best movie of the year; indeed, an all-time classic.

This Belgian drama is the real deal, an alternately wrenching and ecstatic viewing experience, adapted from a play by lead actor Johan Heldenbergh.

The match of larger-than-life actress to larger-than-life role is perfection.