You'll have to seek it out in its limited release, but no current movie is more worth the effort.

This is a tender, rapturous film, both joyous and melancholy, a reverie for a lost past and a door that opens to myriad imagined possibilities.

Intoxicating. [19 Dec 1988, p.78]

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

Three of the hippest indie film princes make a perfect commercial comedy.

The most beguiling romantic comedy this side of "Broadcast News." [11 Jan 1988]

This glorious, tender picture, a memoir written in film language, is only indirectly about the man who made it. He stands off to the side, in the shadows, beckoning us toward something. Roma is filmmaking as gesture, an invitation to generosity that we perhaps didn’t know we could feel.

Sublime and sorrowful movie.

A home movie of a fictional home life, an epic assembled from vignettes, Boyhood shimmers with unforced reality. It shows how an ordinary life can be reflected in an extraordinary movie.

It’s about love and poetry and dreams, and about the chance encounter that can close a wound with the magic efficiency of a tiny butterfly bandage. How you pour all of that into one movie is something of a mystery. But then, a good poem is always something of a mystery too.

Bursting with earned emotion, Hugo is a mechanism that comes to life at the turn of a key in the shape of a heart.

This radiantly sensual film ends on the perfect note, a rush of emotional intensity that’s wrapped in a secret, as hushed as the rustle of silk.

This is more than an Important Documentary: it is engaging and, finally, enraging - as captivating as any "Superman" movie, and as poignant as a child's plea for help.

What’s wonderful about Wells’ instincts, and her sense of craftsmanship, is that she never spells anything out for us. Yet we walk away feeling that we know these people, even if we aren’t clear on all the specifics of their lives.

However ripe A Separation might seem for being adapted into a smart American film, Hollywood shouldn't bother. Farhadi's movie is just about perfect as it is.

This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowy indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film's genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme.

One of the year's most fetching and affecting pictures.

It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. [10 Oct 1994]

The movie is a museum of emotions, brought to contemporary life through the director's artistry and his leading lady's fire. Here, they show us, is how people felt, and hurt, in another time. Their love and pain can touch us today.

For 82 minutes, The Little Mermaid reclaims the movie house as a dream palace and the big screen as a window into enchantment. Live-action filmmakers, see this and try to top it. Go on and try.

The year's most thrilling, FEELING mainstream movie.

Kidman, in a career-best performance, and Eckhart lend pitch-perfect calibration to the couple's shared and separate agonies. It's as if previous treatments of the subject were a series of failed experiments, and Rabbit Hole is the Eureka! moment.

The rewards for paying attention are mammoth and exhilarating. This is a high-IQ movie that gives viewers an IQ high.

This is a true-life heist movie, and the thieves not only got away with their billions, they're still doing business. Pay attention and blow a gasket.

It's a cocktail-party movie with a Molotov-cocktail finish: a tribute to the 88-year-old auteur's artistry - and his con artistry as well.

A document that is raw, eloquent, horrifying and essential.

Caught in the movie's grip, you are simply hypnotized by the damned thing.

An expensive flop and the latest Iraq movie to be shunned by the mass audience, Green Zone was still the year's most visceral, thrilling entertainment.

On its bright face, The Imitation Game, written by Graham Moore and directed by Morten Tyldum, fits into that cozy genre of tortured-genius biopics that sprout like kudzu just in time for the Oscars. But that’s not fair to the film, which outthinks and outplays other examples of the genre.

We the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.

A work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody.

It is a ripping yarn and a spectacularly new and odd vision.

It is among the best and most delicately managed films of the year.

His films will never be mainstream fare; audiences who wander into the theater may well find them derisive, needlessly shocking, perhaps unforgivable. But I'd call them, and especially Life During Wartime, unforgettable.

The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book. It is certainly the best picture Darryl F. Zanuck has produced or Nunnally Johnson scripted. It would be the best John Ford had directed if he had not already made "The Informer."

This is a declaration of love: The Opposite of Sex is the smartest, edgiest, most human and handsomely acted romantic comedy in elephant years.

Even by the out-there standards of "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls," Paul Verhoeven’s latest, Elle, is a thing to behold. Part thriller, part obsidian-black comedy, part cerebral firebomb, it’s confrontational, terrible and glorious. You almost can’t believe such a picture exists.

Mark down the date: June 27. That's when American moviegoers will see this perfect storm of a film, and the tiny force of nature that is Quvenzhané Wallis.

The movie is not just spectacle; it's got a tender, ultimately tragic love story and enough deadly political scheming to fill a Gaddafi playbook. Indeed, in its narrative cunning, luscious production design and martial-arts balletics, Detective Dee is up there with the first great kung-fu art film, King Hu's 1969 "A Touch of Zen." We'd call it "Crouching Tiger, Freakin' Masterpiece."

In 2007, Jamie Foxx won Best Actor for his subtle performance as Ray Charles. Boseman exceeds that solid standard. Incarnating James Brown in all his ornery uniqueness, he deserves a Pulitzer, a Nobel and instant election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A coda that will have the movie's audience gasping in exhilarated exhaustion, whispering astonished gratitude to Sokurov for having created vigorous art out of 21st century video technique and asking themselves, "What's the Russian word for Wow!?"

No matter what you take away from writer-director Halina Reijn’s daring, alluring, and ultimately joyful Babygirl, one idea flutters around it like a potent perfume cloud: both desire and the memory of it are what make us feel alive.

It is a whale (2 hr. 41 min.) of a story, and in the telling of it, British Director David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations) does a whale of a job. He shows a dazzlingly musical sense and control of the many and involving rhythms of a vast composition. He shows a rare sense of humor and a feeling for the poetry of situation; and he shows the even rarer ability to express these things, not in lines but in lives. Most important of all, he understands the real nature of the story he is telling.

There’s something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.

What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives. It’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little.

It takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.

BlacKkKlansman is both hilarious and exquisitely direct, and had it been made before November 2016, you might call Lee’s approach a little alarmist. But if anything, he’s restrained. This is an angry film as well as a hugely entertaining one, and Lee has complete control over its shifting tone, minute by minute.

If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.

A final word for those of you who just don't care for musicals: The movie's true lyricism is less in its score than in its visual and emotional palette, and in watching Depp rise to the majesty of madness. So give Sweeney Todd a try. Even Victor, when he finally saw it, agreed: it's bloody great.

Director Wilder handles his players superbly. He holds an amazingly tight rein on Actress MacLaine, which gives her performance a solidity she seldom achieves. Yet it is Actor Lemmon, surely the most sensitive and tasteful young comedian now at work in Hollywood, who really cuts the mustard and carries the show.

Think of A Fish Called Wanda as the next best thing to a Looney Tunes-Merrie Melodies summerfest…Wanda defies gravity, in both senses of the word, and redefines a great comic tradition. [July 18, 1988]

Whatever it was not, Gone With the Wind was a first-rate piece of Americana, and Americans in the mass knew what they wanted before the critics had got through telling them they should not want it.

This is spellbinding reality cinema about duplicity and, worse, ignorance at the highest level.

Inception is precisely the kind of brainy, ambitious, grand-scale adventure Hollywood should be making more of.

As fine--hard, soft, approachable--as any in movie history.

Without question, the best crime movie of the year--and one of the best movies of any sort now playing.

Remarkable. [22 July 1991]

Huppert is extraordinary — she reveals everything even when you think she’s showing nothing — and she’s the perfect actress, right now, for Hansen-Løve’s fine-grained perceptiveness.

It deftly walks the line between appropriately somber and great, sophisticated fun.

Have you ever had an intense experience—fallen madly in love, say—only to look back years later and feel it had happened to a different person, a person who had walked through a dream, and survived it, to get to the self you were destined to become? That’s the feeling Sofia Coppola captures in her quietly extraordinary Priscilla.

Jonze creates the splendid anachronism of a movie romance that is laugh-and-cry and warm all over, totally sweet and utterly serious.

Dunkirk is extraordinary not just because it’s ambitious and beautifully executed, but because Nolan, who both wrote and directed it, has put so much care into its emotional details—and has asked so much of, and trusted, his actors.

Michael Tolkin's script abounds in such cynical wisdom, but it never loses an appreciation for the grace with which these snakes consume their victims. [13 April 1992]

The movie is one continuous, exhausting, exhilarating chase.

In his most painterly film, Spielberg has appropriated the lavish visual palette of John Ford movies: "The Quiet Man" for the rural settings, "The Horse Soldiers" for the war scenes. Boldly emotional, nakedly heartfelt, War Horse will leave only the stoniest hearts untouched.

Peele succeeds where sometimes even more experienced filmmakers fail: He’s made an agile entertainment whose social and cultural observations are woven so tightly into the fabric that you’re laughing even as you’re thinking, and vice-versa.

By next semester, some grad student will be writing a thesis on the B-movie influences on this A+ film.

Upon all these folks, writer-director David O. Russell turns a bland, almost anthropological eye. Nothing surprises him and nothing outrages him, except for bed-and-breakfast lodgings, about which, at last, his movie tells the terrible truth. [1 April 1996, p. 72]

A marvelously sad and funny docucomedy. [22 Oct 1990]

Hair succeeds at all levels—as lowdown fun, as affecting drama, as exhilarating spectacle and as provocative social observation.

Artful but not arty, Spirited Away is a handcrafted cartoon, as personal as an Utamaro painting, yet its breadth and heart give it an appeal that should touch American viewers of all ages.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a seemingly straightforward picture that’s surprisingly stealthy in capturing the joy and exaltation of being an almost-adult but still feeling young, of messing around and messing up, of waiting and hoping for the chance to meet a guy or girl you really like.

Shelton has written the wittiest, busiest screenplay since Moonstruck, and his three stars do their very best screen work. [20 June 1988]

The Zone of Interest is possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way.

There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like Tangerine and The Florida Project, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with Anora, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It's his best movie yet.

It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances.

An expert, sensitive study of the fateful tie that inevitably binds the strong to the weak, this film may well be the best western of 1960.

Blending plot elements of "Double Indemnity" and "Natural Born Killers" with the ripe sensuality of Francis Coppola's take on "Dracula," the film should make audiences sit up in startled pleasure, as if they'd just received the most luscious neck-bite.

What amazes is that at just 26, Soderbergh displays the three qualities associated with mature filmmakers: a unique authorial voice, a spooky camera assurance, and the easy control of ensemble acting. [31 July 1989, p.65]

For those of us who think this is the best comedy of 2004, the genius of the movie lies in its relocation.

So Almost Famous is almost fabulous. Oh, all right. The movie's so clever and endearing, you can forget the almost.

As reversible misunderstandings grow into irreversible tragedy, it slowly dawns on you that this is a superior, heartbreaking film.

Probably the bleakest, least sentimental study of the Mafia in Italian or American film history.

This covertly brawny film, with a script by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, has plot points that click like pegs under Spielberg’s tight direction. In his fourth pairing with Hanks, Spielberg again examines the furtive face of justice and issues another masterful ruling.

Three decades ago, Milk and his ilk were able to enlist President Jimmy Carter and future President Ronald Reagan in the gay fight against Prop. 6. But this fall, Barack Obama was all but mute on Prop. 8. Some community organizers, like the President-elect, are more cautious than others. It's a shame Harvey Milk wasn't around to recruit him.

Mamet's elegantly efficient script does not waste a word, and De Palma does not waste a shot. The result is a densely layered work moving with confident, compulsive energy.

Hidden Figures, both a dazzling piece of entertainment and a window into history, bucks the trend of the boring-math-guy movie.

Prepare to be riveted: No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson's first film, is without question the most important movie you are likely to see this year.

Epic cinema, tragic drama, it is also an act of remembrance and conscience that ultimately transcends the ordinary critical categories.

Poignant, troubling and altogether splendid new film.

If the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too.

Sin City is brazenly, thrillingly alive.

At every point, moreover, the actors are supported by Bergman's impressive cinematic skill. His script is a marvel of elision, speaking most eloquently in what it does not say. His photography is both poetic and worshipful. In every frame of the film the still light of subarctic summer silently instills an aspect of eternity, a sense of the presence of God.

In this film, however, he battles the elements and mortality with a thinking man’s resilience the equal of any astronaut, freighter captain or free man enslaved. That he fights fate on his own makes All Is Lost a signal film achievement and the capstone to a great star’s career. This is Ultimate Redford.

A funny, gentle and honestly sentimental movie that is easily one of the best of the year in any category, and very possibly the best movie about sport ever made in this country.

Towers, while not quite so varied as Fellowship in its moods and settings, has a grave gusto that energizes every moment...a thrilling work of film craft.

A picture that’s both tranquil and dazzling, two qualities that should be at odds with one another yet somehow bloom in tandem under Reichardt’s gentle touch.

It’s a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don’t fully understand. It’s both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It’s all about the bold, muscular act of caring.