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.