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

It could as well be called Best Thing of Undetermined Species.

A superb film.

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."

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

A musical that even the deaf should enjoy.

The picture is more than a brilliant exercise in moviemaking techniques; it is also a blistering commentary on Hollywood manners & morals.

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.

The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world.

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?

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

The French Connection is a knockout police thriller with so much jarring excitement that it almost calls for comic-book expletives. POW!, ZOWIE! The film has all the depth of a mud puddle, but Director William Friedkin (The Night They Raided Minsky's) sets such a frantic pace that there is hardly a chance to notice, much less care.

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.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s semiautobiographical Lady Bird is both generous and joyous, but when it stings, it stings deep.

Ambersons is not another Citizen Kane, but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the novice or one-picture-prodigy class.

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

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

The Thirty-Nine Steps neatly converts its essential implausibility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the predicament he is in.

To say Toni Erdmann is funny doesn’t even begin to capture the out-there texture of the jokes, and of the actors’ timing.

Sandler has perfected the art of talk-smiling through his teeth, barely moving his lips, and it’s perfect for Howard: He’s a guy who’s always hustling, because to stop would be a kind of death. He shows what he’s feeling by trying to hide what he’s feeling. He’s extreme, but he’s also for real. And his is the shtick you keep buying even when the movie around him tempts you with cheaper, shinier stuff.

Inside Llewyn Davis is more deserving of a Grammy than an Oscar. Problematic movie, great album.

Unlike most sure-fire movies, it was put together with good taste, honesty, wit—and even a strong suggestion of guts.

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically.

One of the most wholly original American movies ever made.

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.

To accept the film, though, one must first understand its point of view, and that is maddeningly difficult. All we know for certain is that Do the Right Thing is not naturalistic. [July 3, 1989]

"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.

In No Bears, the 62-year-old Panahi shows nothing more than the normal effects of aging: his hair is grayer than before, the lines in his face perhaps slightly more pronounced. But this is hardly a broken man. He knows one thing for sure: defiance is the ultimate act of survival.