Seemingly loose and free-associative in style, Experimenter builds to an effect and, for all its humor — or rather, through its humor — makes a sober and chilling point.

A movie about an obese Harlem teenager who's raped by her father and abused by her mother. It's depressing, devastating, harrowing and repulsive. But there are lyric flights of hope interspersed among that raw naturalism, and that's what makes this movie amazing.

Original, winning entertainment, and well executed. No pun intended.

Bad Axe is a raw and stunning work of immediacy, a frontlines report from Trump country on the immigrant experience, family loyalty and community co-existence. It is not just among the finest and most important films of the year, but it will stand as a valuable historical and social document of these times.

Block's hypnotic documentary, among the finest of the year.

Women’s sports owes a debt to Shields. She finally has a movie that gives her deserved flowers.

A documentary with the emotional power of the very best in narrative film. It has characters impossible to forget, moments impossible to shake and an ending that leaves the audience both moved and rattled.

An inspiring translation of biblical grandeur, turning the story of one of history's greatest heroes into an entertaining, visually dazzling cartoon.

The whole movie is kind of like that: direct and devastating without overdoing it. The Nest unfolds in the way smart people tend to express their deepest disappointments — get it out, regain emotional control, divert for a while if you can.

People who see it may feel like dancing out of the theater afterward. Go for it.

It's a glamorous revenge romp, a "9 to 5" mixed with "Auntie Mame," and it gives each star the opportunity to do her best work in a long, long time.

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

Heart and tenderness are rare in cartoon movies. But in an age of frenetic children's fare, the new animated adventure The Iron Giant dares to show a lot of both, and it comes up a winner.

Coraci has given us a film that is not only amusing, but well-acted, and not only well-acted, but gorgeous. Micha Klein's animated transitions alone, which are used to signal each change in location, are wondrous and lovely to behold.

The Old Guard shows that, in the hands of a smart writer and director, something can be made of it that’s worthy of our attention. This genre can grow. Let’s hope it does.

Michelle Williams doesn't just survive. Called upon to glow, she glows. Her performance doesn't solve all the riddles of that personality; none could, and it's for the best that Williams doesn't try.

In many ways - in all ways - The Artist is a profound achievement.

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It has a lot of star power: Spielberg, Gloria Estefan, Eva Longoria, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Whoopi Goldberg and her Electric Company co-star Morgan Freeman. But none outshine the feisty subject herself.

An extraordinary and effective film.

Shame has a lolling pace and stunning visual clarity. Structurally, it's close to perfect - its precision echoed in the Glenn Gould piano recordings of Bach keyboard works that Brandon listens to obsessively.

An overwhelming experience.

Cconsistently entertaining.

Jacob Bernstein’s documentary about his mother, Nora Ephron, is unbearably funny for much of the way, and then it is sad, but bearably so because Everything Is Copy is about one woman’s realization that some things in life are more than material for her writing.

Ne Zha II surprisingly contains a sincere-feeling theme of individuality, of resisting what society commands a person to be rather than embracing their nature.

A movie of intelligence and power, of beauty, universality and largeness of spirit.

Intelligent and crackling with crisp, provocative visual energy, Copycat, the new thriller starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, is so creepy and dangerous-feeling that it's like a knife edge pressed against the jugular.

Rarely does a movie come along that captures an aspect of everyday consciousness that has not yet made it onto film.

Follows the country pop singer on what has to be one of the most amazing farewell concert tours in music history.

The film leaves us staggering with a strange, almost unbearable embrace of childish innocence and treacherous spite. It is powerfully depressing. [02 Mar 1990, p.E1]

An enchanting, beautiful and brilliantly imagined film.

Sweet, funny, sad and profound -- the sort of film that becomes more remarkable when you realize it's based on someone's real life.

A further, captivating extension of Oshima's marriage of the oblique and the erotic.

The brilliance of Dark Waters is that it is able to lay out the case against DuPont without getting too wonky.

The films never lose sight of Mesrine the man, a fascinating character in that he's brutal yet extremely intelligent, has a skewed but discernible conscience, and, under the right circumstances, can be warm and generous.

Not a routine cut-and-paste horror but a full-fledged revenge fantasy -- and a completely satisfying one.

The difference is that Iain Softley, who directed Wings of the Dove, and his screenwriter Hossein Amini, who wrote the overlooked "Jude," are keen observers who bring a wealth of ambiguity and mystery to the surface -- and release their characters from the cliches that easily could have swallowed them.

Part fairy tale and part bogeyman thriller -- a juicy allegory of evil, greed and innocence, told with an eerie visual poetry.

Waves is a movie that tears itself apart halfway through with an unspeakable act of violence, then miraculously heals itself. Whatever your reaction to this ambitious, boldly original and hard-hitting family drama, you could never accuse writer-director Trey Edward Shults of holding anything back. He leaves it all on the floor, as they say in basketball.

Die Hard 2 is a huge movie done right. [3 July 1990, p.E1]

Daring in its affirmation that a dowdy woman in her late 60s still can let go of her inhibitions and exhibit a lascivious side.

Elaine May (left), known for making comedies, wrote and directed this brilliant crime film, which easily ranks among the best movies of 1977. [09 Jan 2005]

[Branagh] shows an understanding of the medium worthy of a veteran, and an intuitive grasp of how to make Henry V not only comprehensible, but compelling for contemporary audiences. [13 Dec 1989]

Sir! No Sir! is far from a dry rehashing of what may seem for some like ancient history. Driving guitar rock and lively editing add to the film's urgency. The voices of the veterans alone, however, make this an important and poignant film that can speak to any generation.

Appropriately structured like a ride on skateboard: It swoops back and forth in time, hovers in midair, twists back on itself over and over again, then rolls into silence.

Soft, evanescent and bittersweet.

The King's Speech is a warm, wise film - the best period movie of the year and one of the year's best movies.

Utterly enchanting.

The documentary shows the stranglehold that the teachers union has on politicians, particularly Democratic politicians. The arrogance and ignorance of some of these politicians is galling.

Don’t Look Up might be the funniest movie of 2021. It’s the most depressing too, and that odd combination makes for a one-of-a-kind experience. Writer-director Adam McKay gives you over two hours of laughs while convincing you that the world is coming to an end.

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.

With a zippy soundtrack and breezy editing style, Every Body comes off as an up-to-date declaration that being intersex is something to be celebrated. In the end, we can’t help but share in the enthusiasm.

Payback has a completely different spirit from "L.A. Confidential'' -- more wild, more silly -- but it has the same attention to the fine points of plot and character.

Sly, near-perfect comedy.

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

Athlete A gives us the story behind the story. It’s a terrific journalism movie, but it’s also a story of young women who persevered and found justice against the odds.

A good rule of thumb for Richard III is that if it's not fun, somebody's doing something wrong. Nothing's wrong here. Some of the unexpected visual touches are brilliant, others simply entertaining. But the picture never stops coming at you.

But perhaps the most affectingly weird and most unforgettable performance comes from Penn. There is nothing redeemable about his character, and the actor plays him like Javier Bardem’s unstoppable assassin in the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men”.

This film has a voice of its own. And at a time when the romantic comedy seems to be a lost art form, that's saying something.

Takashi's film is sumptuous, with rich cinematography, costumes and set design. Half the time it is a game of chess - the battle of wits between Motome and the lord. Half of the time it is a moving melodrama.

Stone's feisty, intensely personal style of film making is well-known. With Born on the Fourth of July we are treated to a poignant, spirited and captivating - for the broken heartedness of it all - performance by Tom Cruise. [25 Dec 1989, p.E1]

Just in physical terms, Eddie Redmayne transformation’s into Stephen Hawking is something remarkable.

Brother's Keeper is a thoroughly engaging examination of the whole curious affair by two New York City-based film makers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who document with a distinctive underlying humor and a feeling for contrasts between urban and rural America. Sometimes that contrast is touching, sometimes painfully hilarious, and often a little gloomy as the film delves into the lives of the surviving brothers to reveal a community with genuinely humane values, but one ripe for exploitation by the big city media. [16 Oct 1992, p.C4]

The story itself is arresting, and if that’s all “Bang” offered, that would be enough. But “Bang” does more.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

The film is its own beast, and it's a rare one.

Bridge of Spies tells us that the Constitution is not some quaint national luxury but the road map out of the darkness.

Acting rarely gets better than this.

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.

Verhoeven creates an elegant frame for his lead actress and lets her fill it, and what we end up with is Huppert’s best collaboration with a director since the death of Claude Chabrol.

Dan in Real Life fires on so many circuits that at times it's actually shocking how good it is.

Amid scattershot pop culture references, flying cars and squads of armored knights with laser-guided crossbows, Nimona makes a cry for acceptance that has mythic resonance.

Talented director Eran Riklis is interested in the coexistence of cultures, not violence, but that doesn’t mean his ending fails to carry an emotional wallop. It’s a doozy, and shows us that life can be a complex whirl of dueling identities.

I'd be shocked if we see a better horror film in 2013.

Ultimately, Black Bear is about the price of art — not only the price the artist pays, but that the people around the artist end up paying, unwittingly. Yet in the actual experience of it, the movie doesn’t feel so lofty. It just feels tense and disquieting, like a thriller. In that sense, it is a thriller, but one of the emotions, and it’s riveting every step of the way.

A great piece of filmmaking and a legitimate science-fiction/horror classic.

Walt Disney Pictures' Beauty and the Beast is an enchanting feast of extraordinary animated film making that magically revives the classic Disney style with genial humor, memorable music, fluid grace in its drawings, and compelling romance. [15 Nov 1991, p.C1]

A very smart, very shrewd movie, and the smartest, shrewdest thing about it is the way it masquerades as just a fluffy comedy, a diversion, a trifle.

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.

Unfolds as a masterful chess match of wit and ingenuity, a cat-and-mouse chase of the highest order.

Bite the Bullet is epic Americana, gorgeously filmed, and a candidate for most underrated film of the 1970s. [10 Jun 2012, p.20]

A masterpiece.

A heartbreaking, powerful drama.

A beautiful work that could easily have turned into a four-hour-long affair but, at just a tad over two, is enticingly rich and shines with humanity. [8 Sept 1993, p.D1]

A minimalist masterpiece.

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.

Under Fontaine's direction, family dysfunction is an intense experience with unexpectedly positive repercussions, even if the steps between are painful and potentially deadly.

You leave Cinema Paradiso with that feeling that's kind of like getting kicked in the stomach, but nice. It's one of those breathless, swept-away-by-a-movie experiences that you might have once a year, if you're lucky. [16 February 1990, Daily Notebook, p.E-1]

In the end, though, “Kneecap” is a dramatically well-structured tale of cultural and personal reclamation – done in the cheekiest, craic-talking way imaginable. It’s as if “The Commitments” had a bastard child with “The Crying Game,” and it mutated into its own, magnificently defiant thing.

“Meat’s meat and a man’s gotta eat” is the kind of line that makes this an offbeat horror treat. Some moments are satirical of other horror films, yet they carry a horrific impact, so you may not have much time to laugh before fright sets in.

As Whelan slowly comes to terms with the loss of her identity, she begins to forge a new one as a contemporary dancer, going on to produce her own performances on a national tour titled “Restless Creature.”

El Cid goes for the big scenes as well as any Hollywood epic, but sometimes the smaller, more intimate ones work better, partly because the architecture is stunning. [17 Sep 1993, p.C3]

Absorbing and exquisite.

It's extremely funny, one of the funniest films of 2012, with a particularly winning style - far-fetched, extreme and nonstop.

I like to think that sometimes when a film maker takes no shortcuts but does everything truthfully and sincerely, with an interest in nothing but the creation of something wonderful, he can be visited by a muse or a spirit that comes out of nowhere and, as a kind of reward, infuses his film with that extra element that can't be earned or whipped up from a recipe: magic. Much Ado About Nothing is a wonderful, beautiful film. It's not a perfect film -- it has Keanu Reeves in it. But it has that kind of magic. Very early on, from the first scene, really, it lifts up off the ground; and there it stays till the last shot, when the camera itself lifts off, and we in the audience look down on lots of happy people dancing in an elaborate Italian garden. [13 May 1993, p.E1]

Master director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose work won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, doesn’t pour on the emotion. He doesn’t need to – his film, even as it enchants, is quietly devastating.

Though much of Like Water For Chocolate simmers with humor and the stumbling plight of human life, the movie takes its soul from deeper strains -- unfulfilled longing, the tyranny of social customs in a macho-dominated world, and the final outrage that love and death are inseparable, often indistinguishable companions. [26 Mar 1993, p.C1]

Hurry Up Tomorrow, is a risk-taking experience, a David “Lynchian” fever dream of a movie that’s as visually marvelous as it is head-scratching. It’s a “Purple Rain” for the “Euphoria” generation, and you can’t take your eyes off it.

Beautiful and utterly entrancing documentary.