There’s dignity and folly to The Tramp in City Lights, and everything in between.

Intolerance is thrilling and vital, a collision of historical periods that feels as earth-shaking as the movement of tectonic plates.

François Truffaut’s Jules And Jim is many things, not least among them a modernist Pygmalion.

It isn’t simply a nostalgic movie, it’s a nostalgic movie about nostalgia. Lucas could have set the film in 1959, when Steve, Curt, and John were still in high school and still cruising night after endless night. Instead, Graffiti begins right as the fun is about to end, and gives its characters just enough self-awareness to recognize that this is last call at the party. George Lucas isn’t the only one mourning for this magical lost era; the characters onscreen mourn right along with him.

The film would be exciting to watch even completely silent, both because it’s a valuable record of Soviet city life at the end of the 1920s, and because it explodes with visual ideas.

[McQueen's] film is a tough, soul-sickening, uncompromising work of art that makes certain that when viewers talk about the evils of slavery, they know its full dimension.

In Nashville, the background is just as important as the foreground, and this diffusion of focus allows Altman and his collaborators to build a whole world out of minuscule interactions.

The film uses the cutting edge of technology to take viewers to the far reaches of the human experience, but also to create a sense of empathy, of investing in the life of another person. It’s a remarkably complex film, but an admirably simple one, too.

Don’t Look Now culminates in a shock for the ages, the grim payoff to Roeg’s editing scheme. But it would all be mere supernatural hokum if the film weren’t so persistently insightful about the gnawing pain of losing a child, and how the mind can keep that wound from scarring over... It would all be unbearably sad, if it weren’t chilling to the bone.

The Searchers is more a look at American genocide and racism, and the poison of revenge-obsession, than it is an adventure movie, and it feels like one of the wisest and most mature Westerns on the classics docket.

Leigh’s generous approach to capturing the fullness of Turner’s life, through unhurried rhythms and scenes, makes Mr. Turner memorable.

Hitchcock is fully Hitchcock here, plunging deeply into his characters’ psyches, and remaining in full control of every cinematic effect.

Inside Out has a rich, unpackable story. But like all Pixar’s best films, it’s fleet and accessible, trusting the audience to keep up with an adventure that unfolds at a breakneck pace.

First Cousin Once Removed doesn’t come across as overly demeaning or exploitative, because Berliner himself is so kind to Honig in their meetings. But it’s hard to deny that Berliner is using Honig’s deteriorating condition as fodder for his art, just as it’s hard to deny that Berliner’s willingness to risk that criticism is what makes First Cousin Once Removed such a great film.

Where Barton Fink sometimes resembled a horror movie, Inside Llewyn Davis plays like an elegy. Its conclusions are more regretful than angry, and while the conflict between art and commerce is no less central, there’s much more emphasis on that conflict’s personal toll.

Timbuktu’s delicate tone is totally unexpected and specific to Sissako, who keeps finding notes of vulnerability.

The Act Of Killing raises all kinds of provocative questions about the sins of nations in transition, and about how important it is for those in power to control the narrative.

But it’s also edited so crisply, and shot with such an overpowering sense of decay, that it’s hard not to look on all the dismemberment and despair and think, “Man, that’s pretty.”

Leviathan itself feels like a brave, lonely act of rebellion against the system, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of it ever working in the people’s favor. It advocates for a stiff drink.

Her is a 21st-century love story that perfectly captures the mood of the times and finds new inroads into the exhilaration and heartbreak that have existed since the first “I love you.”

Ida’s piercing intimacy makes the deepest impression, but its vision is deceptively wide-reaching despite a scale that’s deliberately pared-down and small.

If Fury Road were only interested in action, it would still be a stunning achievement, but the film has more on its mind.

The Elkabetzes don’t need the audience to have any firsthand experience of what Viviane and Elisha are actually like at home. Gett works better if the viewer has to puzzle out the truth from testimony, asides, and outbursts.

It’s emotionally and sexually explicit, as raw as an exposed nerve at times, but Adèle and Emma have public lives as well as private ones, and the film’s great achievement is holding them in balance and observing how they relate to each other.

Few movies have ever been as subtly, methodically composed as High And Low, in which every shot reflects, to some degree, the dichotomy presented by its title.

Thankfully, Big Men doesn’t have heroes or villains. It’s a deep dive into an endless pool of moral and political ambiguity in which very little is clear-cut, except that the desire for wealth and power.

There’s no other movie quite like it.

It’s both unfailingly exciting and overly familiar, a restless but risk-averse film that’s a little too content to borrow from what’s worked before.