Excited with the possibilities of the relatively young film medium, Russia's Dziga Vertov took to the streets of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev to give us a portrait of an ever-changing world that is more essay than documentary. It's a 1929 silent film that added its punctuation in the lab - jump cuts, dissolves, split screens, etc. - to create an indelible work in cinema history. [13 Apr 2017, p.E8]

A lovely, evocative tour de force. So why does it seem we should be enjoying it more?

A gem of fast action, sophisticated wit and inspired comedy.

A worthy, fascinating film..

12 Years a Slave has some of the awkwardness and inauthenticity of a foreign-made film about the United States. The dialogue of the Washington, D.C., slave traders sounds as if it were written for "Lord of the Rings." White plantation workers speak in standard redneck cliches. And yet the ways in which this film is true are much more important than the ways it's false.

Affleck is magnificent, but the movie is something less than that, because it can’t completely overcome some built-in challenges.

It's back in a handsome new black-and-white print, and it's still powerful stuff -- you can see why Pauline Kael wrote that it was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."

Ratatouille is a classic.

See Gravity in theaters, because on television something will be lost. Alfonso Cuarón has made a rare film whose mood, soul and profundity is bound up with its images. To see such images diminished would be to see a lesser film, perhaps even a pointless one.

An ungainly masterpiece, but Chaplin's ungainliness is something one can grow fond of.

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]

Bride is often cited as Whale's masterpiece, and one of the reasons surely is his intentional lacing of humor throughout that never completely undercuts the horror or pathos.

A haunting, beautiful labyrinth that gets inside your bones and stays there.

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”.

But make no mistake, whether the movie is fair or horribly unfair - I know nothing of the actual facts and can't make that determination - its portrait of Zuckerberg is a hatchet job of epic and perhaps lasting proportions.

There are many great acting moments in this film, but you should especially savor the final shot, the long close-up of Haenel in profile. Put simply, it’s why we go to the movies.

What keeps I Am Not Your Negro just short of greatness is, alas, the competition from Baldwin himself. Watching it, it’s hard not keep wanting to see more of Baldwin and hear less of Jackson.

What's amazing is the raw honesty of it all -- the performances, the interviews, the spontaneous occurrences. There is little artifice. The 70mm print is must-view material for rock fans and sociologists of any age or generation. [1994 version]

Aftersun is a film about memory and regret, of finding small islands of warmth and happiness and holding on; a movie that beautifully struggles to say what is unsaid.

Amour is also unforgettable and one of a kind, two hours of torment that, in the end, you will probably not regret.

This one enters the pantheon of great American war films.

This is the legal movie that lawyers most often praise for its realism, in terms of not only story but also tone and atmosphere. It's full of great scenes. [08 Apr 2012, p.P19]

It is an exhilaration from beginning to end. It's the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer.

One of the most innovative and best made films of the past year. Every now and then, even Dick Cheney gets to like a great movie.

A fascinating documentary that seems to unfold over real time.

Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation.

For its look and its innovation, and for its ability to suggest shades of feeling with a minimum use of intertitles — and as a classic of the first order — Sunrise must be seen.

In this one masterpiece, Federico Fellini achieved the ideal balance -- between social observation and unconscious imagery, between artistic discipline and freedom, and between the neo-realism of 1950s Italian cinema and the orgiastic flights of his later work.