This is Sally Field's movie. Her performance - hyperbole completely aside - is peerless, one of the major achievements by an actress in the movies of any place and of any time. Reuben tells Norma Rae that when he wants a smart, loud, profane, sloppy, hardworking woman he'll call on her. From now on, when directors want legerdemain that becomes art, they're going to call on Sally Field.[10 Mar 1979]

Both leads fit their performances seamlessly into this destabilizing scheme, providing a provocative timelessness to the characters.

This is the master at the top of his form, his erratic genius harnessed and everything clicking, everything flowing, a fresh creation from a mature artist.

Firecrackers is not as casually joyful as its title suggests – but it is absolutely as incendiary.

While the film first regales us in sightseeing tours of the scenic Faro Island, the film ends in an unexpected wallop of heartbreak as Chris begins to describe the film-within-a-film she’s writing in her notebook to her unattentive partner.

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.

Thrilling and beautifully crafted.

"The Hurt Locker" may be getting all the attention and awards but The Messenger is at least as good and perhaps, given its delicate handling of a sensitive subject, even better.

Beyond Thunderdome is a masterfully directed fantasy, convincing down to the smallest detail in its vision of an alternate existence, and it has gone beyond the relentless sadomasochism of The Road Warrior; Max has now taken up with children, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is suitable for them. [9 July 1985]

It’s a document of mutual care; a self-authored family archive magnified by the scope of its editor and platform; and a compassionately rendered adaptation of the ways in which we feel the tempo, intervals, duration and memory of time.

Detective Dee is the action flick of the year, a two-hour epic that blows the "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the Bermuda Triangle.

Every once in a long while, the right director comes across the right project at just the right moment, and things so often discordant fall into perfect harmony.

Spare, steely, sexually explicit in a way that transcends mere provocation, Stranger by the Lake is vital cinema.

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

What elevates Foy's impressive first feature (he also served as editor and composer of the dark, whimsical score) above, say, your average "unsolved mystery" TV episode, is the emotional connection he gradually builds between Duerr and the elusive creator of the Toynbee tiles.

It’s a beautiful work of cinematic concentration that’s purely Apichatpong.

Real Genius is great, the freshest, most insouciant Hollywood inspiration since Risky Business. Director Martha Coolidge was handed a fleet cast and a well- oiled screenplay and she plumb took off. The darn thing works so well it fairly sings. [12 Aug 1985]

Can a film that raises more questions about its subject than it answers be considered a masterpiece? If it can, that film is Paul Schrader's innovative cinematic biography of the Japanese novelist, essayist and actor Yukio Mishima, the man who in 1970 committed public seppuku (hara-kiri) in an unprecedented, grandiloquent attempt to turn his life into art. [12 Sep 1985]

Legs flashing and eyes smouldering and brain scintillating, Fiorentino serves up each facet with venomous glee - it's a performance that mixes a main course of Bette Davis with a side order of La Femme Nikita, and it's mesmerizing.

The exceptional story of a low-level diplomat who had a 20-year affair with a man he thought was a woman, is, in Cronenberg's hands, turned into a beguiling masterpiece on the question of self-deception. [01 Oct 1993]

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

Take a funny, touching, complex play that moves at a breakneck pace, filter it through the huge (if often underrated) talents of director Fred Schepisi, and you've got Six Degrees of Separation. Such a rare gift - a film that treats language with infinite respect and ideas with cultivated precision, a film that challenges us to keep up and rewards our efforts with a bittersweet comedy of manners. [24 Dec 1993]

Observant and funny and thoughtful too, powered exclusively by vérité footage without a word of narration, Babies is William Blake’s Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life.

By twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.

The story of a man afflicted with fearful visions, Take Shelter is a film that's hitting the right apocalyptic trumpet call at the right time.

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.

Adapted with great warmth and wit, and with as much of Austen’s crackling dialogue as his own, Stillman shapes lean Austen descriptions such as “He is as silly as ever” into superb character bits for the preposterous twit Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett).

Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.

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.

Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.

It’s bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head.

One of the most interesting, one of the most rewarding and one of the funniest films of the year. [4 July 1986]

No doubt about it, Nobody's Fool is endowed with a lot of cinematic smarts - from the star's poise to the director's wiles to a lambent cameo from the late Jessica Tandy. And those smarts, part trickster's magic and part craftsman's guile, work their transforming art to perfection - seldom has a shallow pool looked so refreshingly deep. [13 Jan 1995]

With The Salesman, Farhadi opens a window into his own society that offers a universal view of the emotional rivalries within the human heart. Neither America nor Iran could ask any more of an artist.

Chandor's shrewdest bit of business is figuring out how to make an A-list movie with a $3.5-million budget. Solution: buy low, sell high. Hire last decade's A-list – Spacey, Irons and Demi Moore – and give them their best parts in years.

An unforgettable portrayal of the unglamorous gangster life, which is often short and never sweet.

The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.

A classic... Edward Scissorhands is a sharp salute to the oddball in all of us.

It is sublime. Better than "Lady Bird" even, and I would not, could not, say that lightly. Because it hits harder. Like someone ripping your heart out, while gently rubbing your back and telling you that it’s all going to be okay. I laughed obnoxiously loud, and I cried so hard my face formed a frozen death mask that just went, “Owww, myyyyy hearrrrttttt.”

A portrait of America that is devastating and freeing, bursting with sorrow and empathy.

One of the things that is admirable about Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea – and there are many admirable things about this quietly moving drama – is the way its initial enigma seems to need no explanation; yet, once deciphered, the film does not falter but moves only deeper into the emotional territory it charts.

In an era where films such as "Moonlight" and "If Beale Street Could Talk" have received accolades for their capacity to reimagine expressions of black life on film, Ross contributes to this new canon by staring down the assumption of what type of black lived experiences mass audiences are capable of acknowledging.

A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.

Few directors working today make films with the grace and magisterial power of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's best work.

Poised, delicate, powerful, hovering between poignancy and pealing laughter, it is a feast formed by skill and serendipity.

Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.

Movies have always been - at their most extravagantly appealing, sensually exciting and rationally disturbing-pieces of art with the power to bypass our defences. A few times in the history of movies, one caught glimpses of a power that could turn the screen experience into a hallucinatory celebration of irrationality, of pure feeling, and even, perhaps, of insanity. Apocalypse Now goes further in that direction more successfully than any movie ever has. [21 May 1979]

But Turteltaub surprises us. He has the kind of unerring comic touch - easily able to carry his audience from smart dialogue to heart-tugging emotion to something awfully close to slapstick - that should serve the movie world well.

This is where the movie excels. In the classic neo-realist tradition, it's scant in plot yet rich in mood and character, offering us a revealing hint here, a poignant glimpse there, with each revelation filtered through Michelle Williams's superbly muted performance, all the more moving for being so restrained.

A movie in which TV show host Bob Eubanks tells a joke at once anti-semitic and homophobic, a movie in which a town turns into a vermin-ridden, crime- crazed black hole - this is the happiest surprise of the holiday season? What gives? [22 Dec 1989]

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

You don't need to have seen a lot of art films to love The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. All it takes is compassionate curiosity and perhaps some lingering memory of the world as a child experiences it.

British humour at its eclectic best, a deliciously heady mix of dry wit and ribald farce.

Tense, immersive and excellently assaulting, Good Time is hella time.

A majestic feat of filmmaking, an intimate portrait of a family that also serves as a broad portrait of a changing nation.

The 15:17 To Paris, like "Sully," "American Sniper" and (to a lesser extent) "Gran Torino" before it, combines such conceptions of late style: both harmonious and intransigent, resolute and difficult, defined by lively contradiction.

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.

The movie’s moral centre, is the island’s doctor, who in one of the film’s most powerful moments reflects on all the autopsies he’s performed. “It’s the duty of every human being to help these people,” he says. That’s about as close as director Gianfranco Rosi gets to a political message.

Reservoir Dogs sizzles - it's dynamite on a short fuse, and you watch it with mesmerized fascination, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the explosion you know will come.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

It's a masterpiece of exposition and compression. An allegorical examination of a transitional period in U.S. history. [01 Sept 1988]

What keeps the energy percolating is DiCaprio’s performance, in the loosest and most charismatic turn of his career.

A riveting, impossible-to-shake masterwork that leaves the audience spooked, not by its telling but by its commitment to abstract themes of grief, solitude and coming of age.

With this complex characterization, Bening looks like a shoo-in for a best-actress nomination come Oscar time, but she is also amply supported here with two performances that nicely capture the insecurities of earlier stages of womanhood.

Technically awe-inspiring, narratively inventive and thematically complex, Dunkirk reinvigorates its genre with a war movie that is both harrowing and smart.

An experience that is sometimes unbearable and always riveting. [14 Oct 1988]

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

If the word masterpiece has any use these days, it must apply to the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a mature, philosophically resonant work from Turkey's leading director, 53-year-old Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, Distance, Three Monkeys).

Todd Haynes' Safe grips you with its air of antiseptic malevolence and leaves you gasping. You feel as disoriented as the protagonist, a young housewife suffering from 20th-century disease. [11 Aug 1995]

The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.

I love this movie like a person. It pierced my heart the way certain paintings or pieces of music do. The way standing at the foot of a mountain does. The first time I saw it, I had to stay in my cinema seat for five minutes after it ended, to finish crying. The second time, I vowed to watch it more analytically, but ended up crying all over again.

Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.

As much about deception as it is the fear of being forsaken, White Lie unfurls to become an unexpected empathy inquest.

This outing not only doesn't disappoint; it surpasses high expectations. This is a terrific, smartly designed adolescent adventure, visually rich, narratively satisfying, and bound to resonate for years to come.

The doc, similar to the Oscar-winning The White Helmets but a subtler portrait of heroism, reveals accurate information as the first weapon of resistance.

Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.

Set against the high-tension strings and jarringly funky synthesizers of Greenwood’s score, the film is transformative and transfixing.

Akilla’s Escape recasts the monolithic narrative of gang involvement as one that rejects a trope of Black peril in order to tell a multi-dimensional story of resilience – one where keen strategists are developed through unsolvable situations, where the enduring love of Black mothers demonstrates what it means to walk into the line of fire and where, amidst abject tumult, moments of tenderness and triumph persist against all odds.

What advance publicity has been powerless to suggest is that Personal Best is an exceptionally well-crafted, thoroughly accurate, emotionally galvanizing piece of filmmaking, easily one of the most intelligent explorations of competition on cinematic record. What's best about Personal Best is a lot more than just personal .[5 Feb 1982]

Raw and electrically presented, Civil War is an ugly odyssey and an audacious premonition.

The ensuing story about life and love is made visually compelling by exquisitely crafted animation, much of it drawn in the bold and refreshing ligne claire style pioneered by the Belgian cartoonist (and Tintin creator) Hergé. That counterintuitive contrast with the mysterious, unspoken tale only makes this unusual film all the more intriguing.

There is no rookie-film handicap required in grading the excellence on display. There are no fireworks or twists or unnecessary frills here, nor should there be – this is simply perfect filmmaking from a voice that demands to be heard. The fall movie season is saved. Thank you, Greta Gerwig.

Utterly magnificent and intoxicating.

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

Kurt Russell has never seemed more clever, Mel Gibson more vulnerable nor Michelle Pfeiffer more goddess-like. Once upon a time, before the pictures got small and the hills were obscured by smog, the Hollywood sign read: "Hollywoodland." That was back when Tequila Sunrise, an intelligent, escapist epic for adults, wouldn't have seemed the anomaly it seems today. [2 Dec 1988, p.C1]

A film where the cast neatly dovetails with the script which perfectly meshes with the direction. In short, a film that works. [5 Aug 1987]

The Long Day Closes is a twice-remarkable film. Once, because director Terence Davies opens his personal bottle of memories and makes them interesting to us. Twice, because, in doing so, he triggers our own memories. [11 June 1993]

An uncommonly tender and observant documentary on the phenomenon that is "A Chorus Line."

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.

In short, Batman is terrific - funny, smart and sensitive too, the perfect cinematic date.

From the very first scenes of the Canadian documentary Eternal Spring, you’re thrust into a thrilling, all-consuming film that challenges traditional documentary tropes and finds a way to tell a winding, difficult story with brilliant ease.

Unlike many of his action-cinema contemporaries, McQuarrie excels at creating clear lines of sight for his set pieces, and cutting them together to ensure maximum tension.

The Witches of Eastwick is an uproarious and entirely successful attempt to examine the differences between the sexes by couching the examination in mythological terms. [12 June 1987]

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.

Bronstein infuses every moment of If I Had Legs... with a jagged kind of intensity, stringing together scenes with an adrenalized propulsion that makes a story of a mother struggling against a world pitted against her feel both singular and universal.

BlackBerry is funny, fast and nerve-rattling. And it is always – always – intensely entertaining.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

The film is simply operating at a speed constantly one click ahead of expectations, never satisfied that any one viewer could know where it might all be heading.