This is a tale of redemption and transcendence, of the hunchback of London Hospital, of the noble phantom who want to go to the opera, of Beauty and the Beast. In Treves' account, though, the Beast was a Beauty. In Lynch's hands, so is this film.

The Maltese Falcon is frighteningly good evidence that the British (Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, et al.) have no monopoly on the technique of making mystery films. A remake of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled mystery, it is rich raw beef right off the U.S. range.

Director Hitchcock toys with this plot as lovingly as the crack-brained murderer, plays it for wry irony and unexpected humor as well as suspense. But he seems less interested in making his audiences believe in the story's outrageously rigged situations than in teasing, tricking and dazzling them with the masterful touch of a talented cinematic showoff.

Independently financed and distributed by Soderbergh, Logan Lucky is a magnificent movie that comes disguised as a modest one. Or, as I like to call it, a Joe Bang.

It is, finally, as a richly pulsating, hugely entertaining human comedy -- antic, wayward, glancing -- that Short Cuts bemuses, amuses and finally entrances us. [4 Oct 1993]

Kubrick’s remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era.

Disquieting and skillfully crafted thriller.

A musical that even the deaf should enjoy.

An instant classic.

A grand and glorious film that may well be the smash hit of 1977, and certainly is the best movie of the year so far.

The most inventive and entertaining family movie I've seen this year, packed with wickedly smart humor and joyful animation.

Pi is a giant leap forward, outward and upward in expanding the resources of the evolving medium of movies. Magical realism was rarely so magical and never before so real.

It shows Eastwood, at 84, in his finest directorial effort since the 2008 "Gran Torino," while painting on a much broader canvas. Utterly in command of his epic material, he films the Iraqi action in terse, tense panoramas with little cinematic editorializing, as if he were an old Greek or Hebrew God who is never surprised at man’s ability to kill his fellow men, or to find reasons to do so. Directing 34 films over 44 years, Eastwood has honed his craft to its essentials: make it seem as if the story is telling itself.

It works; this is Pixar's most enthralling entertainment since "Nemo."

"The Avengers" is kid stuff compared with this meditation on mortal loss and heroic frailty. For once a melodrama with pulp origins convinces viewers that it can be the modern equivalent to Greek myths or a Jonathan Swift satire. TDKR is that big, that bitter - a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement. The most eagerly anticipated movie of summer 2012 was worth waiting for.

Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far this year.

Singin’ in the Rain might have been the last musical of the ’50s to convey irrepressible optimism through what Alan Greenspan would call “irrational exuberance.” But what exuberance! Look at it and try to think of a contemporary picture that has half as much vivacity, fun, joy. When your movie-loving grandpa says, “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he is surely thinkin’ of Singin’ in the Rain.

The Walk is a visionary high-wire act.

A grand and poignant movie epic about what is lost in war and what's worth saving in life. It is also a rare blend of purity and maturity -- the year's most rapturous love story.

Inside Out is nearly hallucinogenic, entirely beautiful and easily the animation studio’s best release since 2010’s "Toy Story 3." Stylistically Inside Out is nothing like Richard Linklater’s "Boyhood," but for its scope in examining the maturation process, it might well be called "Childhood."

It is the wittiest, most charming, least pretentious cartoon feature Walt Disney has ever made.

It’s a work that blends compassion with artistry so purely that there’s no way to separate them. This is bold filmmaking that makes us feel more courageous too.

"How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure." Irony aside, that's how to respond to this magnificent study in ink and blood.

No goggles, no gloom. And no competition for the coolest, orneriest, funniest, best-looking movie of early 2011.

Director Bogdanovich has achieved a tactile sense of time and place. More, he has performed that most difficult of all cinematic feats: he has made ennui fascinating. Together, that is enough to herald him as possibly the most exciting new director in America today.

Crouching Tiger is contemplative, and it kicks ass. Or put it this way: it's a powerful film and a terrific movie.

Parasite won the top prize at Cannes, and it’s South Korea’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. There are good reasons why it’s poised to resonate worldwide. It tells a story you could probably follow without subtitles, or any dialogue at all: the faces of these actors show with piercing clarity how it feels to be outsiders in a world of wealth and privilege.

There is not a more daft, more original or haunting vision to be seen on American movie screens this year... A terrific movie has escaped the asylum without a lobotomy. The good guys, the few directors itching to make films away from the assembly line, won one for a change. [30 Dec 1985, p.84]

Raiders of the Lost Ark has it all—or, anyway, more than enough to transport moviegoers back to the dazzling, thrill-sated matinee idyls of old. It is surely the best two hours of pure entertainment anyone is going to find in the summer of '81.

The best, surely the smartest, English-language movie of the year to date.

It is a work of art created for grown people by grown people...Orson Welles treats the audience like a jury, calling up the witnesses, letting them offer the evidence, injecting no opinions of his own. He merely sees that their stories are told with absorbing clarity. Unforgettable are such scenes as the spanning of Kane's first marriage in a single conversation, the silly immensity of the castle halls which echo the flat whines of Susan.

Sideways is by far the year's best American movie.

The true, rare glamour of the piece is its revival of two precious movie tropes: the flourishing of words for their majesty and fun, and--in the love play between Fiennes and his enchantress--the kindling of a playfully adult eroticism.

Even if its goals are lofty, the movie is so fleet and entertaining that you never feel you’re being lectured to. This is a superhero movie for real grownups.

This is high, and high-wire, melodrama. It's less soap opera than grand opera, where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower is.

It is as cool and distant as the planet the Strangers come from. But, Lord, is Dark City a wonder to see. [2 March 1998]

One of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk; and the movie can take a place, without blushing, among the best ever made.

The result is that rare Hollywood achievement, an adventure of the intelligent spirit. From lift-off to splashdown, Apollo 13 gives one hell of a ride. [3 July 1995]

Both gentle and staggering, an examination of the way our personal experiences can spur creativity—or render it inconsequential.

Creed mingles go-for-broke romance with bloody pugilist thrills—but instead of feeling like a rehash, it works like gangbusters. Coogler honors and builds upon the Rocky formula so that it feels both comfortingly old-fashioned and bracingly new.

This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period.

Smartly crafted, impeccably acted, The Lives of Others packs a subtle punch, from its creepy first images to its poignant finale.

A near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes.

This says nothing about Gallo's own demonic charm as Billy or his directorial boldness in juxtaposing the emotional surreality of his story with the bleak reality of his hometown in winter, creating a sort of casual but strangely haunting weirdness.

A technical knockout. [29 June 1987]

Apocalypse Now is about an American, perhaps a human madness. It searingly depicts, and finally embodies, the spiritual wounds men inflict on themselves and one another in the name of war. To gain the hearts and minds of a distant people, we lose our own souls.

It is hard to think of another film more tightly autobiographical than this one. It's even harder to think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents.

Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, Up is the studio's most deeply emotional and affecting work.

Though faithful in every detail to Tolkien, it has a vigorous life of its own -- grandeur, moral heft and emotional depth.

Röhrig isn’t an experienced actor. In fact, he’s a poet and a former kindergarten teacher, living in the Bronx. But that could be what makes the performance so magnetic.

A coming-of-age movie, and a love story, that leaves you feeling both stripped bare and restored, slightly better prepared to step out and face the world of people around you, with all the confounding challenges they present. There’s not much more you can ask from a movie.

The charm, humor and loving care with which it treats its inanimate characters puts it in a class by itself.

Batman Returns could mark a happy beginning for Hollywood -- not because it might make a mint but because it dispenses with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea and image found in the best feature-length cartoons.

Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving.

Reveling in its ’70s milieu and in the eternal abrasion of sexy women and covetous men, American Hustle is an urban eruption of flat-out fun — the sharpest, most exhilarating comedy in years. Anyone who says otherwise must be conning you.

Hero is the masterpiece. It employs unparalleled visual splendor to show why men must make war to secure the peace and how warriors may find their true destiny as lovers.

Carrie's ultimate triumph is spectacular beyond anything one is used to in this antique genre. Brian De Palma's sure and powerfully individual style, blending romance, darkish satirical humor and suspenseful spookiness, transforms what could have been dreary stuff. From its first shot, Carrie catches the mind, energetically shakes it and refuses to let go even after the end credits have rolled.

With accurate casting, a swift screenplay, and authentic German settings, Producer-Director John Sturges has created classic cinema of action. There is no sermonizing, no soul probing, no sex. The Great Escape is simply great escapism.

At the end, the movie tops itself with comic outtakes, undoubtedly the funniest finale of any cartoon feature. “Antz” may have amused viewers with its sidewise wit, but as a comprehensive vision of computerized moviemaking, Pixar's dream works. And when A Bug's Life hits its stride, it's antastic.

A small army of Disney craftsmen has given the centuries-old Cinderella story a dewy radiance and comic verve that should make children feel like elves and adults feel like children.

The film is seductive, disturbing, enthralling -- a trip to hell that gives the passengers a great ride.

The funniest, cleverest, most exhaustingly exhilarating animated feature in ages.

It's a Wonderful Life is a pretty wonderful movie. It has only one formidable rival (Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives) as Hollywood's best picture of the year.

The controversial film that is unbearable--and unmissable.

This is a movie as big as the open sky, but one where human emotions are still distinctly visible, as fine and sharp as a blade of grass.

Saraband makes for a powerful and poignant final roar from the grand old man of cinema--the movies' lion king.

The best Hollywood movies always knew how to sneak a beguiling subtext into a crowd-pleasing story. Superman Returns is in that grand tradition. That's why it's beyond Super. It's superb.

This is a complex and sophisticated picture, the kind of grown-up love story we see all too rarely these days, especially when it comes to starry, big-ticket moviemaking. It’s entertaining and robust and forthright; it’s also tremendously sad, not necessarily in a bring-your-hanky way, but in a deeper, more truthful way.

Mitchell — who was so marvelous as Eazy-E in the 2015 "Straight Outta Compton" — is superb here, as a young man struggling with what it means to be at home within his own heart, and within his country. Mudbound — tough and bittersweet and, in places, painfully brutal — is all about what it really means to be an American.

For three hours, Kechiche puts the audience on a ride nearly as exhilarating and exhausting as that endured by Adèle and Emma, Adèle and Léa. The film is like a tough exam that everybody aced. The director, the actresses, the moviegoer — we all deserve a très bien.

No film since Preston Sturges was a pup has so shrewdly appreciated the way the eccentric plays hide-and-seek with the respectable in the ordinary American landscape; no comedy since Annie Hall or Manhattan has so intelligently observed not just the way people live now but what's going on in the back of their minds; and finally, and in full knowledge that one may be doing the marketing department's job for them, it is the best movie of the year.

In a style of agitated naturalism, Jordan examines poignant matters of life and death, sex and friendship, duty and loyalty, freedom and bondage, manhood and womanhood and all the ambiguous areas in between. [30 Nov 1992]

Triplettes is terrific…there's no competition for the fall's most imaginative delight. In that race, Triplettes can already take its victory lap.

The second half of the film elevates all the story elements to Beethovenian crescendo. Here is an epic with literature's depth and opera's splendor -- and one that could be achieved only in movies. What could be more terrific?

For this movie stands to be something its predecessor was not, a megahit. And it deserves to be, for it is a remarkable accomplishment: a sequel that exceeds its predecessor in the reach of its appeal while giving Weaver new emotional dimensions to explore.

The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

It's an exhilarating trip of movie madness and sadness.

Reitman's blend of comedy and drama, romance and social observation make Up in the Air the ideal movie --- and maybe even a cure -- for the Great Recession blues.

As you watch this enchanting fantasy, feel free to be thrilled or to giggle, as you wish. This time, Happily Ever After lasts 98 minutes. [21 Sept 1987]

But it is the style with which this wild farce is developed that sustains our horrified interest and keeps us laughing as the darkness gathers around Barbara and Oliver. [11 Dec 1989]

So it is Scorsese's triumph that GoodFellas offers the fastest, sharpest 2 1/2-hr. ride in recent film history. [Sept 24, 1990]

A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.

This is a movie in which expertise and good sense win the day; no one is rewarded for stupidity or cruelty. And in that sense, Knives Out isn’t just a beautifully made diversion. It’s also a utopian vision.

Silence is something to see whether you’re certain there’s a God or whether you just believe in sunlight, which covers just about everybody.

This is a chase movie (Simon Legree after three Little Evas) across parched outback terrain, captured with rapturous authenticity by cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

Hannah and Her Sisters is old-fashioned in another sense: its plot has the elegant geometry of a Philip Barry play. [Feb 3, 1986]

If Shakespeare's poetry enters the mind through the ear, Kurosawa's enters it through the eye. But the imagery is of comparable quality, at once awesome in its power, delicate in its irony and, finally, for all the violence of the events it recounts, eerily serene in the sureness with which it achieves its effects.

Remain open to fantasies but not be consumed by them. These are good lessons for a would-be director. They are good lessons for everybody. And no recent movie has taught them with more patient sweetness. [Feb. 5, 1990]

It’s also hugely entertaining and joyously profane, a movie whose spirit is so big the screen can barely contain it.

As thoughtful as it is handsomely acted. Caine's subtle, bold performance should guarantee him an aisle seat on Oscar night.

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face.

In an amazing year for animation, The Princess and the Frog is up at the top. Go on, give it a big kiss.

La La Land is both a love letter to a confounding and magical city and an ode to the idea of the might-have-been romance, in all its piercing sweetness. It’s a movie with the potential to make lovers of us all. All we have to do is fall into its arms.

When a genius like Lasseter sits at his computer, the machine becomes just a more supple paintbrush. Like the creatures in this wonderful zoo of a movie, it's alive!

Hill wants the viewer to read his frames, not his dialogue; lighting, angles and cut ting carry the weight of meaning. Perhaps he sends too many people to meet their maker in balletic slow-motion. But that is only a small reservation. Hill is very much in the American grain, the inheritor of the Ford-Hawks-Walsh tradition of artful, understated action film making.

It's just possible that Tarantino, having played a trick on history, is also fooling his fans. They think they're in for a Hollywood-style war movie starring Brad Pitt. What they're really getting is the cagiest, craziest, grandest European film of the year.

Along with the high comedy, this determined insistence on the gory stupidity of ancient but still potent fancy is what holds the film together. Grail is as funny as a movie can get, but it is also a tough-minded picture — as outraged about the human propensity for violence as it is outrageous in its attack on that propensity.

The picture is precise, potent, and ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the United States government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling anything out in detail, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about.