Working "lobbed" and "scimitar" into that same sentence hovers near the empyrean of genius.

Amin’s story is given life and depth, charted here with a care for his wholeness rather than too simply his refugee status.

It pains that this documentary was so tedious, since the New York Public Library is the crown jewel of public institutions, deserving of every accolade. If you want to spend three hours finding out what the library has to offer, save yourself the price of a movie ticket and head down to your local branch.

It’s hard to describe Nickel Boys. It seems like an injustice to call it, simply, a film. It’s a remarkable piece of art, even more impressive when you consider that it’s photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut feature film – in fiction.

It is tender, true and – depending on your interpretation, or understanding, of the finale – intensely heartbreaking.

That the director is able to continue producing such creative and daring work while ostensibly under the thumb of the state is a true feat.

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

The director wisely dives with her whole heart and soul into Goldin’s life, which makes seeing her almost destroyed by an addiction to painkillers so painful. And then, when Goldin resurrects her energies into waging a David versus Goliath war, there is a distinct sense of against-all-odds triumph that hits hard, and lingers long.

Profound, and profoundly affecting.

Using nothing but the voices and the images from the past, They Shall Not Grow Old is a powerful tribute to every veteran and one of the most empathetic portraits of war ever created. His grandfather would be proud.

Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession.

Yet for a number of reasons, The Favourite is the first Yorgos Lanthimos film that puts the director’s bitter instincts to good use. It’s not only his most tolerable film, it’s his most insightful, too. It even approaches, well, fun.

This low-budget horror film, sophisticated far beyond its budget, is the work of John Carpenter, an authentic prodigy whose style recalls both Martin Scorsese and the Brian De Palma of "Carrie," but who has a metaphysical, sophomoric sense of humor both of those directors lack.

THE THREE hours and 10 minutes of The Right Stuff fly by faster than a plane snapping the sound barrier - there's never a moment that's not entertaining, and there are very few that are not wonderfully photographed and choreographed - but for the non-American, the excitement is confined to the filmmaking. [22 Oct 1983]

Patricio Guzmán's documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, pays equal attention to the astronomers and searchers, regarding their quest as the same – a search for life.

As a political testament, the result is revealing and important. Yet as a documentary, it wanders here, there and everywhere – long on intensity but short on focus.

The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.

This is a sequel just as intriguing as the original.

Trier has an incredible ear for dialogue and can observe the pitiful drama of a millennial breakup like no other.

A horror movie based on history, offering some of the most spectacularly brutal, viscerally intense battle scenes ever brought to a Hollywood movie.

A comedy, a drama, a romance, a memory, Licorice Pizza is the director’s warmest and fuzziest creation.

A butterfly metaphor is employed by the time-flipping Takahata, a filmmaker whose delightful Only Yesterday took 25 years to arrive right on time.

Simultaneously a tough, haunting, lyrical, hopeful film, and the tears it wants us to shed are an alloy of sorrow and joy - cleansing tears, the kind that alter the rules and dignify the game.

As audiences, we lean toward demanding a near-constant auditory assault – that if we’re not hearing something, we’re missing something. Director Kelly Reichardt has no qualms with upending this, and other pieces of conventional cinematic wisdom with First Cow, a film that takes great care to remind us of the whisper-quiet bones of America’s history – a time when there wasn’t much to hear except what nature was telling us.

Its true subject is the thrill of the chase and the means by which the movies express it, which is to say it’s one hell of a ride in the same direction taken by the characters: deep into a desert of vast and horizonless emptiness.

This is a world out of time and, despite the trappings of flinty realism, the film too unfolds like an elemental myth from the stormy past – a Greek tragedy driven by dark fates and struggling toward a catharsis.

Succeeding where most docudramas fail, it turns a slice of recent history into a revealingly intelligent entertainment, without being didactic at one extreme or sentimental at the other.

Sublime documentary.

Director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Lean on Pete) knows how to build towering moments of human drama from the tiniest foundations. And he mostly pulls off such a feat again in this tale of grief and generational pain.

An impressive film accomplishment, a combination of technique and extremely specific detail that reminds viewers how potent a rhetorical force the medium can be.

The winner of Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.

The best American movie so far this year.

Perhaps this is Anderson's version of a parlour game – walk into Phantom Thread expecting a portrait of a testy male genius as portrayed by another testy male genius, but be gifted with a stealth drama about the hidden lives of the women who suffer in his shadow.

Essentially agenda-free, My Perestroika has the quality of a candid conversation with long-lost cousins from another country.

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

Deft and ironic, mixing banal reality with poignant metaphor in a typically Iranian style.

Though the Disney logo is on this movie, there is -- possibly excepting little Nemo himself -- not a single cloying, sentimental Disneyesque creature in it. There is, instead, wit and flair in concept and writing, the trademark of the Pixar people who drove the project.

In just her second feature, Schilinski creates a true art-house epic, haunting and lyrical.

With its visual, sonic and cultural gestures, the film is nothing less than a love letter to West Indian life, and makes home in its political figures and artists, its iconography, its food, its music, its gestures and movements all shared here on screen.

The smarter script and stronger range of performances than most high-budget blockbusters clogging theatres these days make you wonder why the live-action feature isn't already obsolete.

If enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border – and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible – the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit. And sometimes a little bit is all we need to effect urgent change.

One caveat: At the risk of sounding sexist, let me say A Prophet is an unreservedly male film. Female characters are few and far between, and when they do appear, they pretty much fall into either one of two categories – les mamans ou les putains.

Once it clicks – and it will – the film burns hard, fast and blindingly bright.

Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.

The result is a rarity on any screen: intelligent fun.

Most movies have music, some movies are musicals, but very few movies combine the two with the grace and pure eloquence of Once.

"It's one of the problems I have with Hannah. I feel I haven't gone deeply enough." Should Woody Allen ever tire of making movies, he can take up criticizing them.

One of the most compelling aspects about Paterson as a film about art is the effortless way in which it declines to ask its audience to judge whether Paterson’s poems are any good: their quality seems immaterial to Jarmusch’s point. It is the act of writing them, both expressing and amplifying Paterson’s sensitivity to his world, that seems important.

The intensity of the film verges on the intolerable.

Greengrass's reluctance to unduly demonize the villains or overly sentimentalize the victims is commendable on the surface, but it tends to blur the two sides and to mask the gulf that separates them.

In the midst of this emotional train wreck in motion, with angry outbursts and accusations, there are moments of levity, jokes and even a song or two. Strangely, it does not seem irreverent or bizarre but, rather, an expression of affection, as if love is tearing them apart.

The character of Rosalyn – a mash-up of Carole Lombard, Lady Macbeth and maybe even Regan from The Exorcist – is by far the most hair-raising phenomenon in a movie bristling with high hair.

Star Wars is the most entertaining sci-fi movie of the decade.

Persepolis is as modern as tomorrow's headlines and as classic as an ancient myth.

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.

Stark and haunting, and still unbearable to watch at times, The Deer Hunter remains a powerful movie experience. Unlike the broad strokes of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, the 1979 best-picture Oscar-winner provides a more personal take on the human casualties of the Vietnam War.

You'll be rewarded with a terrific finale. The twists here are the rare sort that seem both narratively surprising and emotionally engaging.

If you've got six hours to invest watching superior television in a movie theatre, then spend the time wisely with The Best of Youth.

Whiplash is an intense, unmelodious, highly amped and probably unrealistic drama set in the fictionalized Schaefer Conservatory in New York.

A movie that combines the Cold War intrigue of John Le Carré with the wired buzz of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" -- one of those rare two-hour-plus pictures that runs long but plays bracingly, excitingly short.

Actors Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro are the kind of startlingly good-looking, glamorous stars that evoke classic Hollywood adventure films.

The best of art makes you think of life. On that front, Michael Apted has achieved more than all but a handful of filmmakers. Cherish 63 Up, like you cherish life.

This is a movie about children that isn't just a children's movie - thoughtful adult accompaniment is strongly advised. [13 Aug 1993]

This is a master artist putting a stamp on not only his own career, but also the entirety of American cinema and, why not, American history, too.

Marsh's most remarkable directorial achievement, however, is preserving the original sense of amazement and awe when watching historical footage and still photographs of Petit walking that tightrope up in the sky.

"You're so lucky to live in Mexico," Luisa says. "Look at it -- it breathes with life." So does Y Tu Mama Tambien, both the pant of passion and shuddering sigh of regret.

For all its cleverness, Elle suffers, like many a thriller, from an unmasking that proves less intriguing than the original mystery and, in its misogyny and its misanthropy, the film ultimately proves less interesting than it believes itself to be. Mainly, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth long after the credits roll. Like Michèle herself, Elle is a nasty piece of work.

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.

Borat at its best is pure satiric genius, the Swiftian kind that has you busting a gut with laughter even while checking your conscience for implicating flaws.

The film forms a kind of origin story, giving voice to the often silent experiences of a particular immigrant community in the 80s. Lachlan Milne’s cinematography veers from prosaic to evocative to breathtaking, depending on the scene.

Unlike "Crazy Rich Asians," which had eyes for narrative substance but shamelessly flirted with the superficial, The Farewell is a more substantive, engrossing and ultimately deeper work about the bonds that hold and strengthen us.

Safdie and Bronstein know they’re playing with fire in every frame, and it’s a miracle of Maccabean proportions they’re able to keep the entire thing from self-combusting.

A classic film that only low-down no-good viewers could fail to like. [18 Dec 2004, p.8]

With a riveting performance-within-a-performance of subtle physicality by Nina Hoss, the charade in which a woman plays her own doppelganger certainly borrows tension, look and conventions from postwar film noir.

At heart, though, every moviegoer can recognize a love story, no matter how unusual the context.

There is exquisite dramatic tension here, built partly by Campion’s deft storytelling and partly by her powerful cast.

The best thriller of 2003 was made in 1979.

With elements of "A Star Is Born" and "Singing in the Rain," The Artist is a rarity, an ingenious crowd-pleaser.

Zama is a disjointed watch that is both challenging and mesmerizing.

Great art is both immediately accessible and eternally elusive, having at its centre a powerful simplicity that speaks to anyone who cares to listen, that rewards every interpretation while embracing none. The Piano is great art.

Film, not film, whatever it is, Cameraperson plays like a study not only of cinema itself, but a warm, welcome reminder that there is (ideally) an intelligence, and maybe even a bit of grace, behind the moving images that wedge themselves in our memory; that they are the handiwork of a living, thinking, feeling, sneezing human being, someone who is both camera and person.

You’re unlikely to any time soon encounter a more thorough and energetic dive into the art of letting go. I look forward to Johnson’s next act, whilst I look over my shoulder.

For all its emphasis on doomed honour and grim death, Letters from Iwo Jima is also sentimental.

Yes, the filmmaker and co-director Duke Johnson laboured for years over this project, and their set design is often astonishing. But that doesn’t mean the film is a masterpiece, or even half a masterpiece.

Puzzling out the reality and meaning of Long Day’s Journey into Night’s second half is as involving and absorbing an experience as watching the thing itself. And by the time Luo makes his way to what seems like the end of his journey, it is hard to not similarly feel transformed, or at the very least shaken.

For all the undeniable merits, it somehow feels manufactured, and thus, to a degree, calculated - the product not of a collective imagination taking esthetic chances, but of an imaginative collective putting the rivets into a well-wrought plan that can't go awry.

Established Bergman as a director of arresting visual and intellectual power. [6 March 1993]

This Paddington, so sweetly voiced by Ben Whishaw, is just ursine enough on the one hand and just teddy enough on the other to reproduce the charm of the original.

A seriously black comedy. Black, because affliction and angst abound. Comic, because this rampant bleakness is presented as nothing more than an amusing bauble.

Beyond the eerily evocative impersonation, Hoffman's brilliance lies in not only playing the shrewd puppet master but also revealing that he too comes with strings attached, the most dominant being his consuming need for acclaim.

There is one thing that power can’t stand, and that is to be mocked: The social importance of this topical romp should not be underestimated.

Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character.

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it.

There is no grand narrative or point to be hammered home; instead, Olshefski delivers a subtle, sincere and honest portrait of barely making ends meet in modern America.

In the hands of director Mia Hansen-Love and the heart-stopping Huppert, Things to Come (L’Avenir) examines the inevitable losses and possible liberation of late middle age with impressive sensitivity and restraint.

From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.

Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living.