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.