The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.

Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.

A virtuoso piece of kinetic moviemaking. Working with material that could, with a few false steps, have turned into a tony reality-and-illusion puzzle, the director, Richard Rush, has kept it all rowdy and funny -- it's slapstick metaphysics.

This is an elegant and stirring entertainment about the hard-drinking, hard-smoking reporters of "See It Now," the show that Murrow and the producer Fred Friendly put together every week.

Only some on-the-nose symbols and facile political sentiments diminish her majestically playful, fiercely empathetic vision.

The incisiveness of Hamaguchi’s ecological critique is matched by the vividness of his characters; you’ll remember the talking points, but also the faces of the people making them.

It's like visual rock, and it's bursting with energy. The action runs from night until dawn, and most of it is in crisp, bright Day-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There's a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.

Familiar Touch, its title perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.

The movie that we do have is cogent, lavish, and formidable enough, with a Recchi-like power to frighten and seduce.

Why is it, then, that Loveless, which has been nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards, should be so much more gripping than grim? One reason is that, for all the deadened souls who throng the tale, the telling could not be more alive.

Complex and devious beyond easy recounting, Bad Education is about the fallout from the ending of a "pure" love between boys, consecrated in an Almodóvaran temple--a movie theatre.

The film wasn’t completed in the form that Welles originally intended, and there are pictorial effects that seem scaled for a much fuller work, but even in this truncated form it’s amazing and memorable.

Rockwell’s vigorous detailing of personal life—with its evocation of inner lives—is at the heart of its political vision and of its dramatic strength.

Sturges seems to leap out from behind the screen to address the viewer directly. Few classic filmmakers with so much to say manage to find so many splendid words to say it in.

Bergman is literally ravishing in what is probably her sexiest performance. Great trash, great fun.

It's a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it's genuinely sparkling.

The specifics of The Other Side of Everything far overleap the facts of regional politics; the movie is, in effect, a film of political philosophy, not only in Srbijanka’s trenchant, stirring, and tragic observations, but in its ever-relevant observation of the endemic reactionary counterweight to political progress: populist ethnocentrism and nationalism.

The result is pure Saturday-night moviegoing: it gives you one hell of a wallop, then you wake up on Sunday morning without a scratch. (By contrast, the emotional nakedness of the Judy Garland version, poised within formal compositions, can still reduce me to rubble.)

It would be fun to be able to dismiss this as undoubtedly the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh, but it also happens to be one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made.

The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie.

Though not as cleverly original as "Strangers on a Train", or as cleverly sexy as "Notorious", this is one of Hitchcock's most entertaining American thrillers.

What lingers, when this movie is done, are not the regular rallies, during which we survey the whole court, but those moments when we focus on McEnroe alone — on the dancing shuffle of his feet as he bobs and races for a return. Swap the sneakers for tap shoes and the dusty clay for a mirrored floor, and we could be watching Fred without Ginger, lost in the delirium of his art.

Wilde is unerringly focussed on her heroines, and on their fundamental right to get things wrong.

Scorsese infuses this tale with the passionate energy of New York street life and wonder at the powerful workings of show business and studio craft. Yet his main subject is the ineffable factor of genius, which Jerry has, Rupert lacks, and no desire or effort can replace.

Grandiose, emotionally charged musical version of the 1937 tear-jerker. This updated version is a terrible, fascinating orgy of self-pity and cynicism and mythmaking.

This arch, bold, and tender transposition of elements of the Nativity to the cramped secular life of a high-school student in current-day Paris is as much of an emotional wonder as a conceptual one.

Eastwood only gently tweaks the story’s conventional surfaces, yet he infuses it with a bundle of ideas and ideals that turn it both bitterly ironic and ferociously critical.

For an instant, I heard the rumble of the coming Revolution, and wondered how Sciamma would conclude her engrossing movie. In violent devastation, perhaps? Well, yes, but the violence is that of a storm-tossed heart, and the final shot is of a woman — I won’t reveal who — shaken by ungovernable sobs, with smiles breaking through like shafts of sunlight. Reckon you can weather all that without falling apart? Good luck.