The secrets unveiled in the movie’s second half are mostly wretched, and Kore-eda, in his steady and unhectoring way, is levelling grave accusations at Japanese social norms, yet what stays with you, unforgettably, is that bundle of mixed souls at the start.

The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie.

This suave, amusing spy melodrama is directed with so sure a touch that the suspense is charged with wit; it's one of the three or four best things Hitchcock ever did.

Along with the documentation of material destruction and displacement, the movie is a record of psychological warfare, of the effort to demolish morale, suppress energy, break will. This, as much as the physical violence that it documents, gives the movie immense moral authority.

Uncut Gems jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone.

If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord.

It's not a great picture; it's too schematic and it drags on after you get the points. However, the episodes and details stand out and help to compensate for the soggy plot strands, and there's something absorbing about the banality of its large-scale good intentions; it's compulsively watchable.

This lyrical tragicomedy is perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film.

Perhaps the most likable of all Westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about everything--adventure, romance, chivalry--and all of it very simple and traditional.

Simon films the lives of others with an empathetic passion that transforms observation into deep and resonant subjectivity.

The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all.

An enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic.

It’s plain and uncondescending in its re-creation of what it means to be a high-school athlete, of what a country dance hall is like, of the necking in cars and movie houses, and of the desolation that follows high-school graduation.

The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness.

Lee is nimble-witted, and he’s always on the offensive; he stays in your face until you’re too exhausted to resist. You have to watch your reactions closely or he’ll speed right past you, get you to nod assent to an argument you haven’t fully realized he was making. Most American movies just want to knock you senseless immediately and get it over with; Do the Right Thing tries to wear you down, and its strategies are fascinating.

With this intricate web of personal and family connections, and the brave maneuvering in the face of the overseers’ commands, Gerima is doing nothing less than reconstituting and affirming the full humanity of the enslaved.

There’s palpable joy in the sheer ingenuity of the movie’s conception and in the realization of it. Panahi goes at his subjects with an irrepressible cinematic verve that extends from the story and the dialogue to the performances and the very presences of the actors.

It's a deluxe glorification of creative crisis, visually arresting (the dark and light contrasts are extraordinary, magical) but in some essential way conventional-minded.

There is so much displacement of the usual movie conventions that we don't have the time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically. One of the rare Japanese films that is both great and funny to American audiences.

One of its major virtues is what’s not there: no creepy flashbacks of prowling priests, or — as in the prelude to Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” — of children in the vortex of peril. Everything happens in the here and now, not least the recitation of the there and then.

The Comden-Green script isn't as consistently fresh as the one they did for Singin' in the Rain, but there have been few screen musicals as good as this one, starring those two great song-and-dance men Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan.

Rigid formality leaves much unsaid in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film, but the director reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression.

It's extremely uneven--there are slick and sentimental passages and some are impenetrable. But there are also emotional revelations and there's a superb sequence--almost an epiphany--when the dying man, who has accomplished what he hoped to, sits in a swing in the snow and hums a little song.

Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.

Perhaps the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns.

Schnabel’s movie, based on the calm and exquisite little book that Bauby wrote in the hospital, is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies.

A B-picture classic. This plain and inexpensive piece of science fiction employs few of the resources of the cinema (to put it mildly), but it has an idea that confirms everyone's suspicions.

In Kiarostami’s furiously clear view, religious dogma suppresses the eye’s observations through the dictate of the word; his calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy, have the force of a steadfast resistance.

I would be surprised if this brilliant and touching film didn't become required viewing for teachers all over the United States. Everyone else should see it as well--it's a wonderful movie.

Beyond question a return to the dark, simmering days of their best work, in “Blood Simple” and “Miller’s Crossing.”

The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It's all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.

Baker has taken an unregarded thread of American life, from the fraying edge of the land, and spun something rousing, raucous, and sad. Innocence is not utterly lost, but its bright-purple shine has gone. Who knows what Moonee knew?

Timbuktu is hard to grasp, as befits the sand-blown setting and the mythical status of the name. The more you try to define the movie, the faster it sifts away.

Frenzy, with its piles of peaches and lettuces, its constant drinking, is a masterpiece devoted to appetite in all its varieties—but it is most seriously devoted to the perversion of sexual happiness in murder and to the absence of sexual happiness in “normal” life.

A celebrated, craftsmanlike tearjerker, and incredibly neat.

A lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

The project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.

Spielberg wrote a poem. And all the best movies are poems. [2002 re-release]

Twenty-two years on, the picture has aged better than we have; it both feeds our hunger for sensation and scorns our impatient need to have it all right now—apocalypse is, whatever the title claims, always waiting round the river bend. Many people will continue to find it incoherent; but, frankly, given the choice between a work so laden with ambition that it nearly breaks its back and the stiff, crowing blockbusters of today, too timid to stretch their wings, I know which I would take.

Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. It’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him.

Consistently beautiful and often exciting -- despite some dead passages here and there, it's surely the best big-budget fantasy movie in years. [24 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 126]

Glazer’s movie is a presentation of nearly unfathomable horrors by way of bathos, alluding to enormities in the form of minor daily inconveniences. There’s conceptual audacity in the effort, yet Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully.

The picture's real strength is its witty, vigorous evocation of the fifties media world.

Leviathan is a tale for vertiginous times, with the ruble in free fall. There must be thousands of stories like Kolya’s right now, lives folding and collapsing, upon which Zvyagintsev could cast his unfoolable eye. Despite that, he is not primarily a satirist, or even a social commentator; he is the calm surveyor of a fallen world, and Leviathan, for all its venom, never writhes out of control.

In the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.

Is it a great movie? I don't think so. But it's a triumphant piece of filmmaking -- journalism presented with the brio of drama. [24 Sept 1990]

The Look of Silence is a simpler work than “The Act of Killing,” and a better one.

The animation, by Craig Staggs, has a notable imaginative specificity, and the meticulously complex interweaving of styles turns the film into a horrifying true-crime thriller that’s enriched by a rare depth of inner experience.

The movie’s writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, crafts a tight story with startling freedom, leaping between characters in order to conjure their fateful interconnections, while giving them all, persecuted and persecutors alike, an identity and a voice. In the process, he brings history to life with bracing immediacy—a feat all the rarer for the audacious twists of cinematic form with which he renders the movie an act of archival reclamation.

Personally, for that reason, I would have lopped off the final scene, which I simply didn’t believe in, and which, if anything, resolves too much. A movie as cryptic as “Burning” deserves to hang fire.

It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.

It is, bluntly and unabashedly, rip-roaring entertainment, propelled by flurries of comedy, bursts of emotion, and sidelong jolts of social critique.

Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama; she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity.

Gavagai is an extraordinary and memorable film; its strong and clear emotional refinement arises from a rare force of imagination, a rare power of observation, a rare cinematic sense to fuse them, and a rare skill to realize them together.

Centering on a racetrack robbery, it has fast, incisive cutting; a nervous, edgy style; and furtive little touches of characterization.

Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell. [15 September 2003, p. 100]

The remarkable thing is that Son of Saul is a début: Nemes has never directed a full-length film before. As for Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, born in Budapest and now living in the Bronx. If neither of them made another movie, this one would suffice.

Probably the most famous of all horror films, and one of the best.

Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time.

The movie’s outward gaze is radical, no question, yet it refuses to scorn the comforts — of ingrained habits, and of home — that are honored by the conservative imagination. Such equipoise is almost as rare in cinema as it is, God knows, in politics, and right now, though we can’t foretell whether time will be cruel or kind to Gerwig’s Little Women, it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.

An inspired piece of casting brought Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn together. This is a comedy, a love story, and a tale of adventure, and it is one of the most charming and entertaining movies ever made.

Such is the hazard of the cartoon: as a form, it thrives on elongation and excess, yet, within its vortices and crannies, who knows what moldy prejudice can breed? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

It's a wonderfully full and satisfying movie, with superb performances by Connery and Caine.

The point of the film gets to you, and though you may wince at the lines Maxwell Anderson wrote (every time he opens his heart, he sticks his poetic foot in it), you know what he means.

Graceful and all-embracing.

The story...opens out into a dazzling multigenerational array of characters, as well as a panoply of trenchant themes.

One of John Ford's most memorable films, and not at all the tedious bummer that the title might suggest. Henry Fonda, in one of his best early performances, is funny and poignant as the drawling, awkward young hero.

This sinister black comedy of murder accelerates until it becomes a grotesque fantasy of murder. The actors seem to be having a boisterous good time getting themselves knocked off.

Not every rarity is a revelation, but Lady Killer strikes me as the real deal.

The surprising thing about this film, given its potential for devastation, is how funny it can be.

Seldom has our modern taste for the confessional mode been so smartly explored. [20 May 2013, p. 123]

In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.

The mocking of oppression may be steely, but the film’s an easy ride.

This compact masterpiece has the curt definition and the finality of a reckoning—a reckoning in which anger and mourning blend together.

Ari Folman, the director of Waltz with Bashir, has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it. Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there.

A work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination.

The movie is haunted by death and loss, focussing on men who live in stifled grief and reconcile themselves to solitude—a personal desolation that is doubled by Japan’s collective mourning for those who were lost to the country’s catastrophic war.

There’s a significant work of art lurking within “Anora,” but it’s confined within the limits of a potboiler.

The good news about the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, is that you are likely to emerge from it in good humor — bemused, or amused, or a mixture of the two.

The movie has the happy, enthusiastic spirit of a fanfare, and it's astonishingly entertaining considering how divided it is in spirit...Whatever one's reservations, the film is great fun to watch.

There's no denying that for many people sequences such as Bambi's birth have an enduring primal power.

For Wiseman, the “small pleasures” of the title are highly concentrated distillations of mighty exertions, from the grand and carefully catalogued tradition of French cooking to the immediate tradition of the Troisgros family restaurants (now in its fourth generation).

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

With its clean lines and precise assembly, it's nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that's still in search of its characters.

The movie is an O. Henry-like conceit--the slenderness of the initial premise is part of the charm--but the anecdote becomes almost momentous as it goes on.

At the heart of La Chimera is the question of how we bear the weight of the past while living in the present, and the answer that Rohrwacher settles on strikes me as both sensible and hopeful: we must, to the best that we can, eradicate any meaningful difference between the two.

The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.

Haim brings a constant and instant focus even to riskily inchoate emotions, and Hoffman lends his driven energumen a lambent glow of innocence. Both inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.

Has the sure grip and the unstoppable momentum of a dream – which are qualities, too of great fairly tales and the most memorable pop songs. [16 Nov 1992, p.127]

The film has a strong style that is very different from Lean's earlier work. He seems to have finally to have let go--to have pulled out all the stops. The film is emotional, exciting, full of action.

Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.

Wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up.

In its lived-in, completely non-ideological way, Winter's Bone is one of the great feminist works in film.

How could Frears and his cast rise above the sins of the miniseries? One answer is the force of that cast...The other thing that rescues and refines The Queen is one of the basic bonuses of moviegoing, more familiar of late from documentaries like "Touching the Void" and "Capturing the Friedmans": you come out arguing.

The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.

For all its droll shading of the screenwriter’s art, “All of Us Strangers” is a screenwriter’s movie, in which the power of intention over observation, of the blueprint over the finished product, is asserted with a vengeance.

The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film. Visually, Part II is far more completely beautiful than the fist, just as it's thematically richer, more shadowed, fuller.

The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky notions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C. Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it.