Haynes elicits two great performances and provides the perfect frame for them, not just in terms of setting, but through smart casting and attention to the smallest of performances.

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

It’s one of the best war films ever made, distinct in its look, in its approach and in the effect it has on viewers. There are movies — they are rare — that lift you out of your present circumstances and immerse you so fully in another experience that you watch in a state of jaw-dropped awe. Dunkirk is that kind of movie.

45 Years is very much an English film and in the best sense. It’s subtle, understated and ultimately devastating, but only if you’re paying attention.

Its deeply anarchic sensibility has kept Taxi Driver fresh all these years. [20th Anniversary Release]

Wise, delicate and impeccably performed, Yi Yi is a three- hour drama that looks at one middle-class family in transition -- and does so with such a kind and probing eye that we all see our lives reflected through Yang's lens.

The Irishman is all about the end of something. It is to gangster movies what John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” was to westerns. Without a doubt, it’s a masterpiece.

The class act of action movies.

A joyous, exuberant celebration of the New York band’s brainy yet kinetic post-punk groove that ranks as one of the best concert docs ever. [Review of re-release]

The not-as-good news is that, like “Wall-E” and “Up,” Inside Out has a great opening, a satisfying finish, and something of a sag in the middle. But this time it’s only a sag.

Payne's little marvel.

Lemmon and MacLaine are magical together, and MacMurray more than holds his own as the third part of the triangle. He commands the office - and, not incidentally, the big screen - with a sexual energy he would scarcely have a chance to show again.

There is no turning away from the screen.

Because of age and illness, Varda is losing her sight, and Faces Places, which she co-directed, could be her last film. If so, she’s going out on a high note.

Days of Heaven is a visual poem. Slow and elegant, reverential in the way it celebrates the earth's contours and the play of light. [27 Oct. 1999, p.B3]

By the film’s gentle conclusion, we get a rich portrait of Nora and the bittersweet, itinerant nature of her past lives — and the commitment to art that’s remained her constant.

Welles is lovely in the film, open and vulnerable, and Keith Baxter as Hal is quite good. [28 Sep 2016, p.Q39]

Though an estimable success overall, The Return of the King has several scenes too many and too great a concentration on battles.

Among the great American crime movies, 1973's Badlands stands alone. [13 Feb. 1998]

Armie Hammer’s performance is a brilliant exercise in subtlety, suggesting a genial yet inappropriate space-taking, the carelessness of the beautiful.

Ultimately, Marriage Story celebrates life and the journeys all of us are on. Noah Baumbach is the writer-director, and to watch such an incisive, deep-feeling script be given life by actors — Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and those around them — at the top of their game is to rediscover movies as a powerful medium of personal expression.

As French crime thrillers go, this is about as good as it gets.

It’s a beautiful and hopeful film, coming at a time when there isn’t much beauty or hope in our movies, and it’s the type of picture — a sprawling, exuberant musical drama — that hasn’t been seen in decades.

Petite Maman immerses the viewer in all the things you might have forgotten about childhood — what’s funny to a child, what’s valued, what’s priceless, what will be remembered and valued in years to come. Just watching the almost-identical Sanz sisters play and interact becomes fascinating, like witnessing from the outside some lovely and enclosed world.

This is warm and intuitive work, striking that elusive balance between inspiration and control.

The comic contrast between the genteel snobbery of von Bulow, a Danish aristocrat, and Dershowitz's dry contempt for his well-tailored client is treated with understated but stinging wit in Nicholas Kazan's brilliant script. [9 Nov 1990]

The film has aged gracefully.

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.