Watching this masterwork allows you to return to the filmmaking sensibility of the 1960s, when epics looked like epics.

In this final installment of a glorious trilogy (which includes the films “Blue” and “White”) he has saved his greatest for last.

As a film that dares to honor small moments and the life they add up to, Boyhood isn’t just a masterpiece. It’s a miracle.

Even if it weren't in pristine shape for its current re-release, it would still qualify as one of only a handful of films made in the past 30 years that truly deserve to be called great. (Review of 1994 Release)

Vertigo remains something less than a foolproof psychological spellbinder and agonizer. It's compulsively watchable and stylish, but the obsessive and delirious moods seem to exist apart from the creaky plot, which fails to convince one of the nature of the conspiracy that entraps Stewart's character in the first place or of the follow-up system of coincidence that eventually drives him up the fateful bell tower. [10 March 1984, p.G1]

It's a strange enough film, yet weirdly great. No movie has quite gotten the clammy weight of fear, the sense of hopelessness that would necessarily haunt underground workers. To see it is to sweat through your underclothes. It'll melt the pep out of your weekend.

Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.

Rules would have been just another good movie if not for its masterly visual design. With it, however, the black-and-white film enters the realm of immortality.

With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.

Hitch's masterpiece.

Hoop Dreams is the most powerful movie about sports ever made.

Rashomon has had such a profound cultural influence that there is even a psychosociological phenomenon named after it.

My Left Foot is gloriously exultant and hilariously unexpected...Sheridan and his great young star have universalized their broken hero.

The drama itself packs a powerful -- and timeless -- gut punch.

The Third Man is so elegant, tiny and perfect that it feels more like a watch than a movie: It should have been directed by Patek Phillipe. [9 July 1999, p.C01]

Stanley Kubrick's wicked sendup of the then-burgeoning military-industrial complex is still lacerating today. Which is better, George C. Scott's bull-like portrayal of Gen. Buck Turgidson ("Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed") or the Peter Sellers trifecta of Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, Dr. Strangelove and President Merkin Muffley? You'll watch it and weep -- from laughter and maybe just a hint of despair. [13 June 2004, p.N03]

Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime.

With Parasite, Bong’s finest work to date, the 50-year-old director clearly articulates a throughline that has been present in all his previous work: there’s no war but the class war.

Brando's performance as Stanley is one of those rare screen legends that are all they're cracked up to be: poetic, fearsome, so deeply felt you can barely take it in. In the hands of other actors, Stanley is like some nightmare feminist critique of maleness: brutish and infantile. Brando is brutish, infantile and full of a pain he can hardly comprehend or express. The monster suffers like a man. [Restored version]

Roma, a masterful drama by Alfonso Cuarón, is many things at once: epic and intimate, mythic and mundane.

Old myths and wonder tales spun afresh.

Though computer-animated rather than hand-drawn, this wry, rippingly paced buddy movie is as delightful in its own way as any of Walt Disney's traditional fairy tales.

See Killer of Sheep, and see it again and again. It's one of those truly rare movies that just get better and better.

The result is something akin to cinematic hypertext, and thanks to Thompson’s steady hand, the brief but deep dives are richly rewarding.

Intense, unflinching, bold in its simplicity and radical in its use of image, sound and staging, 12 Years a Slave in many ways is the defining epic so many have longed for to examine — if not cauterize — America’s primal wound.

Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.

The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.

Still a marvel of verve and bone-dry wit, the movie has been treated kindly by time.

Observed mostly from Remy's rat's-eye view, Gusteau's kitchen is a memorable world-in-miniature with its vivid old-fashioned stoves, bright, brassy pots and general air of frenzied industry; never did sliced red onions or simmering soup look so fresh and real.

As rich and fun as it was in post-Depression 1937 -- yes, 1937. And the seven dwarfs (Doc, Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Grumpy and Dopey) are every bit as charming as they "Hi-ho" to work at the diamond mine.

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]

Through it all, Spall is equally enigmatic and transfixing: With his guttural croaks and barks, his Turner is often difficult to understand, but, thanks to Spall’s amazing physical performance and Leigh’s sensitive, information-laden direction, he’s never incomprehensible.

The Irishman is a feast for the ages, a groaning board of exquisitely photographed scenes, iconic performances and tender nods toward old age that leave viewers in a mood more wistful than keyed-up.

Magnificently nonchalant about its magic.

As visually stunning as it is, though, the film's most enduring gift is the simplicity and sensitivity with which it was made by Truffaut. [19 Dec 2008, p.WE29]

This is that rare movie that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic, even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their unruliest emotions.

There's not a false note here, and the entire supporting cast -- is uniformly excellent.

The finished film remains a mess of tangled, turgid continuity and florid, mock-operatic style -- at best a collection of production numbers and set pieces waiting in rain for a story capable of accumulating suspense and meaning.

Faces Places is a film of sheer joy, its exuberance surpassed only by its tenderness and purity of purpose.

Days of Heaven leaves one wanting more: either a totally revolutionary approach to pictorial storytelling or traditional dramatic interest....It may be artistic suicide for Malick to continue his style of pictorial inflation without also enriching his scenarios. If he doesn't, he's likely to be remembered not for his undeniable pictorial talent but for his eccentricity. [5 Oct. 1978, p.B10]

Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge.

Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.

An almost sinfully enjoyable movie that both observes and obeys the languid rhythms of a torrid Italian summer.

Somehow Baumbach manages to find a nugget of humor at even the most painful points.

Superb.

The real star in La La Land is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the “Singin’ in the Rain” era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave...while commenting on them from the sidelines.

Petite Maman is what every film should be: powerfully, even arrestingly original; grounded in emotional truth; hyper-specific; deeply universal; strange; mesmerizing; and not a minute longer than necessary. It is, in short, a small wonder.

Lady Bird is a triumph of style, sensibility and spirit. The girl at its center may not be a heavyweight, but her movie is epic.

This engrossing mystery-comedy peeks through the keyholes of the rich and infamous in a manner both droll and delicious.

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

In American Utopia, Lee brings the same insight and sensitivity to Byrne’s stage show, which bursts forth with an exuberant mixture of optimistic joy and wistful nostalgia.

With its air of intimacy and fractious affections, Shoplifters feels like “The Borrowers” by way of Yasujiro Ozu, a discreetly observed drama about resourcefulness, loyalty and resilience in an era of obscene income inequality and a fatally frayed civic safety net.

Toni Erdmann, it turns out, is Hüller’s movie all the way, with her character not just matching wits with the bumptious, often irritating father, but ultimately coming into her own with the genuine feeling he seems determined to deflect.

No Other Land, the Oscar-nominated documentary (and odds-on favorite to win), is the record of an atrocity: the erasure of a people from the land on which they’ve lived for centuries.

Sandler is so good, so committed and so watchable that, despite everything — Howard’s irrationality, a rogue’s gallery of unpleasant characters, the foreboding of a bad, bad end — you can’t take your eyes off the screen, which Sandler seldom vacates.

This soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.

Although undeniably a western, Stagecoach transcends the genre, as both a character study of the relationships among a socially mismatched crew of stagecoach passengers and an action movie about their attempts to avoid the dangerous Geronimo and his Apache tribe. And that action, by the way, is impressive, even by today's standards. [28 May 2010, p.WE37]

Bazawule’s simple, arrestingly composed frames accumulate into something transcendent and deeply affecting.

Its themes of passion, heartbreak and the inexorable passage of time are eternal.

Tár, the film that wraps around its mesmerizing antiheroine like a fawn-colored cashmere wrap, is less a movie than a seductive deep dive into an unraveling psyche of a woman who’s simultaneously defined by and apart from the world she has so confidently by the tail.

A searing, apocalyptic and finally breathtaking drama.

A movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film.

The Decline . . . of Western Civilization is a bracing primer to just about anything one might want to know about the hard-core punk scene. At the same time, it's remarkably evenhanded, making no judgment on the musical or social standards of the movement. Director Penelope Spheeris neither champions, patronizes nor condescends to the participants' stylized fury. The result is a film that will appeal equally to the furious and the curious, assuming that both enter the arena with an open mind. [10 Nov 1981, p.D2]

Keeper is nonfiction in name only. Unabashedly subjective and dramaturgically conscious, it squeezes reality until the drama collects. Luckily for filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, this reality was juicy stuff.

One of the most extraordinary films of the year.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

If 8½ seems stuck in the early 1960s, it's only superficially so. Somehow, the movie is more than the dated crisis of a naval-contemplating artist. It's about the inability in all of us to make sense of our lives, put it all together and come up with something meaningful.

For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience, and not just for filmgoers with intimate knowledge of the culture it depicts.

His (Tarkovsky's) pictures, and his sounds -- such as the symphonic drip of raindrops in a wooded pond -- tell more than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind.

Arguably one of the two or three best musical films ever made, and, along with Singin' in the Rain, the wittiest and most sophisticated of the '50s Technicolor musicals. [25 June 1987, p.B7]

Beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently.

Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation.

The Class is not just the best film released thus far this year. It may be the most gripping.

Platoon is a triumph for Oliver Stone, a film in which a visceral approach to violence, which has always set him apart, is balanced by classical symmetries and a kind of elegiac distance. This is not the Vietnam of op-ed writers, rabble-rousers or esthetic visionaries, not Vietnam-as-metaphor or Vietnam-the-way-it-should-have-been. It is a movie about Vietnam as it was, alive with authenticity, seen through the eyes of a master filmmaker who lost his innocence there.

I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.

The French actor Alex Descas is mesmerizing in 35 Shots of Rum, where he plays a metro conductor.

A magnificent melodrama that draws both tears and laughter from the everyday give-and-take of seemingly ordinary souls.

Dafoe delivers his finest performance in recent memory, bringing to levelheaded, unsanctimonious life a character who offers a glimmer of hope and caring within a world markedly short on both.

In providing audiences a chance to bear witness to unspeakable suffering as well as dazzling defiance and human dignity, Sissako has created a film that’s a privilege to watch.

The acclaimed director’s Depression-era film ranks among the better-known Little Women adaptations.

The Act of Killing is a must-see.

Spielberg has always demonstrated extraordinary aptitude for filmmaking, but "E.T." is far and away his most satisfying work to date. He knows how to transform the raw material of his childhood into an appealing popular fable. There are sequences that touch you to the quick in mysteriously casual ways

The movie offers one of the great lost pleasures, one we so seldom encounter at the bijou anymore. You watch this monster unreeling in its splendid vitality, its absurd ambition, its wobbly tone, its beauty, its stupidity, its immaturity, its tragedy, its grandeur, and before you know it, close to four hours has blasted by. And when you leave, you seize whoever is up close to you -- friend or foe, stranger or lover -- and begin to talk. You have opinions. You must express yourself. You must be heard. [5 Aug 2001, p.G1]

With empathy and outrage that cut equally deeply, Hittman reminds us: This is a girl’s life in a man’s world.

After slapstick farces as exuberant and hilarious as Sleeper and Love and Death, it comes as a soft, fuzzy, mildly diverting letdown.

With its spectacular scenery, stupefying effects and epic scope, is a dream come true.

On the most surface level, “The Zone of Interest,” which Glazer adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf and Hedwig go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless.

As taut, sleek and guiltily comfortable as the classic Chrysler automobile we see at the beginning, "Quiz Show" is built for entertaining road performance. The facts (at least, the dramatically inconvenient ones) are left on the side of the road. Redford retains the emotional engine of the Van Doren affair and drives this baby all the way—presumably—to the bank.

Magnificently acted, expertly crafted and unerringly sure of every treacherous step it takes, Leviathan is an indictment, but also an elegy, a film set among the monumental ruins of a culture, whether they’re the skeletal remains of boats, a whale’s bleached bones, a demolished building or a trail of lives that are either ruined or hopelessly resigned.

Preserves and resuscitates the hard-boiled genre.

Lasseter and his team plunge the audience into a collective case of empty- nest syndrome, with a dash of mortal terror thrown in for grins. And again, they make it work.

But make no mistake: Hogg’s quirky coming-of-age tale (which teases a forthcoming sequel) is no misty remembrance of bygone days. Rather, it is a clear-eyed reflection on how hindsight — and true art — is always 20/20.

Its cleverness is exceptionally congenial and sustained. [13 Apr 1984, p.B1]

One of Martin Scorsese's most brutal but stunning movies, an incredible, relentless experience about the singleminded pursuit of crime.

The Look of Silence is as beautiful as it is bleak.

From its opening shakedown to its final takedown, “The Secret Agent” wanders a world consumed by corruption.

Lee plays the actors off one another to create a compelling exploration of human nature. South Korea’s official Oscar submission, Burning culminates in a finale so astonishing that it will sear itself into viewers’ memories for years to come.

There is so much going on here, yet the director handles the film’s constellation of themes and sweeping emotion with impeccable assurance and an at-times breathtaking sense of the poetic.

Moolaade, in short, is a movie to rock the soul.

It Was Just an Accident ends twice. Both times, its brilliance can take your breath away. That is, what breath you have left by the third and fourth acts of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s latest relentless road trip, wherein the destination isn’t a place or a thing, but a masterful commentary on power.

Like most of Rohmer’s movies, A Summer’s Tale is comic, humane and much more complicated than it seems at first. The fresh-faced actors, realistic dialogue and naturalistic performances suggest a casual approach, but as the story progresses, the filmmaker’s control is increasingly evident.

Hanson delivers something ever rarer in film culture, not a new film noir but an old-fashioned total movie, somehow of a single piece.

Kryzstof Kieslowski's White...is a continuing testament to the Polish director's poetic mastery. Like all of Kieslowski's works, White articulates a whole language of sensations, images, ironies and mystery -- often with a minimum of dialogue. But it is no rarefied, abstract exercise. The movie...aches with human dimension.

Arguably the best movie of the Astaire-Rogers series, Swing Time is the most consistently entertaining, most imaginatively plotted of their films. [25 Jun 1987, p.B7]

It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.

Breaking Away is a film with a happy and intelligent imagination, crediting the American teenager with more inventiveness than a more mean-spirited popular culture would admit, these conflicts have a charming originality. [03 Aug 1979, p.27]

After Life is really a celebration of before-death: It's a complete rarity, for movies in general, for Washington in specific--pure sweetness of spirt. [8 Sept 1999, p.C9]

Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing.

What’s surprising is that Jonze has taken what could easily have been a glib screwball comedy and infused it instead with wry, observant tenderness and deep feeling.

In Gerwig’s capable hands, though, even the most familiar contours of Little Women feel new, not because she has the temerity to redefine Alcott’s masterpiece, but because she subtly reframes it.

Overflowing with madcap visual flair and following a rambling thread of a plot that seems, at times, more the product of free association than an actual script, The Triplets of Belleville is a triumph of animated style over substance.

It's one heck of a basis for a funny movie.

Thanks to his courage and Rasmussen’s compassion and creativity, “Flee” morphs from a tale of dispossession to a testament to the power of narrative — to overtake a life, and to liberate it.

This is slow, almost languid filmmaking, yet it’s a delight to watch the countless ways in which the library is still capable of lifting us.

With its ingenious structure, seamless visual conceits and mordant humor, Stories We Tell is a masterful film on technical and aesthetic values alone. But because of the wisdom and compassion of its maker, it rises to another level entirely.

It is one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year, and it is also a tragedy that left me weeping for two men, this country and the world.

This is not a happy-go-lucky story, but an old-school fairy tale meant to frighten, confuse and excite.

Some of the characters make more of an impression than others, and the vignettes aren’t always entirely thrilling or well-acted. But Panahi’s movie remains a political coup considering his significant constraints.

Each and every detail accrues to create a vivid, unforgettable portrait, and all are absorbed and reflected by Anna, portrayed by Trzebuchowska with the transparency and wonder of a woman for whom not just history but secular life itself is almost totally abstract.

The documentary would benefit from a few other voices and a wider range of commentary on Goldin’s work, both photographic and societal. That’s not the movie Poitras and Goldin wanted to make, however. And the story they do tell is compelling and distinctive.

A thinking person's horror movie, about real horror and horrifying echoes: The parallels between the Holocaust and the massacres are pronounced.

A major technical accomplishment. But it’s also a major feat of storytelling, one that mentions no dates, place names or famous battles, yet nevertheless manages to evoke a profound sense of connection with its nameless subjects.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

A deliciously diabolical comedy of ill manners and outré palace intrigue.

Halloween is a stab at a derivative minor classic. It's apparent where Carpenter got his horror devices - and a minor misfortune that he hasn't been able to synthesize them in a fresh or exciting way.

The chronological looseness is part of the pleasure of the piece, which magically reassembles in the last reel into something strong, lucid and compellingly powerful.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

A GREAT American movie in a new epic form, The Right Stuff fuses the comic and the heroic to emerge as a knockabout social comedy that also packs a thriller inspirational and -- why deny it?-- patriotic wallop.

Wiseman's approach is to drop you blindly into the middle of the Troisgros milieu and allow details to emerge scene by scene, frame by frame, as if you're watching a photograph come into clear, four-color focus over several hours.

Gracefully moving between the infinite and the practical, the celestial and the implacably grounded, Guzman has created a sensitive, richly textured portrait of time and place that transcends both those conceits.

Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning.

All foreplay and no climax.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

Trier and Reinsve have gifted audiences with a movie that understands the ecstasy of diving into the unknown, the flush of new love, the beauty of connecting amid unspeakable loss.

Its relatively minor imperfections seem more glaring when compared to the near flawlessness of the film's lyrical, scorching start.

Licorice Pizza is at its best — and is genuinely charming — when it’s simply focused on Gary and Alana — two mixed-up kids trying to make their way in a world that feels promising and perilous in equal measure.

Small moments take on larger meaning in this exquisite memoir. That’s as true of the plot — in which nothing terribly significant happens, except life — as it is of the visuals.

An intriguing yarn.

We might go into a Kelly Reichardt movie thinking we’ll be told a story, but we emerge with our consciousness subtly and radically altered.

To say that there is also a monomania to the film is, if anything, an understatement. But it is precisely that sense of tunnel vision that makes Fury Road such a pulse-pounding pleasure.

An austere poem of crime, "Le Samourai" manages to have a grip of an old-fashioned potboiler as well. Not a half-bad combination.

A tough movie to love.

Mirren's finely calibrated performance reveals a complex woman coping with a bewildering world, and Blair's growing sympathy for his beleaguered monarch gradually becomes ours. This nuanced compassion may not impress the real Queen Elizabeth II, but, for us commoners, it makes for a richer experience.

Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly.

The documentary I Called Him Morgan, which charts his brief life and career, offers classic tunes and a vivid history of the New York jazz scene, while never quite managing to sell the drama inherent to its tale.

Its elegiac themes might make All of Us Strangers sound like a bummer, when it’s anything but. This is an intriguing, increasingly mystifying rabbit hole disguised as a romantic drama, with all the sensuous pleasures the genre suggests (not to mention some superfun synth-pop cuts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys).

It must weather some bummy mid-passage exposition, but the movie survives its flaws triumphantly, evolving into a uniquely transporting filmgoing spectacle.

As a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.

Hours, even days later, they may find themselves thinking of Adèle and wondering how she’s doing — only then realizing how completely this fictional but very real creation has winnowed her way into their hearts and minds. That’s great acting. It’s great art. And that’s why Blue Is the Warmest Color is a great movie.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

If Phantom Thread isn’t exactly a narrative triumph, it still manages to deliver, especially as a haunting evocation of avidity, appetite and aesthetic pursuit at its most rarefied.

It's a very funny movie in that sniffy Brit way.

The Souvenir Part II may bring an end to the introduction of a marvelous filmmaker to a wider world. But far more promisingly, it suggests what, with luck, will be an exhilarating next chapter.

May be a fish tale, but its story of the paradox of love -- knowing when to hold on means knowing when to let go -- is profoundly humane and human.

A 160 minute work of sustained brilliance and delicacy.

So full of creativity, so subversive, so alive.

The movie is full of wonderful little touches: Syndrome, the bad guy, is drawn to remind viewers of "Heat Miser" from the classic Christmas cartoon "The Year Without a Santa Claus."

Audiard delivers on and exceeds the promise he evinced in that earlier film, drawing viewers into the densely layered, ruthless ecology of a French prison and, against all odds, making them not mind staying there awhile.

This is wonderful stuff, as far as it goes.

As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills, not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.

A near-perfect film, an artfully crafted, flawlessly acted meditation on love, memory and invented history that’s both deeply personal and politically attuned.

It's not one of his masterpieces, but High and Low fully illustrates why Kurosawa is regarded as Japan's foremost director.

One of the smartest, most inventive movies in memory, it manages to be as endearing as it is provocative.

Even the uninitiated will be hard-pressed to resist the movie's charms, from its likable leading players and its charming Dublin setting to its wistful take on modern love.

Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.

Boynton’s most impressive feat in Big Men is how she takes an impossibly convoluted scenario, makes sense of it and tells a story that’s riveting on its own but also serves as a parable about greed and human nature.

What becomes clear in the course of the movie is that Jarmusch has constructed his own version of a poem, with recurring images and themes that allow him to delve into the nature of commitment, artistic ambition and how inner life is shaped by the tidal pull of place and history.

The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star.

In addition to her exquisite eye for casting, Holmer knows how to film actors and environments in ways that are expressive enough to make up for her minimal dialogue.

Martin Scorsese's obsession with a dubious mystique of masculinity turns Raging Bull into a ponderous work of metaphysical cinematic bull.

United 93 unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a modern-day "Battle of Algiers," with Greengrass exerting superb control of tone, structure and pace...United 93 may be the best movie I ever hated.

Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.

The warmth that courses through American Hustle makes it irresistible, with Russell’s affection for his characters and his sharp-eyed evocation of their recessionary times, honoring their struggle, however dishonest, rather than denigrating it.

Star Wars had all the right stuff, and unlike its confounding progenitor, "2001: A Space Odyssey," it was fairy-tale simple: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," good met evil. [Special Edition]

The movie, while no fun, faces hard truths and asks hard questions.

Though lovely to behold, this film isn't meant to send you home with a song in your heart.

Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. It's the most fully realized working out of his two favorite obsessions: the subjective nature of experience and the psychological mysteries of pair bonding.

Works as both historical allegory and moving family drama.

The Overnighters is commendable for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it allows complex issues to remain complex.

The dynamic between Fletcher and Andrew makes for highly pitched drama, which strains for credibility during two climactic scenes.

To watch "Lives" is not just to enjoy a fabulously constructed timepiece; it's to appreciate a deft cautionary tale.

The sheer joy of letting go as a tale overwhelms your senses and drives the known world away -- that's the story.

Binge-watching the first eight installments before you settle into this one isn’t strictly necessary, but I wouldn’t discourage it, either. They’re that good.

A wonderfully acted, heartwarming family film, it suffers from a goopy score, but not in the least from its potentially stalemated subject matter. Zaillian can make a chess tournament look like the Threepeat.

As a parable on karma, capitalism and Darwinian corporate politics, Two Days, One Night can often feel brutal. As a testament to connection, service, sacrifice and self-worth, it’s a soaring, heart-rending hymn.

There’s no doubt that Killers of the Flower Moon reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leeched of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating.

National Gallery could have used a few more edits; its long run time may limit its appeal. But the film is remarkably engaging and, with close looks at so many important pieces of art, bursting with beauty.

Thanks to Marsh's sensitive storytelling, Man on Wire manages to put Petit's performance into another, more ineffable realm: What began as a caper turned into poetry, and poetry became a prayer.

There are so many good things to say about this film it's hard to find a statement that really nails it. Perhaps we can leave at this: Y Tu Mama Tambien is originality writ large.

For Sama is a before-and-after portrait, both literally and figuratively. What begins as a brash, bold, giddily optimistic love story devolves into something far darker, as viewers begin to question why al-Khateab is willing to endanger her child in the name of doomed principles.

Perhaps the most satisfying and endearing aspect of The Hidden Fortress at this juncture of movie history is that it so persuasively lends meaning to a high adventure format, using the stimulation to enhance ideals of individual valor and group solidarity.

Elle would be too clever by half — not to mention fatally offensive — were it not for Huppert, who in her portrayal of Michèle owns the movie from its opening moments to its bizarre, but not entirely surprising, denouement.

One of the more accomplished and beautiful films released thus far this year.

It spins its wheels in a giddy sort of way, then puts the pedal to the mettle, lays rubber and fairly takes wing.

The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

It’s a good movie, executed with affectionate humor, wistful honesty and tender care.

The Farewell pays delightful, insightful homage to the facades and pretenses nearly everyone adopts in the name of compassion.

None of this would work were it not for the swaggering, high-wire performance of Chalamet.

A gorgeous, magical and melancholy fantasia about the joy and pain of human existence.

Gradually, a story of bittersweet beauty and unexpected tenderness emerges.

Ferguson builds a compelling case of bad judgment, error, stubbornness and arrogance.

Riotous adaptation of Alan Bennett's comedy about monarchal frailty.

Hoss’s breathtaking portrayal, especially in the film’s final minutes, makes it clear why director Christian Petzold has made a habit of working with her.

At 160 minutes, “Magellan” is one of the shortest and most accessible of Diaz’s films, which for the past decade have tended to fall between four and eight hours...But the scale of the film remains resolutely epic, in part because Diaz is patient and in part because he’s insistent on telling this story of conquest and domination on his terms.

Goodbye Solo is visually simple and stunning, especially the haunting nightscapes of Solo's perambulations. But more important, Goodbye Solo is driven by deep feeling and sensitivity. Don't miss it.

Surprisingly, it isn’t heavy-handed, moralizing, polemical or sentimental. And you can enjoy the film without knowing any of that.

Once again demonstrating her own strong, clear vision — not to mention superb control of her craft — Campion proves her ability to illuminate hidden truths and let us see what was hiding in plain sight all along.

The drama is a realistic and methodical meditation on family obligation, personal sacrifice and — of course — the power of architecture. That makes Columbus as lovely to look at as it is to ponder.

The Artist is anything but mute, with a lush orchestral score and a little sonic wink at the the end; fewer movies this year reward listening - and watching - so lavishly.

The Piano is dark, sublime music, and after it's over, you won't be able to get it out of your head.

In a mesmerizing series of images, encounters and delicate juxtapositions, Cameraperson testifies to a world in which it would be clear to see that we’re all connected, if only we took the time to look at one another with reverence and simply listen.

Plenty of movies are wish-fulfillment fantasies, but Kirsten Johnson has created a first: a dread-fulfillment fantasy that brims with love, humor and, of all things, life.

It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining.

A terrific piece of filmmaking. It's taut, believable as it unspools. It's charismatic, with a slow buildup of tension in near-real time that finally explodes into a blast of violence.

The Quiet Girl is that rare thing: a work of storytelling that speaks most loudly when it is saying nothing.

In the last half-hour, the story, like the Japanese, loses its way; lacking any clear-cut goals except survival, the film becomes repetitive. Letters From Iwo Jima is a necessary movie; too bad it's not a great movie.

Whether or not Kaufman’s meticulously accumulated details add up to a grand unified conclusion, there’s no doubt he’s getting at something painfully familiar beneath his movie’s self-conscious artifice.

Viewers who come to this delicate creation with expectations of just another quaint or sad story are in for a surprise.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening unspools like a not-so-minor miracle. It’s a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace.

Shakespearean in tone, epic in scope, it seems more appropriate for grown-ups than for kids. If truth be told, even for adults it is downright strange.

For the most part, the film balances its outrage with objectivity.

A charmer from its first action-packed frames to its over-the-top jailhouse-musical scene during the end credits.

The Little Mermaid is only passable. Even at its highest points, it cannot claim a place next to even the least of the great Disney classics.