When we peruse this movie, we see a superb evocation of Turner’s latter years, during the first half of the 19th century, and a performance that’s symphonic in the sweep of its eccentricities, vivid in the spectrum of its passions.

This new film, which seems shorter than its 209 minutes, feels genuinely new and deeply satisfying — for its subtlety, wit and resonance; for its serenely confident technique, meaning no truck with fancy tricks; for the sumptuous quality of the production; and for the epic scope of the story, an extraordinary tale of organized crime’s grip on American life as seen through the eyes of one outwardly ordinary man.

The level of invention is so high, and the density of detail is so great, that it’s impossible to absorb everything in a single viewing.

Sideways makes you glad about America, about movies, about life.

The buddies in Faces Places are perfectly matched, notwithstanding an age difference of 55 years, so the things that happen during their wanderings around rural France aren’t funny in a conventional sense. They are lovely, surprising and deeply moving.

The main attraction is Welles, of course, decked out with scruffy hair, a cantilevered beard, crusty eyes and a crafty smile, and deploying a tuba-register voice that shakes the timbers of the Boar’s Head Inn. He gives a performance that’s monumental in girth.

The invisible wizard Peter Jackson makes use of every scene to show us the meaning of magnificence. Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more.

It’s a tale of totality, not during an eclipse but during a brief conjunction that changes at least one life surprisingly, and one of the greatest pleasures of the movie year.

One of the high points of last month's Telluride Film Festival was, as I wrote at the time, spending 5½ hours in a darkened theater-with one short break around the four-hour mark-to watch Olivier Assayas's shocking and edifying epic.

It takes a series of self-reflexive turns that are overelaborate in their conception and slightly inert in their execution, rendering the movie’s poignancy more theoretical than fully felt.

It’s a life-affirming, profoundly affecting classic.

Damien Chazelle’s musical, consistently daring and occasionally sublime, does what the movies have all but forgotten how to do — sweep us up into a dream of love that’s enhanced in an urgent present by the mythic power of Hollywood’s past.

What you see is exactly what you think you’re seeing from the moment of your first guess. What you feel is another story—one of calm, almost inexplicable enchantment.

Ms. Gerwig’s movie is very much a thanking situation. Once you’ve seen it — even while you’re watching it, with a grin stuck on your face — you want to give thanks for how wonderful it is, how wise and funny and full of grace.

What's fun about this movie is the sight of Mr. Irons's Claus stalking the mansion like a tall, skinny ghost smiling at the perverseness of it all. [18 Oct 1990, p.A14(E)]

What makes Ms. Kapadia so clearly an artist is her ability to let a scene breathe, to be patient but not ponderous, suffusing the film with atmosphere and unarticulated feeling.

Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values and bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems.

Brilliantly funny and moving comedy.

Can a movie that generates steady-state anxiety also function as entertainment? Yes it can, and Adam Sandler is here to prove it in Uncut Gems, a hard-edged and hard-charging phenomenon directed by Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie from a screenplay the brothers wrote with Ronald Bronstein. Mr. Sandler is flat-out sensational as Howard Ratner.

The film's centerpiece is Mr. Isaac's phenomenal performance. He's an actor, first and foremost, who is also a musician.

Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.

Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal is not just the performance of the year -- there will be injustice if he doesn't win an Oscar -- but a creation of awesome proportions.

Crumb pulls us in with rich detail, and with what it says, or suggests, about art, drugs, psychology and the subconscious.... Like last year's "Hoop Dreams," this documentary does justice to a great subject. [08 Jun 1995]

To turn a spotlight fittingly on Spotlight, it’s the year’s best movie so far, and a rarity among countless dramatizations that claim to be based on actual events. In this one the events ring consistently — and dramatically — true.

The movie has done what those who've cherished the book might have thought impossible -- intensified its singular beauty by roving as free and fearlessly as Bauby's mind did.

The Class is clearly a microcosm of contemporary France, beset by social and economic tensions. More than that, though, it's a saga of education's struggles in many parts of the modern world. If only the film were pure fiction.

If watching movie violence is cathartic, then this film amounts to heavy therapy. It's much more than that, however. This is the best film the Coen brothers have done since their glory days of "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," maybe the best they've done, period.

As in previous films, Mr. Baker mixes amateur and professional actors to exceptional effect.