This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carne and written by Jacques Prevert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theatre and life.

The movie succeeds by the smooth efficiency of Fred Zinnemann's lean, intelligent direction, and by the superlative casting.

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 new movie by Robert Greene is a tour de force in the blending and bending of genres.

One of the most impressive movies ever made about espionage.

Hugo is superbly playful.

I can imagine many a moviegoer entering the theatre knowing nothing of Erice and his work, and getting caught up in the gentle grip of his filmmaking. Miguel’s journey may sway to a leisurely, elegiac art-film beat, but that rhythm barely conceals the pulsing machinery of a detective story.

As close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy (and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has come on the stage). The crime of child abuse becomes a curse that determines the pattern of events in the next generation. [13 October 2003, p. 112]

Von Trier's latest fable is nothing without its blaze of majesty - or, as his detractors would say, its bombast.

Under its leathery hide is a genuine compulsion to de-romanticize Western gunfighting. Every bullet in this movie matters, and by the end Munny's alcohol-fuelled, satanic purposefulness is shocking: in the climax, even his choice of victims has a crazy excess. [10 Aug 1992, p.70]

One of the year’s great movies, in any form, style, or language.

In its modest, forthright warmth, “Cane River” is a work of visionary artistry and progressive imagination.

Serra creates rigid, highly pressurized images on the verge of shattering with the force of mystery and desire.

For all the earnest diagnosis of race relations in a country that doesn’t recognize race, Zadi crafts an extraordinary comedic work of lilt and sparkle.

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.

An intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.

By means of ferociously intimate images, tensely controlled performances, and a spare sense of drama, Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, about two young drug addicts in Nova Scotia, conjures a state of heightened consciousness.

Summer of Soul is one of those rare films from which you emerge saying, “My favorite part was that bit. No, that bit. Wait, how about that bit?”

At its best, the movie is an exhilarating, surf-topping ride. With Minnie Driver providing the voice of a deliciously flirtatious Jane.

The movie, Polley's feature début, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career.

My First Film, which looks back at a young filmmaker’s crises and conflicts, is both a masterwork of an artistic coming of age and a virtuosic reconception of the art of cinema itself.

There is something dazzling about a sci-fi film that manages to call upon the energies of both futurism and long-held faith. The movie is not to be compared in ferocity of imagination with Kubrick’s “2001”—significant that the music here is merely illustrative, never caustic or memorable, and that there is nothing of Kubrick’s vision of a blanched form of existence—but it is exuberantly entertaining.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

The most fruitful twist in Late Marriage is that at its core lies not a snippy domestic farce but a prolonged, dirty, and wholly credible sex scene, which starts and stops and starts again, and in which argument and arousal are entwined like limbs. [27 May 2002, p.124]

The most spirited satisfying Western epic in several years--it may seem a little loose at first, but it gets better and better as it goes along and you get the fresh, crazy hang of it.

The film’s considerable power depends entirely on its moment-to-moment persuasiveness, on a set of narrative and aesthetic choices that, as presented—in a series of swift, kinetically composed, and jaggedly edited scenes—seldom feel like choices at all.

At once breakneck and tolerant, Give Me Liberty manages to be both rousingly Russian and touchingly all-American. The Cold War is officially over.

You could argue that a little of this goes a long way, but that’s the point. An Andersson movie is a gallery of littles, each of them going a very long way.

This tenacious artist has now given his father a proper memorial and has reasserted, with power and grace, the history and identity of his nearly effaced country.

Birbiglia films what he knows, offering ample and intricate scenes of improvisations performed onstage, along with an insider’s view of the industry.

The movie's story may be a little trite, and the big battle at the end between ugly mechanical force and the gorgeous natural world goes on forever, but what a show Cameron puts on! The continuity of dynamized space that he has achieved with 3-D gloriously supports his trippy belief that all living things are one.

Kolodny’s film is a touching, disquieting, relentlessly fascinating view of a troubled soul and of the world of trouble he belongs to.

Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.

What Rourke offers us, in short, is not just a comeback performance but something much rarer: a rounded, raddled portrait of a good man. Suddenly, there it is again--the charm, the anxious modesty, the never-distant hint of wrath, the teen-age smiles, and all the other virtues of a winner.

The directors, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, rely on some tricky devices to tell the story of this film shoot—but those tricks, far from undercutting the emotional drama, intensify it. The result is the most accomplished and absorbing film about time spent in lockdown that I’ve seen.

Apparently, the movie has caused annoyance in some quarters because it criticizes the American way of life. This it does, and with suavity and supreme good humor. WALL-E is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible.

A much better movie about the South during the Civil War than “Gone with the Wind”--visionary, erotic, and tragic where the older movie is flossy, merely ambitious and self-important. [22 & 29 December 2003, p. 166]

In this role Giamatti gives his bravest, most generously humane performance yet. Women may be repelled, but men will know this man, because, at one time or another, many of us have been this man.

All that we treasure in Jia is there in Zhao’s scrutinizing gaze, at once pointed and guarded, and in the fierce patience with which she deliberates before taking action.

It’s a strikingly modern, complex, disturbing, and yet sad, touching, and romantic film.

The vision of such severe regimentation is shocking; Zin-mi’s tears of shame and her sharply limited range of knowledge and inhibited behavior embody an outrage.

Another case of a talent torched by its own incandescence — the first half of McQueen is an indubitable thrill, and the second half almost too sad for words.

Its blend of documentary and dramatic filmmaking, of first-person reflection and reenactment, sets a standard for cinematic inquiry into the political implications of personal experience.

Is This Thing On? isn’t a dishy, insider’s view of the New York comedy scene, and it isn’t trying to be. It knows that its best material lies elsewhere.

The film may have dated as a cautionary left-wing tale, yet it has stayed fresh as a study in the minutiae of power. [1 Oct. 2012, p.85]

This exuberant satire of Hollywood in the late 20s, at the time of the transition from silents to talkies, is probably the most enjoyable of all American movie musicals.

Pride is brilliantly entertaining just as it is, so I trust that no one connected with the film will be insulted if I say that, despite the existence of shows with similarly stirring themes, like “Billy Elliot” and “Kinky Boots,” the story would make a terrific musical.

Henry James, who loved the place, accused himself of "making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality." Sorrentino has made a Rome of images, and taken the same risk. But it was worth it. [25 Nov. 2013, p.134]

With “Daughters,” Dash places Black Americans’ intimate dramas in a mighty historical arc with metaphysical dimensions; with his “Color Purple,” Bazawule acknowledges Dash’s work as a landmark in that history and a fundamental inspiration in his approach to historical drama.

A sharply intelligent and affecting view of suburban blues.

For all its mayhem, runs like a mad and slightly sad machine, whirring with hints of folly and regret, and the ending, remarkably, makes elegant sense to a degree that eludes most science fictions. How to describe it, without giving anything away? Scrambled, but rare. [1 Oct. 2012, p.84]

The visual gags that Wilder deploys are as stingingly cynical as ever, but here they have a newfound way with time, which they inhabit with an exquisitely controlled leisure. It’s the first of Wilder’s later and greatest films.

The glaring absence of political chatter doesn’t mar Treitz’s achievement: he has made an instant-classic Western.

Psychologically resonant, visually transcendent film.

The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own.

A new kind of affectionate satire which is all but indistinguishable from an embrace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]

In this handsomely traditional movie, Kevin Costner has tried to fix the Western myth for all time in the stern contours of Duvall’s face and the guttural beauty of his voice. [1 September 2003, p. 130]

The Guilty is smartly constructed and tautened with regular twists, but, if it were merely clever, it wouldn’t test your nerves as it does. Its view of human error is rarely less than abrasive, and most of the adult characters, visible and invisible, are enmeshed in a hell of good intentions.

In its depiction of Guruji’s mastery, The Disciple conjures the wonders and the mysteries of a life that is itself a work of art.

Pumping Iron is, of course, a documentary, but Schwarzenegger isn’t merely its subject—he’s its star, and his beaming, witty, charismatic presence in the film is among the most ingratiating performances of the time, one that’s resoundingly predictive of the acting career that he had long aspired to and that he would, of course, soon achieve.

The trio’s breezy erotic sophistication masks an urban populism that’s as artistically fertile as it is politically risky; their domestic disasters have the feel and tone of epic clashes.

To be fair, you can scoff at the antics and still be swept away. The final quarter of Mission: Impossible—Fallout takes place in Kashmir, with a helicopter chase through deep gullies and past snowy peaks. McQuarrie keeps the action crisp and clear, to match the icy air.

With a limited, intimate focus, Little Girl becomes a grandly diagnostic analysis of French society, distilling the country’s fault lines into a few indelible images.

Emotions, identities, and even bodily functions are distorted by the mechanized uniformity, but Tati’s despair is modulated by a sense of wonder.

The picture--which is almost surreally entertaining--is also famous for its madcap choreography; chorus girls dancing on the wings of planes, to the title song.

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.

Close to being a silly ghoulie classic - the bloodier it gets, the funnier it is. It's like pop Buñuel; the jokes hit you in a subterranean comic zone that the surrealists' pranks sometimes reached, but without the surrealists' self-consciousness (and art-consciousness).

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

I saw Brooks’s Fever Pitch when it came out, and was instantly smitten...Fever Pitch still delivers the same terse, grim, and ironic power that it had when I first saw it.

As director and star, Olivier succeeds with the soliloquies as neither he nor anyone else ever did on film before; they're intimate, yet brazen.

Akerman’s chillingly sardonic feminist fable—which also bears the weight of unspoken wartime trauma—is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified.

The film is distinguished by the fine performances of Nicholson and Quaid, and by remarkably well-orchestrated profane dialogue. It's often very funny. It's programmed to wrench your heart, though-it's about the blasted lives of people who discover their humanity too late.

What matters in Monster isn’t the gamesmanship built into its structure but the imaginative richness, the emotional immediacy, and the vital performances that are concentrated in its extended third section.

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.

The film could have sunk beneath this symbolic burden, yet it is lightened by the speed and precision of Bresson’s art; he could derive more from one pair of hands than most directors can from two hours of blood and guts.

Hong renders these universal conflicts locally specific and intimately personal.

Mr. Turner is a harsh, strange, but stirring movie, no more a conventional artist’s bio-pic than Robert Altman’s wonderful, little-seen film about van Gogh and his brother, “Vincent and Theo.”

The most stirring release of the year thus far is a documentary.

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

Turtles Can Fly has little space for mawkishness, and the kids are far too cussed to be cute. It is, in every sense, the more immediate achievement: it hits and hurts the eyes (the rainy days are lousy enough, but the skies of royal blue, above such grief, feel especially insulting), and it also seems to bleed straight out of the headlines.

Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.

Filming cityscapes and intimate gestures with avid attention, adorning the dialogue with deep confessions and witty asides, Piñeiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike.

A classic screwball fantasy - a neglected modern comedy that's like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures...Set in the world of competing used-car dealers in the booming Southwest, this picture has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness; it's an American tall-tale movie in a Pop Art form. The premise is that honesty doesn't exist; if you develop a liking for some of the characters, it's not because they're free of avarice but because of their style of avarice.

With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import.

The film turns into a triumph for Don Cheadle, who never steps outside the character for emotional grandstanding or easy moralism.

It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium.

Most of the power of this scrupulously honest memorial isn't in the talk; it's in the terror and the foreignness - the far-from-home-ness - of the imagery. Directed by John Irvin, the film has great decency; it joins together terror and thoughtfulness.

Lee would contend, I guess, that the sober approach will no longer suffice — that the age we inhabit is too drunk on its own craziness. He has a point.

Bale is a cussed and calculating actor, yet he’s never been more likable than he is here — an irony to relish, since the character he plays makes so little effort to be liked.

Slickly professional, thoroughly enjoyable.

The film is light and playful and off-the-cuff, even a little silly. Yet the giddy, gauche characters who don't give a damn...are not only familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.

The strangest thing about The Shape of Water, which should be one almighty mess, is that it succeeds. The streams of story converge, and, as in any good fairy tale, that which is deemed ugly and unworthy, by a myopic world, is revealed to be a pearl beyond price.

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

Russell is at her comedy peak here...and as Walter Burns, Grant raises mugging to a joyful art.