This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.

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

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

The picture packs a wonderful wallop.

Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this excellent adventure.

The movie is smart, lavish and fun without being assaultive.

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.

Though overlong and sometimes over-cute, Mary Poppins is the drollest Disney film in decades, a feat of prestidigitation with many more lifts than lapses.

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.

It’s been said that if the U.S. couldn’t tighten its gun-control laws after Sandy Hook, it never will. But Newtown refutes hopelessness, making its case less with words than with faces it’s impossible to forget.

Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors’ and the camera’s movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse.

Director Gillian Armstrong and writer Robin Swicord have fashioned an entrancing film from this distinctly unfashionable classic.

Ceases to be a cogent study of the disease of genius and devolves into two lesser creatures: an ordinary weepie and an Oscar contender.

The quick flow of comic incident through It Happened One Night reaches its fantastic conclusion...

A grand, sprawling entertainment that incites enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min.

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

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!?"

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

So strongly does it challenge the usual commercial film techniques and themes that Hollywood, ever wary both of stylistic innovation and contemporary politics, may never recover. Socially and cinematically, Medium Cool is dynamite.

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

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.

Mission: Impossible—Fallout may be the best Mission: Impossible movie since the first, made in the dawn of the cat-Internet age, 1996, by Brian De Palma. Or perhaps it’s just the one with the mostest: even by the franchise’s extravagant standards, Fallout throws off Hope-diamond levels of grandeur.

Cleo from 5 to 7, acclaimed in France as "the most beautiful film ever made about Paris," is a curiously, spuriously brilliant attempt to contemporize the legend of Death and the Maiden.

A bit much? Yes, but it's meant to be. Like Doctor No and From Russia with Love, the two previous Bond bombshells, this picture is a thriller exuberantly travestied. No doubt Goldfinger's formula for box-office gold contains entirely too much brass, but who cares? In scene after scene Director Guy Hamilton has contrived some hilariously horrible sight gags.

This is a movie that feels, in the best way, like the last day of summer: radiant, bittersweet, redolent of memories in the making.

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.

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.

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.