Rumble in the Bronx has the explosive escapades that Stallone/Schwarzenegger followers crave - hair-raising free falls, hovercrafts out of control, crazed turf wars, collapsing buildings, gun-happy gangsters and other boy-film staples - plus the kind of oddball comedy and independent spirit usually found only outside the current Hollywood empire. Chan is a true artist of a genre that ordinarily does all it can to avoid art.

A documentary with a keen eye, a playful sense of timing and an inquisitive soul.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

Spellbinding.

Citizen Kane...has the best of everything: a great director and star, innovative cinematography, dreamlike - even nightmarish - art direction, a sonorous musical score, a skillful screenplay in which comic passages intensify the movie's tragic qualities by means of their grotesque juxtaposition (how lifelike!), a psychological / narrative form that predates our contemporary "psycho-histories" by at least 40 years, and best of all, a memorial word that, when spoken, recalls the film out of thin air.

Kurosawa pulled out all the stops with Ran, his obsession with loyalty and his love of expressionistic film techniques allowed to roam freely.

With no frills and no commentary, Howard and company have made the kind of absorbing thriller we have in mind when we wistfully sigh, "They don't make movies like they used to."

The Great Ziegfeld is a monument in celluloid to the great American producer, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. He would have been proud to write his name across it as producer. [13 Apr 1936, p.18]

Elegant.

A handbook on cinematic lucidity. All events are described clearly. Motives of all the characters are set right there on the table next to the pasta for our consideration.

Dead is a movie you want to dismiss as another, gross supernatural B-movie: campy fun. But, shot and edited by Romero himself, the film is an astounding technical knockout, often so expressionist that the daylight seems afraid of the dark. The horror is so unalloyed that dead look decidedly, frighteningly human.

Delightfully original. [04 Jul 1982, p.220]

A momentously, shockingly moving fit of shape-shifting by a filmmaker grown tired of the macabre.

Kiarostami's genius is elusive. His films may be unknowable, but they are undeniably hypnotic, charismatic.

A great film of the urban, North American night. His voyeuristic camera roams the streets that come alive with sexual promenades after sunset, and it lingers in noisy, jam-packed bars, watching men search for the man of their fantasies.

The effect is riveting and frightening. You feel you are under siege with the combatants.

Extraordinary, entertaining cinema.

Dern is nothing short of brilliant here.

It's the year's best movie sex.

If you know Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," you'll be unable to watch The Great Beauty without thinking about it. This gorgeous Italian movie, like its predecessor, balances pungent satire and a more melancholy mood in portraying the dissolute world of the upper crust in contemporary Rome.

One of the most complex and powerful literary scripts in recent times.

Minghella is an artist and he has painted himself a masterpiece.

The animation is dazzling (two-thirds of the movie is set underwater). The love story between mermaid Ariel (the sweet voice of Jodi Benson) and mortal Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) is fairy-tale wonderful. And there is a slew of terrific side characters that make the movie as entertaining for adults as it is for children.

The film will intoxicate children and charm the parents in their company.

A movie that has an odd plot, quirky characters and a real edge, but it's not in-your-face, a re-invention of a genre or a smirky independent. It's different because it's flat-out great.

Ruiz has made the most ambitious adaptation of a Proust work yet.

Rivetingly realistic, edited in a gripping and exciting style unseen up to that time, and marvelously scripted.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

To Live and Die in L.A. is as urgent and exhilaratingly paced as anything William Friedkin's done.

Past, an inestimable collaboration by Tourneur and Mitchum, is not just one fine noir film among many. It has been a guage for the genre, even a template, over the last 50 years.

Todd Solondz's grand prize winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival lapses into satire, but its parodistic slant only exaggerates what is truthful, making the unpleasantness of that awkward age all the more disturbing and hilarious. It's a horror film starring reality in the monster role.

So phenomenal that Bill Murray can't even steal it. And he tries. So excellent that Murray's MTV progeny Tom Green can't sink it.

The sexual tension and humorous byplay between Leigh and co-star Clark Gable, in the role of gentleman rogue Rhett Butler, was riveting. And so was Leigh's portrayal of a viper trying to consume the good-hearted Ashley Wilkes, embodied by the fine-boned Hungarian-turned-British actor, Leslie Howard.

This movie is a pleasure, an entertainment and an admirable artistic achievement.

Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.

With Election, Payne announces himself as one of the keenest purveyors of the scattered pieces that once was an American morality.

Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

Big Night's beauty is the fact that it is about passion.

Timeless, and as fine a depiction of human folly as you're likely to see at the movies.

A sweaty-browed exercise in precision filmmaking, but one that doesn't cheat you with wisps of tension and the pretense of attitude.

The scenes with Stalin and his frightened underlings, his giddy yes-men tip-toeing around him, are written and directed by Duncan with a grace, agility and comic deftness one rarely is treated to at the movies these days.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

The film's premise is totally implausible yet great performances, directing and script allow us to transcend the concept of believability and enjoy nevertheless.

Unlike so many other movies of literary provenance, it is clear from the start that this one is going to be entertainment, not homework. Lee serves up this sweetmeat without fuss, without the super-seriousness of filmmakers awed by their literary material.

A marvelous child of Star Wars technology, the advanced sound design makes a celebratory re-viewing of George Lucas' legendary, 20-year-old space opera a thrilling experience. [Special Edition]

Ethereal.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

This movie has everything but Humphrey Bogart, and I'm sure he's sorry he was unavailable.

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

Part aerobics workout, part self-styled dreamscape, Sense is a hyperactive piece of performance art that begins as the stripped-down dress rehearsal of a garage band and builds into a mighty, exhausting spectacle that shakes as much ass as it kicks. [Review of re-release]

Leigh has a gift for demonstrating character from the outside in.

There isn't a whole lot of fancy subplotting, just a potpourri of funny and engaging characters.

The script by Ed Solomon is tight, well-paced and lighthearted. If this were a musical, Fred Astaire could have played the Jones role, although somewhat more dashingly.

Classic in feel and loaded with sumptuous performances.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

Amazing comic performances...give this comedy its lovely manic pace, kept just within the realm of sanity.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

A work at once detached and thrillingly intense, an experience where intellectualizing turns to a raw emotion so overwhelming, unexpected in its power, that you sit in your seat as the end credits roll, unable to move.

A warm-hearted valentine to old traditions in China that are being obliterated by modern - and admittedly more efficient - technology.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

Like a Les Brown tune, a really dry martini and a hug from a good buddy, Swingers makes you feel warm all over, baby.

Its brazen mixture of the comic and dramatic, the high and low and the emotional and intellectual is positively Shakespearean.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

Ryan has an edge that is extremely becoming…This is her best work yet.

The movie is magnificent and stunning the way few spectator events are.

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

It is by far Bogart's most successfully playful role.

This movie is charming the way so few movies are anymore.

It's a more intelligent and dimensional epic than, say, "Anna and the King." Emperor is worth every single penny.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

If nothing else, The Filth and the Fury is a searing, forceful, entertainingly biased reminder only that the English group mattered - as musicians and as anti-social curs.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

The light and heavy flow with equal ease and expertise from McKellen's enchanted kitchen.

A guilty pleasure and one of the best films of the year.

With its fine courtroom scenes, excellent performances, great writing and superb direction it reminds me more than anything else of Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune."

An old-fashioned movie. It is simplistic, full of stock characters and easy solutions to difficult problems, and I absolutely loved it.

Soberly, deeply effective.

Broken Arrow isn't the ultimate fusion of Hong Kong surrealism and Hollywood realism, but it points the way to nerve-shattering possibilities.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

The maturity of the Star Trek saga and its remarkable fan base have combined to produce a polished film that shines like a crown jewel in the Star Trek firmament.

MANNY & LO grows on you, largely because of the charm of its youngest cast member, Scarlett Johansson, who plays 11-years-old Amanda.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

A crowd pleaser that caters to our horror of totalitarianism, our love of personal freedom, our belief - justified or deluded - that knowledge is a powerful tool and that access to information is a God-given right.

The only film sequels in history that just keep getting better.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

In a way, The Eel is very much like Black Rain, and nearly as great. Both deal with an emotionally shattering aftermath, and both question mankind's ability to overcome its many weaknesses.