This is a raw, intense movie circling on despair, hopelessness and inevitable dead ends. It is about the dark. But in plumbing the pitch black, Werewolf offers the distinct hope of a brighter future – at least, a brighter future for Canadian cinema.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

An impressionistic work that is perfectly in tune with its subject’s hallucinatory music.

It’s impossible to guess where things will end up from one second to the next, which may sound daunting, but in the assured hands of Skolimowski and his crew, EO is downright exhilarating.

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic. [2002 re-release]

Free Willy (for some strange reason, that tiny imperative just gives me the giggles) is a family picture that stays safely within the haven of a cozy formula, yet does a whole lot of inventive work in the process.

At best, Leaving Las Vegas is pure alchemy -- it makes of flawed humanity a hymn, and of forlorn hope a beacon.

Whether you care about climbing or not, you’ll appreciate this tale of passion, discipline and, ultimately, transcendence. One incredible climb for one athlete, one quantum leap for mankind.

Faithful to Chekhov, Ceylan spells out nothing except that unhappiness unrecognized is unhappiness compounded, and despite the film’s wintry chill, there’s a thrilling warmth in this struggle to shine a light on life.

The relationship between man and beast develops slowly and mystically - the island interlude, utterly without dialogue, lasts 50 minutes, and is one of the most sustained, lyrical, rapturous sequences in the history of motion pictures, a visual symphony whose beauty cannot be oversold. [15 Mar 1980]

It's a long time since I've heard a press screening audience applaud a foreign film, but then it's a long time since a French movie has been as funny as The Dinner Game.

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

To watch Portman’s every move is to not only watch history being recreated, but to also witness history being made. No one will ever be able to touch this role again. Or, at least, no one should.

There's no redemption here. Indeed, if anything is redemptive about Katyn , it's the fact of the film itself.

Pritz has managed to make this often abstract and far-away subject feel anything but removed. It’s urgent, desperate and terrifying and the words of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau ask us not to look away.

Not precious, but humanist, The Gravedigger’s Wife is a striking first from a filmmaker and cast we should hope to see more of.

Whatever praise heads toward Sandler should be tripled in the direction of the Safdies.

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

Mozhdah empathetically charts Nisha’s despairing acquiescence and fitful rebellions, but it’s Adil Hussain’s work making her father not entirely unsympathetic that really stands out.

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.

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

Beach Rats stands on its own merits as one of the boldest, most original films of the year. It does that incredible thing of making you miss it before it's even over, like fireworks that turn to smoke before you're ready.

With its claustrophobic unity of time and place, the disintegrating party feels highly theatrical and, of various classic screen adaptations from the stage, this wonderfully performed black-and-white film recalls in particular Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Yet also, Potter's comic dissection of the London intelligentsia's personal and political angst is completely of the moment.

Where Song to Song most distinguishes itself among Malick’s uniquely rich filmography is its abiding despair. It is his most pessimistic film since "Badlands."

Unusual for a Holocaust drama, the film offers no false hope of rescue or resurrection, but does insist that our bearing witness matters.

PARENTS defies all categories but one - it is a virtuoso display of movie-making, a multi-textured and pyschologically intense work unimaginable in any medium except film, a tale fantastic in style yet deadly serious in its intent and absolutely horrifying in its implications. [27 Jan 1989]

Heartwarming, tragic and, at times, hilariously funny drama.

DeGeneres goes much further, though, maintaining a delicate balance between Dory’s optimistic personality and the hovering anxieties created by her imperfect memory.

A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.

With Misericordia, Guiraudie deftly strikes the balance between the playfully sacrilegious and the sociopathic, rounded out by a seductively bizarre cast of dwellers and clusters of puckered, corpse-fed mushrooms.

Is it possible for a horror movie to be too good? If it is, then Cujo is it: this is one of the few films on record where the combination of low shock and high style results in an experience that borders on the unbearably intense. The movie is spectacularly well-made, but it's nearly unwatchable. [29 Aug 1983]

De Palma is a true visionary, even if you might not quite agree with what that vision is. Either way, a trip through his wild and hugely influential filmography is mandatory for any film fan, and that’s just what directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow offer in their new documentary.

Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary about the first moon landing is dead brilliant, sure to enrage conspiracy theorists while thrilling most everyone else.

Thanks to the specificity of Richardson’s performance in particular and Giles Nuttgen’s gorgeous cinematography (the movie is shot on 35 mm), Montana Story evokes a grandiose style of American frontier filmmaking, somewhere between John Ford and Kelly Reichardt. See it on the largest screen you can find.

The best thriller of 2003 was made in 1979.

Cabot's meticulously and ambitiously designed Les Quatre Vents in bucolic Quebec is the star attraction, but Luc St. Pierre's score is magical and the interviewees are in their best chatty grooves.

It's a rare feat for a director whose films, from their muted humour and dated-seeming mise-en-scène, to their use of flat, unexpressive, Bressonian close-ups of characters, have always seemed weirdly outside of time.

Hunger -- the disturbing, provocative, brilliant feature debut from British director Steve McQueen -- does for modern film what Caravaggio did to Renaissance painting.

It is a work of great beauty that rewards continued visits.

The new film is easily’s Gray’s most ambitious, bare-your-soul work, and one of the finest films of the year, too.

May be the best war movie ever made...Different is Kubrick's artistry and control, and his almost perverse, but philosophically progressive, refusal to impart to chaos a coherent narrative contour.

To watch German documentarian Thomas Heise’s marathon family memoir Heimat is a Space in Time, the viewer has to continually analyze the relationship between text and image.

A great film about a good man.

Kramer vs. Kramer is one of the most sensitive and least judgmental film about relationships ever made in the United States.... One of the important films. [15 Dec 1979]

Even those familiar with the legacy of the show will discover new and fascinating things about the history of Sesame Street throughout the film – and anyone who watches Street Gang will come away moved by everything its cast and crew managed to accomplish.

A lean, stripped-down and unapologetically cinematic take on Shakespeare's work, an adaptation designed at each turn to diminish the mechanics of the comedy and to explore the depths of the pathos.

The effect is Chaplinesque if Chaplin had the latest in gadgetry, because the entire picture is also shot in 3-D that, for once, puts all 3 of the Ds to imaginative use.

Regardless of whether Undine is working at a level of allegory or actual fantasy, it is an expansively rich film.

It is tempting to call A Thousand and One a love letter of sorts, but a more accurate read might be one of heartbreak. There is love here, certainly, but more than that there is frustration, anger and sadness at the way the world refuses to help those trying hardest to endure within it.

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.

This haunting Chilean documentary is more poetry than journalism as filmmaker Patricio Guzman compares the fate of the indigenous people of Patagonia with that of the disappeared of the Pinochet regime.

This remarkable analysis of a decade when American society lost its moral compass is both brutally honest and lyrically compassionate.

As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means.

Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.

Director James Cameron always works on a mega- canvas, yet he's brought off something unique here.

There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

A fantastic film.

Wilde’s smart directing choices and the bravery of her two fearless leads transform a series of comic set-pieces, usually seen in fare such as "American Pie," into iconic character moments.

The wonder is that the film balances its many genres, from the thorns of murder to the bloom of romance to the thickets of politics, with such easy grace.

Missing, which should easily turn out to be one of the year's best films, is essentially the taut, moving story of three people, two countries and one institution. [13 Feb 1982]

I’m Still Here is a timely, exquisite masterpiece.

A miraculous, American-made Hindi film that is every bit as tranquil as the blue-green reservoir that serves as its abiding metaphor.

Sammy and Rosie is not only the best British film of the year, it's one of the best films of the year from any country, period, a raucously erotic dirge belted into the gaping mouth of a tomb. [30 Oct 1987]

If Apocalypse Now was criticized in the past as a series of impressive sequences that don't quite add up to a tidy story, the new additions put this in perspective. It's a filmed epic, not a filmed drama. [10 Aug 2001, p.R1]

An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]

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

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.

The World’s End isn’t perfect – – but its best moments leave the bulk of recent American “event movies” gasping in the dust.

Tarantino is a masterful storyteller, painter of cinematic images and director of actors; the script, the cinematography and the cast of outlandish characters, created by a powerful ensemble dashingly led by Jackson, can’t be faulted in any way.

These confident women care less about what comes off the runways – ‘money has nothing to do with style,’ says one – than with what can be assembled from thrift-shop finds, homemade items and imagination.

The Stunt Man, which is scary and sorrowful and stirring and sexy - in other words, everything a big Hollywood popcorn-cruncher of a movie should be - is the best movie about making a movie ever made. [11 Oct 1980]

Haneke's ensemble is uniformly excellent – the film is packed with intriguing and provocative encounters between its various oppositional characters – and the actors succeed in the difficult task of making these unpleasant people engaging enough that we stick with them throughout a film that the director successfully balances on a knife edge between satire and drama until its final (hilarious) conclusion.

Their excitement is infectious and the entire endeavour both mind-bending and tremendously human: Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recent Nobel Prize-winner and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in, while a tear trickles down his cheek.

One of the best fantasies ever made. [13 Mar 2009, p.R20]

A movie so pungent and filled with sweaty intensity that you can practically smell the rank body odour of the film's subjects as they hurl their bodies against each other in a frenzy of aggression or perform as if in a trance, soaked with perspiration.

With exuberant naturalism from its non-professional actors, and a standout performance from Kosar Ali as Rocks’s best friend, the film covers the highs and lows of female adolescence with compelling sensitivity.

Like Wheatley’s 2011 film "Kill List," High-Rise switches genres effortlessly – black humour one moment, dystopic parable the next – until it becomes its own singular, horrifying, immensely captivating thing.

This superb remake has the inevitable look of a period piece, a smoke-filled rendering of things past. However, thanks to Tomas Alfredson's direction, a taut screenplay, and a uniformly brilliant cast, the film also retains its contemporary relevance.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

Rippling with resonance, Dead Calm is Jaws in a human form, a shape profoundly complete and completely disturbing. [07 Apr 1989]

The result is a genre picture that transcends the genre, that gleefully embraces four qualities alien to the bulk of its noisy brethren: (1) thematic texture; (2) kinetic grace; (3) visuals that toy with the mind even while dazzling the eye; and (3) performers who are permitted to act like something other than human wicks for the pyrotechnical bombast.

Terms of Endearment is the rare commercial picture that sets audiences to laughing hysterically and crying unashamedly, sometimes within consecutive seconds, and then shoos them out of the theatre in contented emotional exhaustion. [23 Nov 1983]

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.

It is extremely difficult to make something as invisible and ineffable as religious faith seem real, let alone touching, on film; doing that is only one of the achievements of Fernando Meirelles’ unusual look inside the papacy.

Delicate, intelligent and honest.

The title is a tease: Quest For Fire is the quest for understanding, the quest for an answer, the quest for The Answer. Quest For Fire maintains that in the space of 80,000 years we have walked a long, long way, and have come scarcely any distance at all. [12 Feb 1982]

This 70-minute movie is the most startling, breakneck comedy of the Marx Brothers' career... Next to Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", this is the purest satire of dictatorship on film. [20 Jan 1996]

No so-called serious gangster film has ever been more fun, or less dangerous, or more intrinsically feminist, than GoodFellas. Even "I Married the Mob" was scarier.

The mesmerizing and lingeringly paced Cemetery of Splendour, picks up where Freud left off.

A little bit of "Crime and Punishment" and a whole lot of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," Revanche, the Austrian candidate for last year's Best Foreign Language Film, is a surprisingly unruffled tale of love, thievery, murder and revenge.

This is hilarious, heartbreaking cinema – a work that will make you burst out laughing one moment, and leave you tearing your hair out the next.

The picture goes exactly where the prose does, enticing all of us, kids and adults and atheists and believers alike, down below the brittle surface of our cold logic and into a richer world of imaginative wonder.

They really pulled out all the stops on this one.

Anne is such a startling and overwhelming work that the act of discussing it can feel unapproachable and crippling.

This is a film with an unforgettable story and performances that will edge into your DNA.

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.

Sharply subverting the male gaze at every turn, Sciamma has created an unforgettable treatise on thwarted desire. It is so very easy to label a film incendiary, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire deserves the scalding honour. It will ignite every flame you might have.

It is filmmaker Assayas who is the star here. France's most important contemporary director has created a work of almost magisterial calm.