Above all, Hara's smile and Ryu's sigh are a touching show of good faith and the genuine pleasure they take in each other's company–which, of course, makes their response to life's disappointments all the more poignant.

In its perfect fusion of popular entertainment and high art, Rear Window ranks among Hitchcock's best.

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)

There’s a cumulative power here that transcends any rough patches. Boyhood isn’t perfect, but it’s an astonishing, one-of-a-kind accomplishment—and further proof that Linklater is one of the most daring, ambitious filmmakers working today.

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.

Tati's most elaborate film, Playtime stands as his masterpiece, an awe-inspiring work of intricate choreography with a heart to match its technical expertise.

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.

Far from muting the satire, Renoir's hearty characterization complicates it and gives it life, which is rare among broadsides at the bourgeoisie.

For all its Jiminy Cricket optimism, Pinocchio is a potent illustration of how people can only improve because they’re so lousy to begin with.

While the movie may be a Western—one of the best Westerns ever made, in fact—it’s also an action movie, one that was crucial to action movies becoming what they would eventually be.

If one were looking for a perfectly realized film, Au Hasard Balthazar would be as likely a candidate as any. For every convention of film grammar and narrative that this 50-year-old masterpiece utilizes, it uses strictly on its own terms, discarding many more.

It's typical Hitchcock: taut, morbid, stylish, and determined to confound expectations all the way up to the final shot.

After two hours of dazzlingly fantastical images and stomach-turning gore, del Toro winds around, and finds his story's center.

A large part of what makes Some Like It Hot a perennial favorite is that it has the go-for-broke commitment of an early Marx brothers farce, but it's harnessed by a well-structured script that keeps building on itself. It's no fluke that the capper is the most famous closing line in movie history.

Every element in the film, from the dense thicket of forest branches to master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's deceptive framing and lighting design, is precisely calibrated to make the facts more difficult to discern.

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

Hunter is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the stuff of dreams, too, and it beckons you to follow it downstream.

Ran represents the color/widescreen zenith (qualification necessary due to Seven Samurai) of Kurosawa’s genius for spectacle.

A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level.

Shooting Dr. Strangelove as if it were Paths Of Glory makes its ridiculous elements at once funnier and more chilling, emphasizing the Cold War’s inherent insanity.

4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant).

Parasite isn’t just thrillingly unpredictable. It pivots with purpose, the class politics setting the trajectory.

Battleship Potemkin remains remarkable for the way it builds over a brisk 69 minutes, setting the pace for nearly every action movie made since.

The movie Streetcar still seethes with lust, and retains so much of Williams’ florid dialogue and insinuation that it often feels like Kazan and his cast are getting away with something.

A funny, touching, nearly cliché-free, and thoroughly considered evocation of a time, place, and state of mind. Released just 11 years after the events it depicts (it usually takes about 20 years for nostalgia to set in), the film both captures the enormous societal changes between the early '60s and early '70s and winningly dramatizes the lives of its characters.

Though the jury in 12 Angry Men reaches a verdict, neither Rose nor Lumet definitively state whether they're "right." The point—as Lumet well knows—is that when it comes to making sense of a picture, a lot depends on the framing.

It's not only one of the best classic-era Disney features, but also one of the best animated films from any studio at any time.

The result is a little too rose-tinted an homage, but Roma is still an exceptionally moving story, as well as another technical feat from Cuarón.

It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience.

A wonderful encore, marked by the painstaking attention to detail and artful balance between terror and joy that make Miyazak's work unique.

Where Summer Of Soul really distinguishes itself is in Thompson’s inspired filmmaking. Making his directorial debut, the Roots drummer and frontman approaches this condensed narrative with a musician’s sense of timing, expertly assembling rhythmic montages with editor Joshua Pearson that transcend flashy music-video devices to relay a sense of conversation, of voices reaching across the decades to be heard.

If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread — the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.

Manchester By The Sea sweats the big stuff and the small stuff, and that’s key to its anomalous power: This is a staggering American drama, almost operatic in the heartbreak it chronicles.

It’s at once ridiculous and genuinely inspiring—Robert Altman in a nutshell.

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.

Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.

Bird and his co-writers leave room for quiet moments and gentle morals, but for the most part, they send visual gags and verbal punchlines tearing past at an enjoyably demanding speed, whipping up the film's energy at every turn.

The film remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone that considers their emotions in balance.

A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.

A star in every genre, Stanwyck epitomized both the steely femme fatale (Double Indemnity) and the heartbreaking melodramatic heroine (Stella Dallas), but her performance in The Lady Eve was the only one to showcase her full range of ability. Her line readings sparkle with ruthless intelligence and wit, but she's also capable of surprising openness and vulnerability.

If nothing else, Gravity makes the case for throwing immense resources at true visionaries; the blockbuster craftsman as adventurer, Cuarón expertly blends the epic with the intimate. For every stunning 3-D setpiece involving a dangerous hailstorm of metallic debris, there’s a moment of small tenderness.

McQueen has zoomed in on a very specific milieu, but he’s also tapped into the universal and suddenly inaccessible joy of an endless night of music and dance, a house party for the ages. You don’t have to know your reggae or have been born 40 years ago to long for the ache of communal fun on which Lovers Rock waxes nostalgic.

Singularly haunting.

DiCaprio is so terrific, and Infiniti such a charismatic find, that viewers may find themselves wishing the cast, both principal and supporting (which also includes Regina Hall and Alana Haim), had room in this 162-minute movie to bounce off of each other with a little more frequency.

Zuckerberg's story ends up feeling bigger than his own life.

This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.

While the subject matter is difficult, the documentary itself is easy to watch and exciting to grapple with. Its biggest strengths are Jackson’s voice and Baldwin’s commentary, which combine to create a distinctively world-weary tone.

Wadleigh crafted a film with a thoughtful flow; it tells the full story of the event, from the paranoia (and eventual acceptance) of the locals to the helpful attitudes (and eventual paranoia) of the throng. [1994 version]

Despite Wells’ confidence as a filmmaker, Aftersun still succumbs to the predictable traps of films about childhood memories. Every small incident is presented as a big momentous event. That may be true from a child’s perspective, yet it still makes this narrative feel more formulaic than organic. Consequently, few of these beats feel revelatory to the audience, even when they are affecting.

A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.

For the first hour or more, The Hurt Locker boldly forsakes any conventional narrative hook beyond the ongoing tensions between these men and the terrifying grind of defusing bombs day after day.

Anatomy Of A Murder respects the audience enough to turn us into the jury, and trusts that we, too, can consider the facts like adults.

Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.

It’s a taut, intense procedural, with a resonant story that simultaneously follows a journalistic investigation and an attempt to fix a fatally dysfunctional medical bureaucracy—all while criminal organizations, corrupt politicians, and rabble-rousing television hosts work in concert to stymie any real reform.

Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.

Sunrise remains a magnificent tale of adultery and forgiveness, and contains more lessons in visual storytelling in any given five-minute sequence than most film schools deliver in a semester.

It's Pixar's most daring experiment to date, but it still fits neatly into the studio's pantheon: Made with as much focus on heart as on visual quality, it's a sheer joy.

Haynes has pulled off something remarkable here, without a trace of winking or archness. It’s been a long time since the movies have seen a fuse of pure ardor burn this slowly and steadily, leading to such an unexpectedly moving explosion of resolve.

Just as swoon-worthy, and essential, as its predecessors, Before Midnight reveals the full scope of Linklater’s ambition. This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a grand experiment — the earnest attempt to depict the life of a relationship onscreen, decade by increasingly tumultuous decade. In the process of justifying its own existence, Before Midnight redeems the very notion of sequels.

One of the great performances of the 20th century.

Christopher Nolan’s terrific new film, Dunkirk, is powered by an engine of combusting contradictions: it’s at once minimalist and maximalist, cynical and dopey, a big-boy white elephant art film that is actually a lean and mean suspense set-piece machine.

A bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier by focusing on two strikingly different men who help one town choose law and order over the chaos of the open range.

By the time of The Searchers, Wayne had toughened to match Ford's darker vision. Redemption is still out there, but it has to be fought for, and sometimes winning it doesn't make anyone happier.

A small film of big insights, heavy on dialogue but light on speeches, 45 Years often seems closer in spirit to a ghost story: Nothing goes “boo” or rearranges the furniture, but there’s a unmissable sense that we’re watching two people haunted by a specter from another lifetime.

Scorsese's seductive, dreamlike imagery and Schrader's voiceover narration draw the audience into Bickle's head and reveal the world through his eyes, which see only ugliness and filth.

The Manchurian Candidate tweaks our collective fear that the enemy looks exactly like us in much the same way that the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers does, but with a political doomsday scenario foregrounded rather than (as in Siegel’s film) merely implied.

Given the material, it’s fitting that Mr. Turner is the director’s most visually ravishing movie. With cinematographer Dick Pope behind the lens, every shot is gorgeous enough to hang in a museum.

The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.

Chantal Akerman’s radical 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns the term “realism” on its face, exploring the contours of a woman’s life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies.

Fireflies makes its doomed subjects seem utterly human, with the wealth of personal details and believable characterizations common to Studio Ghibli's peerless animated films.

Bucking the current company mandate of churning out lesser sequels and prequels, it’s not just a brilliant idea, but maybe the most conceptually daring movie the Bay Area animation house has ever produced. And that’s really saying something, what with "WALL-E" on the books.

Good comedies are rare, but rarer still are those that conflate laughter with intimacy.

An ambitious nostalgia piece with a broad emotional palette.

Although Billy Wilder's 1950 Hollywood noir Sunset Boulevard gets less attention as a travelogue, it's both an examination of the dark psychological landscape of out-of-fashion show-business types (as underlined by the title) and an actual trip through its physical environment.

It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]

The best and most touchingly personal of all Shakespeare adaptations, Chimes At Midnight is pervaded by melancholy and loneliness, even though its characters are almost seen never alone.

All in all, it's a fitting conclusion to the series, and yet there are disappointments built in. For one, Jackson has opted not to film Tolkien's downbeat "Scouring Of The Shire" epilogue.

Critics don’t tend to talk about this much—it’s tantamount to a confession that we don’t always know what we’re doing—but it’s often the case that the most powerful, haunting aspects of a movie are those that we don’t fully understand.

The potential for a tryst hangs heavily in the humid Mediterranean air; every look and line of dialogue drips with subtext. But Call Me By Your Name’s erotic tension wouldn’t crackle so loudly without the chemistry between its leads.

Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.

By the time Zimmer helps connect past and present, memory and reality, the ensemble’s lived-in performances already gesture towards the logical outcome. We just hope it isn’t true.

Marriage Story, unlike so many other breakup movies, offers venom in drips and drops instead of drowning us in it, because it knows that no matter how far apart Charlie and Nicole drift, the feelings that first brought them together are still there, informing their flawed attempts to move on without destroying each other.

I'd seen moments from that chase for years, held up as an example of what makes the film great. And it is a great sequence. But it's even better in context, arriving after many scenes of false starts, wrong turns, and frustrating dead ends, like a brilliantly staged cat-and-mouse game on the subway involving Doyle and Fernando Rey's smooth French gangster. The explosions have even more impact when you first get to see the fuses slowly burning down...It's also what most imitators don't get. You can put together the most exciting sequence ever filmed, and it won't matter—or at least won't matter beyond the seconds it takes to unfold—if the material around it isn't there.

What the two actors lack in vocal polish they make up for in commitment — and chemistry. La La Land is the third film to romantically pair Gosling and Stone, after "Crazy, Stupid, Love" and "Gangster Squad," and that history of onscreen relationships fortifies their playful rapport:

Lady Bird is something truly special: a coming-of-age comedy so funny, perceptive, and truthful that it makes most other films about adolescence look like little more than lessons in cliché.

The Magnificent Ambersons is still masterly. It’s the movie that all other films about families in decline are measured against.

Rio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian.

Kapadia’s skill lies in her ability to interweave moments of hope into the anxiety. Her leads offer tenderness and pull back into self-protectiveness in equal measure.

The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.

What these people have in common beyond a shared surname really pounds the film’s theme home with a sledgehammer, but there are numerous tender, affecting moments en route to the finale’s tearjerker overdrive, many of them productively tangential to the overarching idea of choosing one’s own family.

Perhaps Four Sisters is best considered a parting gesture from Lanzmann, ensuring that, in his body of work at least, these four “sisters” should endure as more than just a footnote.

Hitchcock would make richer films in Hollywood, but The 39 Steps came off the line as the Model T of cinematic plot machines.

This is a high-concept comedy that’s firmly, almost defiantly rooted in the real world, among fully three-dimensional human beings whose behavior doesn’t conform to a rigid template. There’s nothing else like it in theaters right now. Brace yourself for the emotional whirlwind, and go.

The queasy thrill of Sandler’s live-wire performance is the way he keys us right into Howard’s electric joy, putting everything on the line, consequences be damned. It’s a pure shot of the gambler’s high, and Uncut Gems gets us hooked on it, too. By the end, you want to hurl and cheer.

Beautifully shot by Amélie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis is instantly recognizable as the work of its sibling auteurs. But it’s also something of a departure — looser and more rambling than the average Coen concoction, with a lovingly recreated period setting.

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

Stagecoach gives fine shading to a simple story, making it look and feel like a forgotten American myth.

Powell and Pressburger bring their combination of good humor, visual flair, and unflinching insight to the three telling episodes that make up the film's 160-minute run time.