The telling of this simple tale of survival required cutting-edge technology, but we don't notice the bells and whistles: They're on hand to immerse us in an unforgettable personal story.

Crash seems incredibly prescient, yet rather naive. The film is a stunning document of our alienated civilization, all the more compelling with its dolorous, almost liturgical tones.

This subject demands consummate screen treatment and now has absolutely gotten it from director/producer Spike Lee. [10 Jul 1997, Pg.02.D]

It's an apt title. As divisive as the issue has become, it's hard to deny the power of Guggenheim's lingering shots on these children, waiting on a superhero who isn't going to come.

Minnelli's other Oscar-winning perennial. [19 Sep 2008, p.4D]

Sugar is that sweetest of films: A sensitive and memorable story that surprises at every turn.

With special effects so convincing you don't even think about them, a head-case hero and a three-dimensional villain who is his equal, socko Spider-Man 2 has something for everyone.

Not since "Memento" has a movie served up such a provocative mind-bender, and the Sundance winner by first-time filmmaker Andrew Jarecki has the advantage of being true.

Sarah Polley's memoir is a poignant, funny and engrossing film, challenging our notions of memory and family mythology.

A marvel of well-rounded characters, strong performances and disarming chemistry, this deeply felt film is like a loving elegy to the end of childhood. It's easily one of summer's best films.

This is a fascinating movie experience. [30 June 1989, Life, p.1D]

Blethyn is so astonishing that you forget you're seeing a performance.

Quiz Show is half-a-dozen movies, nearly all exceptional, and a lion's share assemblage of the year's top male performances. A watershed scandal revisited, it's also a riveting revenge story motivated by seething resentment. [14 Sept 1994, p.1D]

At once futuristic, funny and fantastical.

A powerful drama about the murder of three civil-rights workers in the South. Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe are FBI men investigating. A legitimate Oscar contender. [6 Jan 1989, p.5D]

A precisely modulated and mostly mesmerizing 2¾-hour suspense movie, in part because it's one of the most bravely disturbing screen works ever attempted about thoughts withheld by even the most devoted marriage partners and the ramifications of voicing them.

Wonderfully enchanting wintry fare.

Grimly dark humor and spot-on production design buttress the captivating story and heighten the unnerving atmosphere...Gone Girl will leave you breathless and haunted.

Pacino cans the showboating bluster and gives a gently nuanced portrait of a simple man in decline.

These gun-crazy, lust-loopy kids on the run are irresistible in the best crime rush since “GoodFellas.” [10 Sept 1993]

It's a heart-wrenching portrayal of unfulfilled Wyoming love, but this time, we don't mean Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in "Shane."

When was the last time you saw a blockbuster that was impeccably executed and simultaneously thought-provoking, audacious and unnerving while consistently being fun and entertaining?

This is entertainment worth thumping your chest over. [18 June 1999, Life, p.2E]

This breezy farce has lost just enough of its luster to seem no longer disproportionately funnier than its oft-televised Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis remake You're Never Too Young. [29 May 1998]

Pan's Labyrinth artfully fuses a war film with a family melodrama and a fairy tale. The result is visually stunning and emotionally shattering.

Thirty pounds lighter, all cheekbones and bulging eyes, Gyllenhaal plays one of the year's most memorable characters in this dark, provocative drama.

Most of the silliness lands, and the stuff that doesn’t is enveloped by the total chaos, anyway. That’s all to be expected with Deadpool around. The meat of the matter, surprisingly, is the loving closure given to the Fox movie run, plus a reminder how much an unleashed Jackman rules now, and always did.

The "Age of Innocence" oozes anthropological dazzle, but Dazed and Confused may some day rate its own Smithsonian showings for clinically re-creating the High School Experience 1976. [20 Sept 1993]

Ultimately grim, Liam is ripe in humanity --and even comedy.

The main voice actors all fit their animated personas, especially Poehler and Black. Poehler brings a unshakably quirky optimism to Joy while Black takes his acerbic stand-up routine, makes it a smidge more family-friendly, and turns up the juice for Anger.

Despite the sad denouement, it's still the love story of the year.

Depressing and gut-wrenching, but always powerful and gripping.

Has the unanticipated craft and artfully ambiguous appeal of last year's "Croupier," a movie whose art-house word-of-mouth success could be duplicated here.

The net result is an entertainingly frightening film that keeps the audience in a state of alarmed, but eager, anticipation.

Borat is most gloriously funny moving picture for to make people see their stupidness.

Promising Young Woman is a deliciously dark and wonderful combo of style, substance and artfully utilized pop jams.

Translating solitary musings, raw despondency and personal enlightenment into arresting visuals is a substantial feat and novelist/screenwriter Nick Hornby was the perfect choice to convert the fascinating book into a lively script.

The good news is that this is not merely a few episodes cobbled together: It's a real movie.

Hereditary isn’t just a scary movie. It’s much, much, much worse than that.

A robust family comedy that saves its wildest moments for a climactic "get-together."

This unconventional psychological drama weaves a fascinating tale, and Collette and Williams give two of the summer's best performances.

Features the season's most tragic heroine along with some of the liveliest dead people ever seen on film.

Funny People nimbly intersperses humor and reflection. It is a rumination on mortality, fame and life choices, punctuated with Apatow's trademark raunchy humor.

While The Dark Knight won't be supplanted any time soon as tops among Bat-movies, the new film makes a strong argument for second-best simply by taking time to explore the core of Batman that others haven’t: He’s a complicated mess who can’t get out of his own way long enough for the greater good.

A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film.

The look of this version may be the finest of the 27 Jane Eyre film and television re-tellings.

A hard-core war film with raw violence, intense action, graphic sexuality and a twisting plot that offers a series of surprises.

The relaxed and confident Crusade is the first Jones outing to benefit from actual characterizations. [24 May 1989, Life, p.1D]

One Day is an aching lovely romance, but it's also an insightful look at human potential and the search for a purposeful existence.

Jaded samurai Toshiro Mifune shows younger warriors the ropes, just as John Wayne used to toughen up tenderfoots on the range. [21 Apr 1995, p.3D]

Director James Foley deftly juggles expressionistic actor closeups with drab widescreen shots that convey abject seediness. [30 Sep 1992, p.1D]

The result is a foot-stomping rouser. Where else can you get a cop in his underwear boogalooing with skyscraper terrorists? [15 July 1988, Life, p.4D]

Not only is this a deftly crafted and superbly acted film, but Wadjda sheds a powerful light on what women face, starting in childhood, in an oppressive regime.

There is more than enough magic, music and muscle to go around – everybody’s so ripped, Love and Thunder often seems like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life.

If the Marvel superhero movies on the whole are your favorite band’s individual albums, Avengers: Endgame is the triple-disc greatest-hits package with the really awesome cover and a slew of familiar, comforting gems inside.

Miyazaki creates fascinating, fluid and whimsical scenarios.

Emotionally and viscerally compelling and retains a suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat quality.

The most imperfect of the year's best movies, Magnolia's flaws are easily forgiven because they are the result of go-for-broke ambition.

Director Stephen Herek does an admirable balancing job, though the movie slows whenever the animals solo onscreen. [27 Nov 1996 Pg.01.D]

Director Josh Safdie’s globetrotting, genre-busting comedy thriller is a proudly oddball period movie that boasts throwback elements but leans timeless in its unlikely hero’s journey.

By eloquently probing the state of uncertainty and its accompanying discomfort and confusion, Doubt compels viewers to examine their own assumptions as they become caught up in this fascinating tale.

Like the first half of "Best in Show," the movie is so deadpan that sometimes you have to pinch yourself to realize how potently satirical it is.

So it seems lightning has struck again, this time in the DC universe where the most successful movies thus far have played it safe. That’s never been Gunn’s game, thankfully, and certainly isn’t here. Anyway, who needs Batman around when you’ve got Starro the Conqueror?

Sissy Spacek goes vengefully telekinetic in one of director Brian De Palma's best movies, and her scenes with mom Piper Laurie (both actresses were Oscar-nominated) release a lot of energy themselves. [29 Jun 2004]

Middle-aged romance can be a dicey prospect. And it gets more complicated when children are in the picture. But it gets more complex still if the "child" is actually 21, and creepily meddlesome.

Overstuffed but exuberantly humane.

With this 2002 Cannes Film Festival best-picture winner, Polanski skips the quirky flourishes and simply brings history to life.

The first movie Montgomery Clift made (but second released) was Howard Hawks' all-time Western Red River. In the interim, director Fred Zinnemann stole some thunder by showcasing the actor in this semi-documentary about European children left homeless and without parents after World War II, filmed on location in the then-U.S. Occupied Zone of Germany. [23 Oct 2009, p.3D]

Those drawn to unusual, unflinching feats of filmmaking and rare acting turns as well as sustained suspense will be captivated by Buried.

Ray could not have been made without star Jamie Foxx.

In this spare, unusual and intimate action thriller, Redford's expressions do nearly all of the communicating. He is the sole human cast member and utters only one word during the entire movie, which covers a span of eight days. The ocean — super-charged and becalmed — gets equal billing. If this sounds bizarre, or like an exercise in tedium, it is neither.

A cool and clinical reportorial remembrance whose very title reminds us who Solanas was. [3 May 1996, p. 10D]

Splendidly directed by Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? feels worn and lived in – in a good way – with a world of musty vintage tones and bar-room desperation given emotional life through McCarthy and a super supporting turn from Richard E. Grant.

Equally powerful and feel-good, Creed is an entertaining reminder that this franchise isn’t down for the count yet.

The filmmaker keeps upping the ante with surprises until the plot-twist beaut that concludes the picture - a shocker that, upon reflection, is probably the one ending that wouldn't have fallen a little flat.

The movie is more fun than Breathless, a minority (though not sacrilegious) opinion. [10 Jan 2003]

The 21-year-old actor holds his own in the emotional project opposite a couple of heavyweights, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. Just as deft in his work is writer/director/co-star Joel Edgerton, who's crafted a touching look at the darker sides of evangelical belief and parental judgment.

In a role as tailor-made for him as the story is for its writer and director, Nicolas Cage anchors the movie with one of his best performances.

A visually stunning, startlingly clever sleight of hand that will have audiences pondering well after the lights go up.

This is one inspiring movie despite extremely tricky subject matter -- better than "Shine" and among the most affecting ever made about co-existing with mental demons.

It's rambunctious and unruly, but mesmerizing.

Unapologetically brutal and unencumbered by much plot, Raid is the year's most turbo-charged film.

The Painted Veil is a welcome addition to the slate of holiday movies, particularly for those drawn to intriguing tales of multi-dimensional characters in exotic settings.

Gracefully acted, and the story packs a powerful punch straight to the gut.

Despite its awkward title, Starter for 10 is a winning coming-of-age tale told with grace and charm.

Accessibly brainy screen charmer.

A beautiful and brutal headtrip exploring the positives and negatives inherent in mankind's evolution, with characters struggling against losing themselves to something alien.

The best drama you've seen about Anytown, USA, since "American Beauty."

Oscar-winning animator Brad Bird seems to have accomplished the impossible with the fourth Mission: Impossible installment by injecting the 15-year-old series with newfound, breathtaking energy.

An enchantingly beautiful and moving film.

With outstanding performances from newcomer Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose, Spielberg’s take doesn't stray too far from the original 1957 “Romeo & Juliet”-inspired Broadway musical or the 1961 best picture winning-film, but is rather a more authentic, dynamic and thoughtful revamp.

Robert De Niro is so good as a politically blacklisted filmmaker in Guilty by Suspicion that even his hair seems right. [15 Mar 1991, p.4D]

A little movie almost perfectly realized.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend manages to do what the recent crop of crime fighters haven't: show us how much fun it might be to fly, or have super strength, or look buff in spandex.

One bad idea can unravel and ruin lives in unimaginably horrific ways.That's the concept underlying the riveting Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a sharply acted and highly entertaining morality play.

Watching this movie, it seems to be the next level down from great -- maybe too episodic. But it burns in the memory weeks after you see it.

Some caper movies build suspense, while others tweak the genre with tongue lancing cheek. But this lesbian caper pic (how's that for a rarefied subgenre?) often pulls off both feats in the same scene, even simultaneously. [04 Oct 1996 Pg.04.D]

As much of a wry hoot as it is, with Wright as the film's enjoyably irascible lead, Jefferson also weaves in a dysfunctional family drama that gives it emotional heft to complement the hilarity.