Minnelli proves his eye for detail and captures the era and its values in richly colored, gentle images, displaying a startling balance of emotions from scene to scene, song to song.

This grand and powerful biography begins in 1908 when, at the age of three, Pu Yi was named emperor of China and follows him through a tumultuous life inextricably intertwined with the history of modern-day China, one that that ended with the once-coddled emperor working quietly as a gardener at Peking's Botanical Gardens.

That Ledger stands out in such a powerhouse ensemble is a tribute to his radically unhinged interpretation of a familiar character: The lank hair tinged seaweed green, the darting tongue and faint lisp that call constant attention to the ghastly rictus of his mouth, the nightmarishly smudged make up… taken together, they make previous Jokers feel like, well, jokes.

A radiant, heartbreaking film.

By common consensus, Stop Making Sense is the best concert film ever made.

A finely observed film but insufficiently developed as a satire of middle America. [Review of re-release]

It can hardly be called a children's film, but a masterpiece of feature-film animation for all ages.

One of the ultimate expressions of Paramount Studios chic, Desire remains one of its desirable star's finest films.

A stunning directorial debut from screenwriter John Huston.

First-time feature director Sanaa Hamri's virtually perfect romantic comedy is a marvelous mix of brains and heart that confronts serious questions about race and dating with sensitivity, humor and enormous sex appeal.

Bright cunningly translates the story of Little Red Riding Hood into the trashy vernacular of tabloid TV and reality-based cop shows.

But it is Angela Lansbury's incestuous, power-mad mother who makes your blood run cold. This was the peak of the first part of her career, which depended upon these hardbitten kind of characters. Forget Hitchcock--here's the monster mother of all time.

The results are quite frightening and far superior to the lengthy gloom and doom that fill many earlier Bergman films. A magical movie, Fanny and Alexander is likely to be the achievement for which Bergman will be most remembered. (Review of Original Release)

Thom Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology.

This is a gorgeous, fascinating account of the interplay between the personal and the social, directed with the kind of insight that only an aristocrat turned Marxist like Visconti could afford. (Review of Original Release)

Hopkins plays the cannibalistic doctor with a quiet, controlled erudition, lacing his performance with moments of black humor. His Lecter is a sort of satanic Sherlock Holmes whose spasms of violence are all the more terrifying because they erupt from beneath such an intelligent and refined mask.

Melville coolly mixes the conventions of American crime films from the '40s and '50s ( THIS GUN FOR HIRE is one key reference point) with a distinctly European austerity, yet the film still manages to pack quite an emotional punch.

In a film mercifully free of the usual warm and fuzzy movie sentimentality, director Maggie Greenwald and her fine cast shatter most hillbilly stereotypes.

Joan Allen -- playing goody-two-shoes Elizabeth Proctor -- is the standout: She gives Proctor both spine and a desperate, late-blooming awareness that her own unyielding righteousness has helped bring about her family's destruction. Her performance is so true it's almost painful.

A comic masterpiece.

Of all the recent Disney wannabes, THE SWAN PRINCESS comes closest to capturing the ineffable magic of THE LITTLE MERMAID and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. With its scrupulous attention to background detail and buoyant song score, this animated delight is a children's film crafted with enough sophistication to weave a spell around cynical grown-ups.

Woo's direction is clean and direct, with a clarity of purpose behind every scene that makes each wrenching development seem inevitable. It's strong stuff.

For all the casual terribleness it records, it is entertainment; the characters are real and fleshed-out, and we care about what happens to them.

One of the most celebrated films from the extraordinary director-writer partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP is a warm and wise work that displays extraordinary generosity of spirit.

PLATOON is a shattering experience. Writer-director Stone, a Vietnam veteran, used his first-hand knowledge to create one of the most realistic war films ever made, one whose success lies in the mass of detail Stone brings to the screen, bombarding the senses with vivid sights and sounds that have the feel of actual experience.

Quietly devastating... Extremely unsettling, at times amusing, cold yet personal, Dead Ringers gradually and deliberately comes to horrify the viewer, rather than shocking outright.

Landmark gangster film that made a huge commercial and cultural splash.

A beautiful, confounding picture that had half the audience cheering and the other half snoring. Kubrick clearly means to say something about the dehumanizing effects of technology, but exactly what is hard to say.