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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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]

Sunset Boulevard is noteworthy because of its fine sensitivity of things cinema. [24 Aug 1950, p.25]

For all its lazy beauty, the movie is rooted in the personalities of its lead characters and they, unfortunately, are bloodless, affectless, emotionless dopes who turn their considerable lack of scruples on the business of senseless killing, for which they seemingly have no remorse. [13 Feb. 1998]

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.

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

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

"The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon" echo loudly throughout.

With all that has happened to the Soviet Union, and to the dreams of the Cuban revolution, in the years since "I Am Cuba" was made, the film can't help feeling like a relic of a discarded era. But it still has power to surprise and, occasionally, to enchant.

Elegant.

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

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

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

More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.

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.

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]

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]

The movie is strongest when Lee keeps his eye on the prize: the experiences of ordinary people in an extraordinary time.

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.

Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.

The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

The movie is meant to be uplifting and to the degree that you can ignore its unquestioning treatment of mental illness, I suppose it is.

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

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

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

A weird, wonderful and funny work that stands as a true original. As if that weren't enough, director and co-writer Anderson has given Bill Murray his best role in years.

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

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

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

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

I'm not sure all of this works out as convincingly as Anderson intends in the movie's somewhat unsatisfying ending, but getting there is a wickedly enjoyable journey.

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

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

Half snappy, sardonic and incisive and half slow-moving, goofy and dense.

Nobody's Fool belongs to that hoary but no longer frequently seen genre, the slice of life. And for at least some of its duration, Benton - creator of more oleaginous cuts of celluloid, like Places in the Heart - slices keenly and artfully. We get a good sense of the nature of existence in snowbound North Bath, N.Y., where the advantages and shortcomings of small-town life are sometimes hard to tell apart.

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.

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

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

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.

I can't help thinking, though, that maybe Thornton was too ambitious in trying to wear three hats.

A meticulously assembled dramatization of a grossly controversial moment in TV history.

Soberly, deeply effective.

In 80 minutes, the film accumulates a staggering gravity.

Out of Sight needed the energetic and stylish hand of "Get Shorty" director Barry Sonnenfeld. Instead, a sad-sackish Soderbergh ( "sex, lies and videotape") comes at this material looking as if his mind was on something else, something much, much more depressing.

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.

Get On the Bus might just be Spike Lee's best work yet.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

A satire whose dead aim stops wounding - and starts making - stereotypes of white middle-classness.

Easily one of the best documentaries on any subject ever made. It is also one of the most cinematically influential.

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

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 Little Princess is a delightful film. Bring your children, or just bring yourself.

Extraordinary, entertaining cinema.

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.

Superbly acted by its young cast, written and directed with great sophistication, Wild Reeds moves with a sad assurance through that domain that most American filmmakers explore only clumsily: the mysteries of the human heart.

Loach's film offers something dearer than any crowd-pleaser can: the bracing consolation of a truth told without dilution.

A film that can be enjoyed by all ages and that insults no one's intelligence.

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.

One of the most self-in-dulgent, muddled, badly written, vague and pointless exercises in filmmaking I have ever had to sit through.

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

Nicolas Cage gives one of the best performances of his strange, courageous career.

This is the bluest film you'll ever see. The haunting color resounds throughout Empire like a sustained, melancholy chord...Empire is essential viewing for lovers of science fiction. [Special Edition]

In the attempt to rein in a cast playing a great assortment of exaggerated types, Schlesinger (who directed "Midnight Cowboy" and "Marathon Man" ) and Bradbury sometimes lose the tone of the movie.

The trouble comes when Woo's patented - that is, oft-repeated - style overwhelms any hope of discerning story or acting through the haze of burning, crashing, bleeding and exploding.

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

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.

Leigh plays the tragic and annoying Sadie as if she loved and hated the character simultaneously. And to the degree that this courageous movie succeeds it will elicit the same feelings in the audience.

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

Works a familiar mine and produces more than a few nuggets. It's a good tonic, if one's still needed, for '80s-style cynicism: Greed is not good.

Constructed as a sequence of deepening, worsening bad dreams, Living in Oblivion sometimes runs the risk of feeling arbitrary, and the film loses some steam in its final section. But mostly it's a smart, funny send-up of the trials and joys of filming on big egos and low budgets - subjects that writer-director Tom DiCillo and his collaborators presumably know first-hand.

Solondz's greatest success is the pederast, heartbreakingly played by Baker...Had Solondz reached that apex in the other stories, it would have been a masterpiece.

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.

Troisi, who was a star in Italy, hasn't been seen widely in the United States, and from this film it is difficult to be certain how he achieved his fame.

Priceless.

The script, by director Richard Kwietnioski and adapted from the Gilbert Adair novel, is poignant and well constructed.

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

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

A 140-minute film masterpiece.

The story of a trainer and three of his boxers trying to break away from the confines of a gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each story is strong, gripping in its own way. But you've heard them all before.

What the story lacks in tension, Waterhouse's writing and Leconte's direction make up for in entertainment.

Salles' solid narrative is only deceptively simple; there is a lot of dimension and depth to this gentle, sometimes painful portrait of two wanderers.

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

The Secret of Roan Inish freely mixes Celtic myth and everyday reality. But "Roan Inish" is a different kind of ride, less intentionally rollicking and more reverential.

An independent film so enamored of itself it refuses to have any fun.

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

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.

Troubling and troubled.

At its best when it's hovering around the muted dysfunction between a father and a son, who never understood each other to begin with.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.