An exhilarating, four-hour immersion in life at the University Of California campus.

The movie seems like a perfect found object, as if it had always existed and was just waiting to be uncovered.

The film never lets banter, visual gags, or the usual manic kid-flick running about interfere with its more delicately handled thoughts on loyalty, longing, broken relationships, and generational continuity. It honestly earns its emotion, moment by painstakingly executed moment.

A Different Man prioritizes laughs over proselytizing. There is inherent humor in the absurdity of the situation—which takes a momentary detour near sci-fi territory during Edward’s transformation—but Schimberg wrings laughs out of deftly staged awkwardness (though, thankfully, not cringe).

As Polanski leads the audience step-by-step through Levin’s queasy plot, he pushes them toward a conclusion straight out of a Louvin Brothers gospel song. Oh yes, brethren: Satan is real.

It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience.

The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.

It’s essentially a stroll through a fantastically detailed pastel world, in which the plot is little more than an excuse for Miyazaki to dive into a world teeming with colorful (and sometimes prehistoric) life.

It manages to convey a desire for power in abstract terms, divorced from material gain or a need to be admired. What’s more, it manages to do it with energy and a good deal of weird humor.

Behind its substantial charm and light touch is a movie that’s more morbid, alienated, and personal than it lets on.

I Am Cuba is still propaganda of the first order, a beautiful and sensually overwhelming tribute to the land and its people.

At its core, this is one of the most incisive, penetrating, and empathetic films ever made about what it truly means to love another person, audaciously disguised as salacious midnight-movie fare. No better picture is likely to surface all year.

A remarkable film that towers over the endless clones that followed.

Escapism raised to the level of art, Singin' In The Rain inventively satirizes the illusions of the filmmaking process while celebrating their life-affirming joy. Half parody, half homage, the movie became the apex of the splashy MGM musical, while showcasing the collaborative possibilities of the studio system.

Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the silent era.

More than any self-declared masterpiece in the Disney catalog, Bambi has earned the right to be called timeless, because its concerns are transcendent and universal.

Moonlight lets us see Chiron, to see his silent heartache written across three different faces, and that seems a hell of a lot better than good.

Lavish with cultural references and fresh imagination, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is a revelry of comedy, murder, intellectualism, sexual awakening, queerness, and more.

A technically groundbreaking collaborative work with humor, heart, and talent showing through in every carefully chosen line.

Kitano infects the lyrical, meditative beauty of classical Japanese cinema with the jarring, low-down savagery of Western genre pictures. What emerges is more than the sum of its parts, an original and profound statement on mortality, how rich human life can be, and how quickly it can be taken away.

A peculiar and destabilizing tone that's far from the standard Hollywood oater, but entirely fitting for two larger-than-life characters fulfilling their roles in history.

Like the animal itself, Pig is considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance, and unearths treasures that are barely evident on the surface level. We’d have settled for much less, but what a rare treat to be offered a great deal more.

What’s uniquely remarkable about The Long Day Closes, Terence Davies’ 1992 return to his own childhood, is how gloriously disorganized its story feels.

The brothers instantly demonstrate their knack for coaxing beautifully offbeat performances from their actors, too; Walsh in particular is delectably sleazy, speaking his lines in a sneering Texas drawl that makes every word sound as if it’s turned rancid. And then there’s Carter Burwell’s score—his very first—which lacks the grandeur of his orchestral work in later Coen films like Fargo, but manages to evoke a palpable sense of dread with a simple piano theme. Insofar as their name signifies an aesthetic, the Coen brothers were fully formed right from the get-go.

More than a biographical documentary, Eno emerges as a brilliant and endlessly inspiring creative manifesto.

Conceptually bold and rapturously beautiful Gerry, a minimalist landscape film that's unlike anything on the American independent scene.

It's all presented in a detached style that's ultimately much more moving and truthful than any heartstring-slashing weeper. This may be Egoyan's best work yet, and it's surely one of the best films of the year.

Virtually every Super Technirama frame of Luchino Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard could be described as "painterly" in its ornate details and exquisitely balanced color compositions. (Review of DVD Release)