Spotlight one of the best movies about journalism ever made, at once gripping and accurate. It doesn’t just get the big things right, such as how news stories evolve, but the small things, such as what offices look like and how staff tends to react to a new boss.

To watch Ozu's films is to watch elegant simplicity, although they are meticulously complex. It's even a relaxing experience - you can almost feel your heart rate lowering - yet there is much human drama on the screen, and much wisdom.

This wonderful romp of a movie looks magical on the big screen: colors are a picnic for the eyes, details loom so clearly you can practically touch them and there's a sense of the larger-than-life with a film that's already larger than life.

[Apichatpong’s] films are well-thought-out experiences, unique, disciplined, gorgeously composed and irascibly moving to their own rhythm. What sets Memoria apart from his other work is a new setting: Colombia.

By the end, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly achieves a victory over difficult material, but celebrating that fact doesn't preclude recognizing the story is not a natural for movies and remains an uneasy match.

This is the most realistic film about teaching that you're ever likely to see.

Feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.

Hushed minimalism is a rare and appealing quality in the cinema these days, but so little happens in 35 Shots of Rum that I'm hard-pressed to describe the plot. It doesn't exactly have one.

Leigh goes right to the core of his character's lives and mines the place where we're weakest, most alone and sometimes the cruelest.

The results in an experience that is smooth sailing for the first 45 minutes, but then hits a slog that goes on for another 40, before the movie revives again in its last half hour. Obviously, a film can’t be great if you spend 40 minutes wishing the thing would end already. A 95 minutes, The Florida Project could have been a masterpiece.

This Alfred Hitchcock film on his familiar theme of the wrongly accused man is outstanding in every respect. [19 Sep 1999, p.52]

You have never seen anything like this.

Kore-eda weaves these images and others, building a multilayered fugue that contemplates death, asks if mourning ever truly ends and addresses the ephemeral nature of love, family and home. Everything we value and use to define and frame our lives, he suggests, is always at risk.

Spielberg's sledgehammer way with emotional moments, never more obvious than here, kills some of the pleasure for adults and robs the movie of the ultimate laurel -- classic status. [2002 re-release]

Apocalypse Now is a mixed bag, a product of excess and ambition, hatched in agony and redeemed by shards of brilliance. The new Redux version isn't a better film, but for Coppola fans and film lovers, it's essential viewing.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has made a controlled and reserved film, and she has placed at its center a reserved and controlled protagonist named Autumn, played with restraint by newcomer Sidney Flanagan.

Gets it right. It's a wonderful movie. Watching it, one can't help but get the impression that everyone involved was steeped in Tolkien's work, loved the book, treasured it and took care not to break a cherished thing in it.

Maybe Glazer’s movie will be of use to people naïve enough to believe that nobody without horns and a pitchfork can be the devil. Everybody else will learn nothing from this film.

Robert Redford's exceptionally handsome and provocative Quiz Show manages a trick that few films even dare try -- to take a hard look at personal and public moral issues and still provide dazzling entertainment.

Clearly a minor classic, mainly for reasons besides its crime story plot -- namely, the urbane fatalism of its cast and the overall mood of inevitability that hangs over every scene.

Toy Story 3 is a better film than "Wall-E" and "Up" in that it succeeds completely in conventional terms. For 103 minutes, it never takes audience interest for granted. It has action, horror and vivid characters, and it always keeps moving forward.

The most passionate love affair in The Souvenir is with film. Hogg utilizes an almost cinema verite style, with a visual look of the grainy kind of 16mm film an ’80s film school student would work with. Her style is reminiscent of early Olivier Assayas or Éric Rohmer’s “The Green Ray” (1986), an acknowledged influence.

Ferocious brutality is presented without commentary or judgment, yet with unmistakable moral understanding and vision. [21 September 1990, Daily Notebook p.E-1]

It’s a testimony to how much this is a live issue in Indonesia that some of the credits are listed simply as “anonymous.”

Keith Maitland’s powerful and emotional documentary Tower — easily one of the best films of the year — takes a novel approach for a nonfiction film: Animation.

The second-half of Burning is allegorical and intentionally obtuse. It’s intriguing, even. But it all leads to an ending that satisfies no one, especially after 2½ hours.

Like Yûsuke’s beloved classic Saab 9000 that Misaki drives ever so carefully, Drive My Car moves ahead with smooth confidence and a fine-tuned reliability.

Not always pleasant to watch.

It's an endurance test. Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow.

One of the best crime dramas to come along in years.

Exquisite and moving documentary.

A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance, Lost in Translation is one of the best films this year.

He never indulges in schmaltz or melodrama, as most American filmmakers do when approaching this theme -- think of "It's a Wonderful Life" or the awful "When Dreams May Come" -- but delivers a delicate meditation rich with emotion.

Almost too much to bear. But brace yourself and see it anyway. It’s worth it.

The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition.

So the most noticeable thing about the first minutes of Greta Gerwig’s new screen adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is that the women in Little Women seem just a little bit snooty here, more like privileged actresses from 2019 than like a Northern family living in genteel poverty during the Civil War.

Photographed in lush black and white by Sergei Urusevsky, who worked with the amazingly inventive camera operator Alexander Calzatti, "I Am Cuba" unfolds like a cinematic Olympics of complex, acrobatic camera moves.

Impossible to describe, impossible to forget, The Triplets of Belleville sends audiences tottering out of the theater, dazed and delighted, and wondering what it is they have just experienced.

The cruelty of his methods aside -- and Polanski wasn't the first director to terrorize an actor for the sake of a performance -- Repulsion is a frightening, fiercely entertaining experience that holds up to time. (Review of May 1998 revival)

Grievous, loving, organic and mysterious. What a celebration.

Nickel Boys offers a different way to understand horrors based on true events not that far in the past by plunging viewers into its characters’ humanity.

The Boy and the Heron is unquestionably a personal vision, with its own internal logic. It has a direct conduit with the mind of its creator, who happens to be a genius and one of the best to ever do it. If this is it for Miyazaki, well, what a finish.

This is a movie that you will admire both for its courage and its creativity.

Ida is a rarity, a film both intensely grounded in painful historical reality and genuinely otherworldly.

A great visual artist documentary has to be more than a series of images set to narration like an art history course. The best films find some compelling reason in the present to spend time with them. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed filmmaker Laura Poitras’ searing, urgent portrait of photographer Nan Goldin finds that in the opioid crisis.

Riveting.

The best movie of 2008? The most revealing war film ever made? The greatest animated feature to come out of Israel? All these descriptions could apply to Waltz With Bashir.

Panah Panahi, making his feature debut with Hit the Road, definitely inherited his old man’s trouble-making genes. His eye for composition is accomplished, but the movie meanders and the pacing sometimes drags. The problem, of course, is the filmmaker holds back the relevant information that would keep a viewer engaged until the end.

But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that the rewards of They Shall Not Grow Old are in any way akin to that of the usual BBC historical documentary. There is some overlap, to be sure, but by and large this Peter Jackson film does not offer a historical encounter, so much as an encounter of humanity, a psychic linking of hands across time.

Baker is concerned with people who are broke and on the outside (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”), and while there are aspects of “Anora” that make us aware of the distance between people born with everything and those born with nothing, he doesn’t let politics or economics dwarf his characters.

It’s a bit crazy, wild yet precise, a mix of comedy and drama that feints in the direction of anachronism, even as it provides a grand showcase for Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, who are extraordinary.

Egoyan's voice is so clear and loving, his vision so forgiving and his film so intelligent that you come away refreshed.

Bests most other teen comedies right off the bat. If you got a kick out of "Crumb," this film will crack you up.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

Until this film, these Shin Bet directors had never consented to an interview. Now that they've spoken - and have said the unexpected - we can only wonder if their words will have an influence.

The suffering artist story is as old as time. Yet “The Brutalist” tells it with such specificity and visceral conviction, it feels entirely fresh. Modern, even.

Magnificent but somewhat frustrating movie.

The film has the measured and expansive quality of real life, which could have been dull. It’s anything but that. Instead, by making Julie so real and vivid, Reinsve and Trier accomplish something rare. They make everything that happens to her feel as interesting as if it were happening to you.

An overwhelming experience.

Watching Licorice Pizza is simultaneously like watching life with all the boring parts cut out and like watching movies with all the phony parts cut out.

This is a rare film and a rare use of cinema. Other documentaries are like filmed news stories. This one is like a poem. If you see this, you will never again think of hearing in quite the same way, and you will hear sounds that are so haunting that they will be with you for the rest of your life.

It's a movie filled with surprises, including one outright kick in the head that qualifies as one of the biggest movie moments of 1992. [18 Dec 1992]

With Reichardt, you really do feel like you’re actually there. The only problem is that, a lot of the time, you’re really not happy to be there.

Yet all this wit and effort and occasional beauty is in the service of a movie that is little more than a two-hour chase scene, one that seems founded on the assumption that if you show one set of people chasing another, that’s enough to get an audience excited: Oh, no, let’s hope they don’t get caught!

Le Samourai is beautifully assured and has a strong consistency of visual style and tone, but I can't say I had a great time watching it.

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

An absolute delight, combining the cheap thrills of a biopic with the gentler, but more lasting, pleasures of a brilliant character study.

As the title suggests, she might as well be on trial for her life. That’s the absurdist but eerily true premise behind this provocative Israeli feature film, which takes us to the world of the Jewish religious courts, a place where only rabbis can decree a divorce — and where husbands wield stupefying power.

Ultimately, Collin’s film is one of forgiveness. That’s not the usual way great tragedies end.

With any other actor, All of Us Strangers was bound to be an emotional film, but Scott has a way of going down to the nerve endings. He makes the movie into something raw and deep.

A great achievement: tense and passionate, a film that one feels not just emotionally but also physically.

A great experience, precisely because it's so intimate and unguarded.

Make no mistake, Blue Is the Warmest Color constitutes a breakthrough, in addition to being the best film of 2013.

It's a humane and witty treatment of an average life that, incidentally, speaks to the worth and inherent drama of average lives.

Paul Thomas Anderson is getting there. He is a great director of scenes, not of movies, but in Phantom Thread he has devised a film that hangs in from start to finish, his first since “Boogie Nights.”

A British costume film that's funny but not at all fusty.

It not only evocatively captures the Russian spirit and the yearnings of a generation, but it also masterfully chronicles the historic collapse of the Soviet Union and its complex aftermath.

The first film seemed a fully formed, lived-in world. The sequel leaves Julie on her own; an interior monologue that Hogg, and Swinton Byrne, can’t quite externalize.

This Is Not a Film isn't just a film, it's a strong one. It's also an act of political defiance, a moving personal document and a meditation on what film is and can be.

The visuals pop, the fish emote and the ocean comes alive. That's in the first two minutes. After that, they do some really cool stuff.

Part of the appeal of Topsy-Turvy is its generosity about human folly and shortcomings. Its wistfulness is very touching.

Co-directed by Emily Kassie, “Sugarcane” – which won a directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won the Golden Gate documentary award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April – contains stunning natural beauty and painful revelations.

It's tremendously entertaining, and probably worthy of repeat viewings.

The visual and emotional hues are darker [than previous Pixar films], and the focus rests more on middle age than coming of age. The adventures of a family of superheroes are likely to thrill and amuse children, but the film's more grown-up themes might go over their heads.

Green Border has the directness and truth of a documentary and the emotional immediacy of a narrative feature.

If his two previous films suggested a director dipping a few toes in dark waters, Un Prophete marks the moment when Audiard took the plunge.

A sweet but curiously unfulfilling story.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan takes an eggheady topic and, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, turns it into a gut-level experience. He shows that the kind of hyper, jacked-up, ultra-modern filmmaking associated with the action and superhero genres can be harnessed in the service of a smart, serious movie.

Polish actress Joanna Kulig has been waiting for years to show what she can do, and in Cold War she gets the chance. She takes the role of a lifetime between her teeth, chomps on it, pounds it into the ground and never lets go for a second. Ferocity and intensity are present in every moment of her performance, even when she’s contained. With Cold War, Kulig breaks out as a lioness of international cinema.

It is possibly Kurosawa's most underrated masterpiece, rich in characterization and structure, yet lost in the shuffle among such classics as "Rashomon" and "Seven Samurai." [14 Sep 2008, p.N31]

An original, inspired piece of work.

This is a very little film with a very large heart.

Sad funny and richly romantic, everything that makes Allen’s movies so beloved. [7 February 1986, Daily Notebook p.76]

Jarmusch has created a small miracle of a film, one that is both intellectually dazzling and emotionally provocative.

This beautifully shot film (kudos to cinematographer Paul Yee) could have easily been an incoherent mess, but Holmer keeps her lyrical movie under control at all times.

In 1925, Charlie Chaplin released "The Gold Rush," his best film to date and one of the best he would ever make - or anyone would ever make.

There's just nothing artful about it, and it's Greengrass who deserves the credit. These nonactors don't act the way most people do when playing themselves. They act the way people do when they're being themselves.

A superb documentary.