With the aplomb of a modern Mesmer, DeMille forges The Greatest Show on Earth into a fabulous entertainment experience — a big, seething SHOW, spectacular, exciting, colorful.

The chemistry between the men is palpable, but what's more important, they convey their characters' complex emotions, expectations and thoughts without necessarily opening their mouths.

More unconventional and downright weird on a moment-to-moment basis than it is in overall design and intent, it's a singular work played out mostly in small rooms that harks back to psychological melodramas of the 1940s/50s but hits stylistic notes entirely its own.

With his fine cast and his gracefully restrained screenplay, Shults makes horror recognizable.

Shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, this is a film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision.

Cannily interweaving its personal stories with a vivid depiction of an eco-system on the verge of collapse, Uncertain marks an outstanding feature debut for its documentarians.

On paper, neither character may seem terribly appealing, but on the screen they steal your heart away, but completely...Not only did that last reel include some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen, but it also provided an emotionally gratifying capstone to a picture that is truly an ode to the human spirit.

Putting the viewer into a men’s circle like no other, The Work is a remarkable piece of reportage.

As Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana’s astoundingly rich and resonant music documentary makes abundantly clear, American popular music – and the history of rock and roll itself – wouldn’t be the same without the contributions of Native American performers.

The rich vein of unsettling darkness and psychological unease that ripples like a treacherous underground stream beneath the absurdist humor of Yorgos Lanthimos' work becomes a brooding requiem of domestic horror in his masterfully realized fifth feature.

This meticulously crafted jewel is del Toro's most satisfying work since Pan's Labyrinth.

The incisive beauty of the documentary, and its power, is that it's not a thesis or an argument but a full-blooded, multifaceted real-life drama.

Direction by George Cukor is ever a display of fine craftsmanship. He utilizes small mosaics of sharp characterization in building to his climax and works in each facet faultlessly. This is the job for which Cukor admirers have been waiting.

Alive with the magic of pictures and the mysteries of silence, this is an uncommonly grownup film about children, communication, connection and memory.

Not unlike her gutsy protagonist, Twomey moves through the charged landscape with extraordinary agility. Combining gripping suspense with a quote from the immortal Persian poet Rumi, she creates a stirring final sequence from the rising chords of terror and resilience.

In its fusion of craft and narrative, My Friend Dahmer is exquisite. In its portrayal of Jeff's agonies, it can be excruciating.

Here is a drama that lifts you right out of your seat.

The film is inspiring.

This is a first-rate mystery thriller, full of visual shocks and surprises which are heightened by the melodramatic realism of the production.

This couldn't be other than a Capra picture, the humanness of its story the dominant factor at every turn of situation. His direction of the individual characterizations delivered is also distinctively his, and the performances, from the starring roles of James Stewart and Donna Reed down to the smallest bit, are magnificent. When Capra is at his best, no one can top him.

It is simply one of the most exciting and intelligent action films in years, probably the best good-cop film we can expect to encounter.

Never talking down to his audience, he rather pulls them up to an intellectual level where other filmmakers fear to go.

This is a compassionately observed story told with unimpeachable naturalism and without a grain of sentimentality, propelled by a remarkable performance from Charlie Plummer that's both internalized and emotionally raw.

With the names and versatile talents of Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, supported by lilting melodies, wonderful dancing and some very funny comedy, the show just can't miss being another MGM top-grosser.

This is a wondrous and moving account of a remarkable life that puts us right there with Goodall to share directly in her discoveries.

Some Like It Hot is another supersonic, breakneck, belly-laugh comedy that should be a block-busting bonanza at the box office. It should be a proof that when the making of pictures is taken out of the bands of men-of-measured-merriment and handed over to men whose only purpose is to create amusement, they are still the world's best means of entertainment. Billy Wilder, who produced, directed and wrote the screenplay, with I.A.L. Diamond, was on the front burner all the way.

The ingeniously structured screenplay by Katz, Huyck and Lucas offers up a load of wonderful characters who whirl about in ducktail haircuts and shirtwaist dresses, lost in the obscenity of American culture. Thanks to some of the most spirited, daffy dialogue since Lubitsch, their sweetness is deliriously funny. No matter how high the dramatic stakes become, the movie never loses its sense of humor, and although it has a lot to say, it's gloriously free of pretensions.

Perhaps returning to Apocalypse Now will reinvigorate the once brilliant storyteller. Certainly, the images, colors and design still astonish. And let's hope that Apocalypse Now Redux will become the definitive version. For the movie hits home even harder now. [14 May 2001]

Most magically, it transcends the colossal power of its own story to show how individual beings, one step at a time, can right the course of inequality and injustice.

Rarely has a film made a historic accomplishment seem so vivid and personal.

Doctor Zhivago is more than a masterful motion picture; it is a life experience.

[Yorgos Lanthimos'] fabulously entertaining tragicomedy, The Favourite, is a juicy power tangle connecting three women in the royal court of early 18th-century England, played by a divine trio who bounce off one another with obvious relish.

Roma may not be the memoir film many might have expected from such an adventurous, sometimes raunchy, sci-fi/fantasy-oriented filmmaker, but it’s absolutely fresh, confident, surprising and rapturously beautiful.

As charming as the C.S. Forester novel on which it is based, The African Queen is top flight entertainment, delightful, different, always interesting. It is filled with excitement and adventure and sparked by superlative performances from Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

On a number of accounts it is distinguished celluloid entertainment, but it is of great interest to the trade because it reveals, in startling terms, the unheralded talent of topflight scenarist, John Huston, who, in the dual capacity of writer and director of this picture, is now entitled to take his place among the most important creative artists in the industry.

Madeline’s Madeline is both heady and head-scratching. Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs.

Cosmatos' ability to put us in Red's head — overwhelmed at first with pain and fury, then saturated by the strange drugs he for some reason feels compelled to try — make this much more than the usual exercise in vicarious bloodshed.

It is in the clandestine scheming of the sex-hungry man and the cunning woman, in the methodical method of their plotting the husband's murder that Wilder builds the suspense that pounds and drives to a staggering climax. There are at least three instances of suspense so great that the heart almost stops beating. The highest praise one can give the Sistrom production is to say that it is like a masterpiece of mystery fiction coming vividly to life on the screen. As you cannot lay down such a book until it has been read through, neither then can you shake off the witchery exerted over you by this film from its very opening scene.

This film is pure entertainment.

West Side Story is a magnificent show, a milestone in movie musicals, a box-office smash. It is so good that superlatives are superfluous. Let it be noted that the film musical, the one dramatic form that is purely American and purely Hollywood, has never been done better

McQueen is a haunting story of extravagant talent and inescapable private sorrow, made with exquisite craftsmanship worthy of its subject. While a narrative biopic has been in development for years, this excellent documentary delivers an eye-popping, emotionally wrenching experience that paints a fully dimensional portrait of a complex artist.

The 20th-Fox release will be one of the movies' all-time hits, one of the all-time great pictures. It restores your faith in movies. If you sit quietly and let it take, it may also restore your faith in humanity. It does this with infectious wit, with consistent gaiety, with simple and realistic spirituality, with romance of heartbreak and heartmend. This is set against the most beautiful scenery you have seen in your life. The Sound of Music is quite a picture.

Pairing his usual boundary-pushing sex-and-drugs fixation with a vital presentation of wildly exuberant dance and movement, Gaspar Noe has made a film that’s seductive in its rhythms and bold visualization of his young dancers’ sometimes beautiful, other times brutal somatic expressiveness.

An intriguingly structured, multilayered road movie in which an ordinary working-class dude looks back over a nation-wandering decade of his life, this second collaboration by the writer-directors is a cumulatively engrossing and ultimately very moving work of clear-eyed political intent.

George Cukor's direction, briskly paced, combines heartbreaking tragedy, out-of-this-world musical entertainment and rib-splitting comedy into a coordinated whole that can only be compared for sheer cinematic know-how with Gone With the Wind. This is a picture that's worth seeing over and over again.

It's both a pulse-pounding depiction of the deadly attacks that shook Norway in 2011 and a sober investigation of the aftermath, evolving into a gripping courtroom drama and a tremendously emotional personal account of one family's struggle to move on.

Meditative and dreamlike yet gem-sharp, director Rob Tregenza's fifth feature in 30 years is an elegantly told story that churns with emotion beneath its deceptive stillness.

Hal Ashby's direction is perfect in realizing the offbeat humor and gentle satire of the piece.

Dead Souls is thoroughly focused and tightly structured. And it is an immensely perceptive piece about the history of China and its multitude of discontents.

Through wit, surprise and an irrepressible ballsiness comes a scorching humor that neither curdles nor becomes exhausted.

Gorgeously shot and produced, impressively acted and with a lot of fascinating things on its mind, this is yet further proof that the 35-year-old Mascaro is one of Brazil’s most audacious and gifted filmmakers of his generation.

This is an illuminating (self-)portrait of a young artist as well as a mesmerizing chronicle of a consuming, destructive relationship that steadily inches its way under the viewer's skin.

Densely informative yet always grounded in deep personal investment and clear-eyed compassion, this is a powerful indictment of a traumatic social experiment, made all the more startling by the success of the propaganda machine in making people continue to believe it was necessary.

It’s a comedy and a tragedy, though the people involved aren’t necessarily on rigid opposite sides. Better to say that everyone has some level of fluidity, not just in terms of personal belief, though they’ll speak their dogmatic minds if the occasion demands it.

Like a crafty predator, the Danish knock-out Holiday lays patiently in wait as long as it needs to — in this case nearly an hour — before stunning its prey, the spectator, with a shocking scene that catapults the film to a whole different level.

The picture is exquisite, extraordinary, a unique gem of filmmaking.

This C.V. Whitney production is undoubtedly one of the greatest Westerns ever made. For sheer scope, guts and beauty I can think of no picture of the Indian Wars of the Southwest to compare with it.

Full of eye-opening musical performances, the film also sparkles with tongue-in-cheek humor, and features contemporary interviews that are often far from what they seem. You have to go back to After Hours to find a Scorsese film with a similarly mischievous wit.

Assaying [Sciamma's] first period film, an exquisitely executed love story that's both formally adventurous and emotionally devastating, she sticks the landing like a UCLA gymnast in peak condition. It's so good you'll want to watch again in slow-motion immediately afterwards just to see how she does it.

A drama of such searing human empathy and quotidian heartbreak that its powerful climactic scenes actually impede your breathing.

Giant stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great ones.

This densely packed, exquisitely executed and just a teensy bit batshit film is peak Pixar. It's a vintage mix of the company's intricate storytelling, complex emotional intelligence, technical prowess and cerebral whimsy on dexamethasone.

Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

While not a lot happens in First Cow by the standards of most two-hour narrative films, and some may wish for a less open-ended conclusion, the drama's rough-edged lyricism kept me rapt the entire time.

Technically, it wouldn't be wrong to call Waves a "teen drama," but that generic label doesn't begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.

What Kovgan's utterly transporting film does, through a thoughtful and dynamic combination of curated material and new performances, is radiate the rapturous power of dance.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is a funny, touching and, to be sure, unique film, and the Johnsons are a very fortunate father and daughter

The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago, The Father takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted.

The distinctive British filmmaker is at the height of her powers in this semiautobiographical work.

It's an eloquent contribution to af Klint's rediscovery, which began four decades after her 1944 death. It's also a cogent argument for why that rediscovery impels nothing less than a rewriting of art history.

At once Panh's personal eulogy to the victims of this pogrom (around one-fifth of Cambodia's population perished during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror) and a subtly informative treatise about history and universal humanity, Graves Without A Name is at once emotionally overwhelming, visually ravishing and intellectually stimulating.

Directed by Howard Hawks with his sly sidearm grace, this is top-of-the-genre stuff.

Redford, who dominates the picture, has never been more assured or appealing.

Led by sensational performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as William O'Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated his inner circle, this is a scalding account of oppression and revolution, coercion and betrayal, rendered more shocking by the undiminished currency of its themes.

A delicate miniature that’s magnificently humanist, occasionally amusing and shot in a palette of rich, saturated nighttime hues, this is the kind of really small movie that is actually really great.

Lee's knack for distilling the energy of live performance is no secret, for example in his terrific 2009 film of the unconventional Broadway musical Passing Strange. But the synergy here between filmmaker and subject — from the avant-funk grooves to the spirit of inclusivity and the urge to heal a broken nation — is simply spectacular.

The beautifully rendered result proves to be even more than one had hoped for: a visually dazzling, richly imaginative, emotionally resonant production that taps into contemporary concerns while being true to its distant origins.

A murder story with a brilliant cast, a brilliant script, brilliant direction, and photography that tells the story in no mean terms.

A grim fable of modern man, a true art picture.

The Killing of Two Lovers is a transfixing drama without a wasted word or a single inessential scene.

Summer of Soul is as thoughtful as it is rousing, a welcome shot of adrenaline to kick off not just a film festival but a new year.

The film is a staggeringly impressive debut, blending color, sound and story to create an intricate emotional tapestry.

The camera often seems to capture seemingly quotidian moments, but Koberidze’s painterly eye elevates them to intimate flashes of poetry and delight.

Peter Bogdanovich has cracked the tough nut of "opening up" the Tony Award-winning hit "Noises Off" for the silver screen. Namely, he has essentially filmed the play in a series of long-cut scenes and it works splendidly. Moviegoers will be delighted by this sharply calibrated farce. Buena Vista's challenge will be to lure audiences who don't have a knowledge of this ensemble's Broadway pedigree. [20 March 1992]

A stunning achievement. [14 Oct 1994]

Carlo Di Palma's intense, smashing, claustrophobic cinematography is terrific: Jarring, moving, and hitting all the hard angles of Upper East Side Manhattan, Di Palma frames a tight picture of woe. As ever, Woody Allen's smear on himself is appropriately smudged with telling musical notes: Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love" and Mahler's "Symphony No. 9 in D" sound the agony. [26 Aug 1992]

The three-and-a-half-hour running time is fully justified in an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip — a sordid illustration of historical erasure with echoes in today’s bitterly divisive political gamesmanship.

Making ingenious use of split-screen, experimental montage and densely layered images and sound over two fabulously entertaining hours, Haynes puts his distinctive stamp on the material while crafting a work that could almost have come from the same artistic explosion it celebrates.

This is an exquisitely crafted film, its unhurried rhythms continually shifting as plangent notes of melancholy, solitude, torment, jealousy and resentment surface. Campion is in full control of her material, digging deep into the turbulent inner life of each of her characters with unerring subtlety.

Crafted with unforced humor, ravishing visuals and commanding maturity, Decision to Leave intoxicates with its potent brew of love, emotional manipulation — or is it? —and obsession.

What sets it soaring is the discerning guide at its helm, one whose curatorial exultation and rigor are also calming, reassuring — a welcome voice in cacophonous times.

It’s the work of a director in full command of his gifts, from the kaleidoscopic vignettes of family life that make the first half such a constant delight through the supple modulation of tone midway, when shocking tragedy prompts a shift into a more ruminative mood.

The filmmakers — superbly incorporating a combination of stunning archival footage (much of it previously unseen), dramatic reenactments and interviews with the principal figures — present the harrowing tale in riveting nail-biting fashion, leavened by welcome doses of mordant humor from the incredibly brave volunteers.

Neptune Frost is an intimidating film, both in scope and pure cinematic power.

The film is a remarkably insightful and powerful portrait of the human condition.

Now, more than a year and a half into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Matthew Heineman’s intensely intimate documentary arrives as a graphic and emotional reminder of the early days of the crisis, in all its confusion and horror. It’s also a breathtaking testament to the fight to live, the calling to heal, and the power of human connection.

Sankofa’s marvels range from Gerima’s meticulous editing style and electrifying use of music to his liberating nonlinear storytelling techniques. But I find myself most consistently drawn to the film’s fluid embrace of language, what it reveals about rebellion and how it deepens our understanding of Gerima’s characters.

Portrait of a city? Portrait of a pair of heroic brothers? Portrait of humanity on the brink of COVID? In this tiny marvel of a documentary, it’s a little and a lot all at once.