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.