To TV-raised minds, Paradise spends more time than it needs to get where it's going. But in its own terms, the movie has flashes of oldtime magic. It's a precious piece of time past -- and time kept.

Nowhere was American comedy in the '40s more frivolously sophisticated than in the movies of Preston Sturges, and The Lady Eve is his most satisfying romantic film. [05 May 1988, p.C7]

Thanks to Cuarón’s prodigious gifts, Gravity succeeds simultaneously as a simple classic shipwreck narrative (albeit at zero-gravity), and as an utterly breathtaking restoration of size and occasion to the movies themselves.

It is icon, uplift, art of the future, nostalgia, psychedelic journey, Americana, technological triumph, classic.

Disney's new full-length animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, is more than a return to classic form, it's a delightfully satisfying modern fable, a near-masterpiece that draws on the sublime traditions of the past while remaining completely in sync with the sensibility of its time.

McQueen’s vocabulary is on particularly glorious display in this lambent gem of a film.

One Battle After Another isn’t really a political film, but neither is it not a political film. It just carries its concerns within the framework of a hellacious action movie, a sidesplitting character comedy, a riveting suspense thriller and various other genres the director makes up as he goes along, replete with a hapless hero, a warrior princess and the damnedest villain the movies have seen in a very long time.

Harrowing and funny, a fine film on its own, "Hearts" leaves us with a new appreciation for the Vietnam War epic it documents.

The Social Network has understandably been compared to "Citizen Kane" in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will.

True to its title, Portrait of a Lady on Fire generates more than its share of heat, even if it never truly becomes an engulfing flame.

A brilliant piece of filmic writing, one that bursts with fierce urgency, not just for the long-unresolved history it seeks to confront, but also in its attempt to understand what is happening here, right now.

Woodstock captures the spirit of itself quite well, and much of what we take for granted now in music videos and stage performance was shaped not only by the festival but by Wadleigh's film. [17 Aug 1989, p.C7]

It’s a series of small and seemingly meaningless incidents that, in Wells’s telling, loom large only from the vantage of hindsight.

Amour is a must-see film that not everyone must see, at least right now.

When viewers are ultimately released from The Hurt Locker's exhilarating vice grip, they'll find themselves shaken, energized and, more than likely, eager to see it again.

The experience overall is like laughing down a gun barrel, a little bit tiring, a lot sick and maybe far too perverse for less jaded moviegoers.

By and large, Zero Dark Thirty dispenses with sentimentality and speculation, portraying the final mission not with triumphalist zeal or rank emotionalism but with a reserved, even mournful sense of ambivalence.

Directed by Alexander Nanau with an alert eye for character and detail, this alternately illuminating and infuriating portrait of everyday bureaucratic corruption becomes a much larger, and more disturbing, portrayal of structural incompetence, indifference and moral rot.

A ruthlessly unsentimental portrait of a German war profiteer's epiphany that inspires neither sorrow nor pity, but a kind of emotional numbness.

The idea that a company in the business of mainstream entertainment would make something as creative, substantial and cautionary as WALL-E has to raise your hopes for humanity.

It’s possible to watch Carol simply for its velvety beauty, but chances are that, by that stunning final moment, filmgoers will realize with a start that they care far more about the problems of these two people than they might have realized.

Amazing Grace can now be seen in all its aesthetic, spiritual and historical glory. And even more gratifyingly, it is as simple and unaffected as Aretha Franklin herself is in the film.

Dunkirk isn’t comfortable to watch; it never relents or relaxes. At the same time, it’s impossible to look away from it.

Directed by John Ford, The Searchers is widely recognized not only as the greatest American Western but as one of the best Hollywood films of all-time.

Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.

It hasn't aged so much as triumphantly metastasized. [20th Anniversary Release]

On one level, Yi Yi is classic soap opera, with a suicide attempt, a wedding ceremony, even a brutal 11 o'clock news murder, all in the mix. But Yang's direction is so admirably restrained, it lends rich heft to everything.

An exceedingly loopy satire of the entire American political circus, and could be viewed as offensive to the sensitive-souled in either camp. And time hasn't in the least softened its bite. [Re-release]