Here’s the thing: Joan and Tom do come back from it. The couples who stay together figure out how to do that. Ordinary Love is an argument that, as hard as that is, it’s worth it.

Cinema Paradiso converts you to the credo that art can indeed be holy.

Favouring long takes over didactic scripting, Pawlikowski lets his powerful imagery carry the film.

Mother! is an unparalleled achievement, entirely unprecedented and unexpected in this era of studio filmmaking.

It is glorious.

As with his previous film, director Chang nurses a compelling drama from a multilayered cultural reality, at once intimate and unfathomably large in implications.

Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

Room is a film of tiny little miracles.

The same didactic instincts that sometimes mar Lee's fictional filmmaking serve him well as a documentarian and eulogist, both with Four Little Girls and this film, a record of the worst natural disaster in American history.

Gravity, a weightless ballet and a cold-sweat nightmare, intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.

It comes eerily close to duplicating the experience of reading while, at the same time, remaining very much a motion picture. That's a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, achievement.

Hornby is a fine craftsman and his dialogue sparkles, though occasionally the scenes are too calculated.

Even in a season of apocalyptic films, these facts are really, really scary.

Douglas Tirola’s doc does the era and National Lampoon justice. The tone is sharp and freewheeling, the craziness is infectious and the pace is cocaine-quick.

The triumph of Foxcatcher is not in the subject but in its art. The clear-eyed compassion and moral intelligence of Miller’s film brings sense to the senseless, and finds the human pulse behind the tabloid shock. It’s not a movie to make you feel good, but, at moments, it reminds you what goodness is.

Director Jon Watts is smart enough never to deviate from a narrow vision that he executes superbly.

This is an exhilarating picture, the kind that strips away smug complacencies and exposes raw nerves to a bright light. [14 Sep 1990, p.C4]

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

It’s not about the world catching up to understand poor, lonesome Hiccup. It’s about Hiccup catching up to the expectations of the world on his own.

Pulp Fiction is at least three movies rolled into one, and they're all scintillating.

One of the most irresistible films of the year so far.

There's a certain nostalgia at work here, but where the film really clicks is on the subject of the creative process and as a meditation on the human-machine dynamic.

Listen to Me Marlon is an offer so intimate that no film fan should refuse.

Based on a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner, the film doesn’t flinch from Colvin’s driven, destructive side. But it’s best when she’s on the ground in a war zone, bearing witness.

Turns out to be one of the most compelling, finely orchestrated and oddly enchanting films of the year so far.

The documentary of the year may also be its most hair-raising thriller.

With great humour and heartbreak, Whether the Weather is Fine is the kind of film intrepid cinephiles long to discover at TIFF.

In The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in judgment, only truth. Every decision she makes is exactly the right one. Her three lead actresses have never been better, and casting Buckley as the young Colman is particularly inspired. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look alike – they share a crucial essence.

Park’s Handmaiden is a great big chocolate box of a movie in which a rich and satisfying narrative is enlivened by some piquant erotica and the sharp tang of politics.

Yes, The Father is a familiar story and a universal one. Yet Zeller has been uniquely inventive in the way he evokes the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of experience in the senile – and the healthy.

Happily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has in Moonlight exactly the kind of small, smart film that the Awards should be recognizing more often. Whether it will actually win is another matter: Jenkins’s script and his direction are bracingly free of the sentimentality Oscar so loves.

Shot in Louisiana, with non-professional actors and apparently set-designed from a junkyard, Beasts of the Southern Wild marks one of the most auspicious American directorial debuts in years.

Children of Men is a nativity story for the ages, this or any other.

Stewart does an intriguing job creating a paradoxical character who explains herself without giving of herself, her very persona exposing the false promise of personal exposition.

The Coen brothers adaptation is impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy's prose – sparse, suspenseful, probing and profoundly disturbing.

The director’s larger point is deployed with such subtlety that it creeps up on the viewer with devastating force.

It rejoices in a classic structure in which one upward trajectory and one downward meet for a shining moment in the middle. Under Cooper’s direction – and thanks to his chemistry with his co-star – the movie throbs with the excitement of that meeting, while the downfall of his alcoholic rocker achieves an almost tragic catharsis.

It is immersive, engaging and dizzying filmmaking.

What has been crafted with The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open is the multitudinous reality of past and present, absent and material; a world-affirming space of narrative realization that speaks to those who exist within the efforts and “now” of survival.

This is a miniature classic, a pulp tragedy. [29 Sep 1990]

It's an exquisite, humanistic and subtly topical work of cinema art that manages to keep the intimate, revelatory sensibility of a one-man play intact while fleshing out the characters and creating a very realistic and richly detailed school community.

One of the best, funniest, most surprising and likeable American films of the year. [27 Aug 1979]

The director, though, reaches in and steals your heart right in front of your eyes, like a magic trick, and you have to admit you didn’t even see it coming.

It’s a film full of delicate metaphors and gentle humour – the locals have elaborate rules for giving a warning honk of the horn on their one-track road but refuse a simple suggestion to widen it – and meanders, sometimes a bit elliptically, to its conclusion.

Credit goes to the actors (especially Gershon) for giving almost as good as they get in seriously demanding roles, and to Friedkin for having what it takes – guts, chops and a refreshing lack of artistic caution – to bring things thundering home.

It is superbly executed and, for all its pitilessness, it's an intelligent dramatization of the impact that consumerist values have had on the psyche of the North American middle class at the end of the 20th century.

Led by a magnificent Viola Davis, the cast is ridiculously stacked. The action is tremendous. And the ultimate message – that nothing comes for free in America – is devastating in its swift brutality.

The pacing is steady. The stories are told simply, with zero affectation or buildup by the director. The effect is astonishing.

Armed with an intimate tale and the true grit of Jandreau’s teeth, The Rider is the best film about searching for a new identity in the wreckage of the American dream since Kathryn Bigelow’s "The Hurt Locker" (2008). It is here to break your heart.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

The drama is an intricately constructed and intensely felt work that transcends the easy “coming-of-age” genre label that is so tempting to slap onto it.

Director Mouly Surya’s unwavering conviction in her material (co-written with Rama Adi and Garin Nugroho) and her star – Marsha Timothy plays Marlina as fearful and indignant but ever composed – create a film that is simultaneously charming and grisly.

It’s a delightfully cruel work of high tension, perfect in just how quickly and easily it gets under your skin.

Dive into a masterpiece.

The Image Book is worth seeing if only as an aesthetic experience – to let its images and sounds wash over you – while also offering itself up as an object to reflect on.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

More arduously, Riva is obliged to act out the physical decline while still registering a full spectrum of emotions. Remarkably, she does it all, even when reduced to communicating with her eyes alone. Hers is, in every sense of the phrase, a nakedly honest performance.

Mostly, Nebraska impresses for its sure rhythms and artful balance of comedy and melancholy, resulting in Payne’s most satisfying film since "About Schmidt."

This is a lovely, quirky and not a little poignant film from Agnès Varda.

There is no raunchier, more raucous, filthy and truly crass movie out this summer than Girls Trip – and I loved every minute of it.

It is rare for a first feature to be so well directed, thoughtful and entertaining.

If you’ve ever loved anyone or anything, A Ghost Story is going to break your heart. It is devastating – and devastatingly good.

A parable that concerns the monstrous conduct of humans, Tusk is a salute to storytelling, a comic send-up of Canadiana – with awesome references to Degrassi and Duplessis – and a terrorizing vehicle for sharply conceived absurdity.

Sissako’s point, while never heavy-handed, is hard to miss: Traditional Muslims are among the world’s biggest victims of Islamic militarism.

Rankin has a made a great film about Canada and an even greater one about the kinds of subjects somewhat contraband in our home and native land: unbridled romantic longing, living in fear of one’s own mother, a perverse desire to masturbate with a dirty work boot, political ambition and shame.

David Cronenberg's gelid masterpiece.

Delightfully inventive, consistently funny, clever but not slick, brisk yet never antic, Quick Change is the perfect cinematic date - a summer film for all seasons, the kind of sharp-edged picture that gives lightweight a good name. [14 Jul 1990, p.C3]

The accurately titled EPiC is the greatest concert documentary ever made.

Divided into five parts, the film is the most ambitious, realistic, thorough and scrupulous feature yet released by a major studio on the subject of cops and corruption...As portrayed electrifyingly - sometimes a little too electrifyingly - by Williams, Ciello's reasons for becoming a stoolie are as complex as his reasons for becoming a cop. [29 Aug 1981]

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

MIAMI BLUES gleefully presides over the happy marriage of two solid but usually separate traditions in U.S. movies: film noir, with its emphasis on the sleazy and the powerless, and screwball comedy, with its celebration of the romantically eccentric. As darkly unpredictable as The Third Man and as bouncingly comic as Pretty Woman, Miami Blues deserves all the rave reviews it's going to get and all the tons of money it's going to make. [20 Apr 1990]

Mostly, though, A Dangerous Method is a suave chamber piece: a series of glimpses of two 20th-century intellectual titans, in friendship and separation, and the story of a remarkable woman who history had swallowed up, brought into the light again.

The final shot is one of the most poignant images I’ve ever seen.

Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," Anderson's latest is enigmatic. But if you have eyes and can see, The Master it is unmistakably some kind of wonder. At least, it's an exhilarating demonstration of big-screen moviemaking in dreamlike colours and a sense-heightening 70-mm format.

As well as an engaging fable about a homeless orphan living in a train station, Scorsese's film is a richly illustrated lesson in cinema history and the best argument for 3-D since James Cameron's "Avatar."

Director Peter Strickland brilliantly ratchets up the tension without showing a single frame of the grisly film.

This is an oddball classic that leaves you weak with pleasure. [11 Mar 1988]

Before Sunrise is a film that first startles you with its simplicity, then bowls you over with its complexity.

With the help of an impeccable cast and with a style steeped in the past, Soderbergh has placed the persona of Kafka under a lens, and the soul he discovers is his own. [31 Jan. 1992]

May be less than the sum of its parts, but its parts are more impressive than most other wholes around.

Performances are still the heart of Leigh’s work, and at the heart of this film is an extraordinary performance by Leigh’s frequent collaborator, the British actor Timothy Spall.

A masterpiece. Admittedly, callow viewers may have difficulty getting past the cumulously bewigged Jean-Pierre Léaud’s uncanny resemblance to Phil Spector, circa 2008.

Time Bandits is the best children's picture since The Black Stallion, but it is a satiric, inventive, fantastical vacation for the filmgoer of any age: imagine an intelligent Raiders of the Lost Ark with a deeply bitchy sense of humor. [06 Nov 1981]

Powered by a Scottish writer, a Scottish director, and the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands, this is clearly a labour of love, and the passion gets right up on the screen.

The most gripping war movie you'll see this year, We Were Here tells first-hand the story of how AIDS attacked San Francisco, killing more than 15,000. Whole peer groups were happy, healthy, and then dead in months.

Because the director weaves in enough scenes to show how deeply this family cares for one another, it never feels voyeuristic in its sadness but true to reality. This isn’t about emotional manipulation or poverty porn, it’s about showing a family as a whole.

Intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this film is to engage in participatory art -- for better and for worse, through sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.

This Barbie is a modern movie masterpiece that must be seen to be believed.

Take the backroom political machinations of "Lincoln," add in the showbiz sleight of hand of "Argo," and you’ll get something like No, a cunning and richly enjoyable combination of high-stakes drama and media satire.

Blank is hilarious and candid in this must-watch film. Every moment she breaks the fourth wall with an eye roll is worthy of a freeze frame.

A great movie... A pop epiphany, marking that commercially creative point where the power of Hollywood meets the purity of myth.

Both shocking and beautiful, the film impresses itself on the viewer with the awesome scale of the imagery – and with the urgency behind it. We have entered an epoch in which human activity is shaping the planet more than any natural force. Anthropocene bears witness that something’s got to give.

Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

Easily among the top 10 films made last year.

The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.