Jenkins has made a movie that captures both the joy of Armstrong’s music and the distinctive nature of his personal charisma, though he doesn’t shy away from some of the more controversial elements of Armstrong’s legacy.

Hollywood's smartest media satire in years--and a breakthrough for Jim Carrey.

A picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year's funniest smart movie.

The film is about joy--in conniving and surviving, in connecting with audiences, in its own fizzy, jizzy style.

Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.

Results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.

The film is more than a murder mystery and more than a study in character conflict. At its best, it is an intense and complex portrait of an urban landscape on which the movies' gaze has not often fallen.

Everything about The Wolfpack is extraordinary.

It's a terrific movie. I love the look and the verve of the thing, the confidence of its epic design, its smart use of half a dozen noted British thesps, lending weight and wit to the supporting roles.

Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films.

[Darabont] makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it.

The smartest, funniest, most cleverly structured comedy of the year.

A true movie rarity: a brutally honest romance. If you loved "Sleepless in Seattle," you'll just hate it.

I have rarely, if ever, seen a documentary reconstruction of a historical event that is so rich in firsthand (and well-preserved) photographic material.

The Card Counter, with Isaac’s superb performance at its heart, might be the movie you didn’t know you were wishing for, coming at a time when wishing for life to restart has become a consuming preoccupation.

A gravely beautiful fairy tale of longing and loss. [20 Sept 1993, p.82]

The Impossible is technologically a marvel - the tsunami experience is harrowingly believable - but also emotionally rich. I hesitate to use this term, since it is so often equated with hokey, but The Impossible is life-affirming.

There are enough under-the-radar subtleties, rendered with a refreshing lack of smart-aleckiness, to make Zootopia feel current and fresh. It’s a modest, unassuming entertainment that’s motored by a sly sensibility.

Each of the four lead performances is exceptional, none more so than Burt Reynolds' beefy, supercilious Lewis.

Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur.

Two cheers, at least, for permitting the past to appear not as a stern lesson but as a delicious irrelevance. [10 Mar 1986]

One of this summer's more pungent pleasures: a well-made sex farce of classical proportions. If there is a horse to fall off or an airplane forced to land at the wrong airport, you may be sure Teddy will be aboard.

It’s simply blissfully restorative, a movie that gives you back something you didn’t realize you’d lost, one that might even make you forget what year you’re living in. Its pleasures run quiet and deep.

Kaufman may be counting on the audience's will, insistence and yearning to create a coherent love story from the shards and shrapnel he provides us.

As bustling and impassioned as the best Sturges and Capra movies, this one captures both the purposeful edginess of Administration Pooh-Bahs (Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, David Paymer and Samantha Mathis--nice jobs, all) and the isolation of the President. [20 Nov 1995, p.117]

Apted...has the storytelling skills to weave a powerful and poignant snapshot of some decent folks who have become, collectively, Britain's first family.

There’s some creepy, spooky stuff in Hereditary, images and ideas that just might surface in your nightmares. But the radical, undiluted humanness of Collette’s performance is the movie’s most haunting effect. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Call it the best humans can do without witchcraft.

This enthralling, enigmatic, romantic drama from Asia's most influential auteur (Chungking Express) is an essay in appetite and inhibition.

Beyond its craftiness and impeccable craft, the film sparks a warm connection with the viewer. Like a smiling cavalier swinging into view to rescue an imperiled maiden, The Artist brings salvation to melancholy movie lovers. For here is that rare film indeed that offers pleasure beyond words.

It’s the most truthful movie you’ll see in 2019, because it swears on nothing but the Gospel of Bob, and in more than 50 years of singing, songwriting and much, much touring, he has never promised us anything beyond pleasure and illumination.

A multifaceted, bittersweet delight.

He's (Wilson) a terrific sidekick to Chan's funny, earnest, often victimized righteousness. This kid could be a star.

Broccoli serves the audience a space-shuttle hijacking, a jumbo-jet explosion and a protracted wrestling match between two men who are falling from the sky without parachutes. All this happens before the opening credits. From there, it's on to gondola chases in Venice, funicular crashes in Rio and laser-gun shootouts and lovemaking in deep space. Meanwhile, beautiful women come and go, talking (ever so discreetly) about fellatio. When Broccoli lays out a feast, he makes sure that there is at least one course for every conceivable taste...The result is a film that is irresistibly entertaining as only truly mindless spectacle can be.

The summer’s best, coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

To their old fascination with Sunbelt pathology, to their side-winding Steadicam and pristine command of screen space, the Coens have added a robust humor, a plot that keeps outwitting expectations and a surprising dollop of sympathy for their forlorn kidnapers. [23 March 1987]

Meticulously and sensitively made, though its best moments may be the lovely but intense watercolor-toned interstitial animated sequences that illustrate the monster’s thorny spiritual allegories, cartoons for grownups rather than for little ones.

You’ll learn a lot from Varda’s narration, about filmmaking, about life, about her. If you want to know how to turn scraps into gold, this is the masterclass for you.

Though Disney's toddling cannot keep pace with the giant strides of Ludwig van Beethoven, Fantasia as a whole leaves its audience gasping. Critics may deplore Disney's lapses of taste, but he trips, Mickey-like, into an art form that immortals from Aeschylus to Richard Wagner have always dreamed of.

Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn.

Wry, richly layered, wonderfully observed Argentine film.

It's hard enough to find comedies like this at any time, so it's a small and welcome miracle to come upon one in the midst of a typical movie summer.

The film's both mental and experimental, more melodious than Yentl and at heart as soft and gentle as a Christmas kiss.

This is a survival manual turned into an existential prison-break movie; it cuts deep and, at its ecstatic climax, soars high.

Everything about Pain and Glory is awake and alive, and Almodóvar’s nerve endings become ours, too.

With craft, crackle, a little bombast and plenty of residual rage, he has created a time-capsule movie that explodes like a frag bomb in the consciousness of America, showing how it was back then, over there.

Train Dreams is stunning to look at, the kind of film where each blade of grass, each jagged tree branch, each mini ripple of a rushing river, seems to sing out as an individual. Yet somehow, none of these images come off as overdone or fetishistic. What Bentley keys into, above all else, are his actors, particularly Edgerton.

Side Effects virtually demands a three-word review: Just see it.

This is a test, requiring rapt concentration and acute attention, and repaying a hundredfold. For spectators dulled by the midget movies of an arrtstically timid era, the film may be a chore. For those on Malick’s rarified wavelength, it’s a wonder.

Blindspotting is entertaining, but it also packs an emotional punch. Sometimes, even the place you call home can make you feel like a ghost.

Casey Affleck is both the soul and the anchor of the movie.

Nolan shapes Oppenheimer’s story into something like an epic poem, focusing not just on his most famous achievement, but on everything that happened to him afterward; Nolan is maybe even more interested in Oppenheimer as a complicated, questioning patriot.

Much as it owes to Kubrick, Spartacus owes even more to its script, which Scenarist Trumbo has adorned with humor, eloquence, sophistication and a corrosive irony. Above all, despite his personal predilection for the 20th century's most crushing political orthodoxy, Trumbo has imparted to Spartacus a passion for freedom and the men who live and die for it —a passion that transcends all politics and persons in the fearful, final image of the dying gladiator, the revolutionary on the cross.

Wings of Desire works hard to be both an essay and a love story, a mural and an intimate portrait. To savor this film, the viewer must work hard too. But when the artists behind the screen and the angels in the audience meet, it's like a smoke and coffee: fantastic! (1998 May 9, p. 79)

Passing is a beautifully rendered story that may be first and foremost about racial identity, though it enfolds so many ancillary reflections within its petals—on the power of longing and jealousy, and on the truth that we all make choices that define us as individuals—that anyone can respond to it.

Sexy, funny, sad and defiantly romantic, Feast of Love is the rare movie to cuddle up to.

Its thoughtfulness somehow shines through its heavy-duty stylistic quirks. And it has a breezier, more relaxed vibe than either of July’s earlier movies thanks to one glorious, effervescent performance: when Gina Rodriguez appears, she turns the picture around — it begins to truly breathe — and she carries it along straight to the end. If you see Kajillionaire for no other reason, see it for her.

The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere. Second, it is executed with panache and utter conviction.

There’s no such thing as perfect love in families; often it’s the fine threads of tension that actually hold things together. Granik’s "Winter’s Bone" was greatly admired for the way it presented “ordinary people” of the Ozarks. But Leave No Trace is better.

There are no noisy meltdowns or hyper-dramatic revelations in Brittany Runs a Marathon; even the lines that sting have some buoyancy. Brittany has a tough outer shell — you need it in New York, and you need it just being a woman. But Bell makes that shell translucent; her character’s vulnerability shimmers through it, in a gorgeous everyday way.

People who love typewriters--you know who you are--shouldn't tap the space bar once, let alone twice, before rushing to see Doug Nichol's agile, deeply affectionate documentary California Typewriter. But anyone who loves machines, poetry or, better yet, the poetry of machines should see it too.

What sets Jaws apart from most of the other ceiling busters and makes it a special case, like "The Godfather," is that it is quite a good movie. For one thing, it is mercifully free of the padding—cosmic, comic, cultural—that so often mars "big" pictures. In that sense, the movie is very like its subject. If the great white shark that terrorizes the beaches of an island summer colony is one of nature's most efficient killing machines, Jaws is an efficient entertainment machine.

Fincher, whose work on "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing.

Dickinson is superb at tracing that veiled anguish, and Hittman--who wrote and directed the 2013 film It Felt Like Love--is a discreet and sympathetic guide to his fractured world.

This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement.

This may be hard ground for the audience that loves to cheer the lump out of its throat at the end of a movie. But for actors, it is the high ground. There is a ferocity in Cruise's flakiness that he has not previously had a chance to tap. That, in turn, gives Newman something to grapple with. There is a sort of contained rage in his work that he has never found before, and it carries him beyond the bounds of image, the movie beyond the bounds of genre.

If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.

Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Old Man & the Gun), in addition to fleshing out the story, puts his stamp all over it so confidently that the results could be annoying, if they weren’t so enchanting.

Perceptive, probing and ultimately devastating, The King is for anyone who cares about where this country has been and where it’s headed.

This is a serious filmgoer's treat: intelligence cloaked in elegance.

A canny director and a top star decided to dig deep to find the core of a compromised hero. And when they reach that center of gravity, Flight soars.

There's something old-fashioned and dauntless about the way the film pushes past our initial resistance to its setting and subject matter, past pain, past defeat, to make this point. Because it rejects easy victories, this may be one of the few inspirational movies that could actually inspire someone, somewhere, sometime.

Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.

The looming presence of that planet and its possibilities turns Another Earth into a metaphysical treat, with influences that range from Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique and Blue" to Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris." It's the most soulful art movie of the summer.

Peck captures all that’s galvanizing and forceful about Baldwin’s words and demeanor.

Reimagined instead of recycled, an adaptation of a '60s old TV show emerges as a first-rate thriller.

Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.

This is a bold, drastic and utterly persuasive inhabiting of a doomed fighter by a performer who has graduated from the shirtless rom-com Romeo of the last decade to indie-film actor du jour.

The Dardennes’ movies have a gentle uniformity, which is why they often slip through the cracks among flashier pictures vying for our attention. But Young Mothers is among the best of their films, so empathetically understated that its full power may not hit you until hours after you’ve watched it.

The sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice -- snappy dialogue, wacky situations -- but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another.

Part of the movie’s understated triumph lies in its casting: Hawke is an actor who clearly cares, and worries, a lot–the tree of life is practically etched into his forehead.

The perfect e-ticket for a flight of fancy into a world far more gorgeous than our own. The film doesn't halve itself to appeal to two generations. At its best, it turns all moviegoers into innocent kids, slack-jawed with wonder.

In its craftsmanship and soul, it has more in common with the 1990s films of action genius John Woo than with anything that’s been extruded through the franchise Play-Doh pumper in recent years. If an action movie can be elegant and thoughtful, this one is.

In this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy, all the performers are tops. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

Other animations, such as Heinz Edelmann's Yellow Submarine, may show more audacity. The melodies in Disney's earlier efforts have been richer. But for integration of music, comedy and plot, The Aristocats has no rivals.

Viewers will feel as though they've just finished a great meal but aren't sure what they've been served. Behind them, the chef smiles wickedly.

Their sweet, determined, gently understated struggle for fulfillment in a superstitiously conservative society makes this densely, deftly packed movie a quiet joy to behold.

The movie is so light on its feet that it never feels forced or didactic, even when it asks us to confront piercing truths about love and the elusive meaning of happiness.

What happens is not the substance of Manhattan as much as how it happens. The movie is full of moments that are uproariously funny and others that are sometimes shattering for the degree in which they evoke civilized desolation.

Beautiful Girls is always in touch with reality but never drowned in it. [19 February 1996, p.64]

It is vigorous, subtle, thematically daring, visually gorgeous.

What viewers will most clearly remember long after the screen goes dark is Redford’s sympathetic portrayal of a good man seduced by the mere prospect of power.

Alice Rohrwacher's enigmatic and bracing La Chimera, its touch as glancing as a zephyr, asks more of us while demanding less. It’s the kind of movie you wake up from, as opposed to one you merely watch.

[Salles]'s imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting.

One thinks of the great opening line of that great novel The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Like many such tales, this one is worth taking to your aching heart.

Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.

Adroitly directed by Orson Welles, who also plays the star, it is a grade A gooseflesh-raiser.

There is no more beautiful-looking film this year; shot by Michal Dymek, it often looks lit from within, glowing as softly as a lantern. And even beyond that, EO may be one of the greatest movies ever made about the spirit of animals, as much as we can know it.

Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry.