The best mainstream film since "E.T.," is an uplifting reminder that Hollywood can still produce truly great entertainment...The plot is so exquisitely developed that divulging anything beyond the basic outline might diminish the joyous surprises that await an audience thirsting for originality in a reactionary medium. [03 July 1985, p.57]

Driving Miss Daisy, about the deepening relationship between a Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black chauffeur, is a luminous joy of a film, heartbreakingly delicate, effortlessly able through indirection to invoke the civil rights era without ever once slipping into portentous pronouncements. [12 Jan. 1990, p.35]

It’s about spycraft, but it goes to the source. If for no other reason, it deserves to be seen for arranging decades of events in the Middle East into a chronology that, to an outsider, makes dreadful sense.

Badlands is one of the great banality-of-evil films. [29 May 1998, p.C9]

The arrival of Raúl Ruiz’s final work, Night Across the Street, brings the total to four, an elegant, clear-eyed bridge game of artists playing their last trump cards.

The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.

Naked is one of the most scorchingly compelling films in years, Mike Leigh's masterpiece, an unflinching vision of civilization in retreat, life as apocalypse. [4 Mar. 1994, p.51]

Vincent and Theo is one of the great Robert Altman films... It's Altman's most structurally conventional film, although it's filled with such trademarks as overlapping conversations. It's also his most personal and deeply felt. [16 Nov 1990, p.81]

If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul.

Angst-ridden, yet graceful, stylish, and optimistic allegory about swerving off one road and finding your way back via another.

Just don't expect the truth. An extremely bent, highly amusing form of the truth, maybe, but not the truth. 24 Hour Party People shares with the current Robert Evans documentary ''The Kid Stays in the Picture'' an awareness that a good anecdote often trumps the facts, but here the cheats are cheekily laid bare.

Riding a mood that's tilted to the jazzy blues that Eddie prefers to Bobby's blasting rock on the car radio, Diamond Men is a sparkly film that's easy to love.

It's brilliantly precise in its detailing, stylishly jagged and sensual by turns, and utterly unpredictable.

In its dark, relentless, devastatingly ironic way, The Pledge is an exhilarating movie, partly because it isn't afraid to be genuinely challenging.

Throughout the history of film, nothing turns campier faster than dinosaur movies. This one will have a much longer shelf life than most.

Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.

Her face is as much a part of her comedic form as her observations are. It's an amazing slapstick instrument, creating a scrapbook of living mug shots.

With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.

A terrific little uppercut of a boxing movie and close to a perfect one.

Stark, haunting, epic, and mournful, The Claim is a mountain of a film.

There's plenty of invention and exuberant vigor in the chopsocky, and Wilson's cool, ironic drollery provides the perfect foil for Chan's heroics.

Ynever seen a documentary quite like this one, and aren't likely to again.

Haunting, powerfully acted, penetratingly written, it's about people coming home -- and not coming home -- to their marriages.

A perfect example of a small, well-made, and (in its central role) rivetingly acted film.

Reveals real feelings.

If there is any message in Tarkovsky's work, although as a poet he would never stoop to anything as banal as a message, it is that life is an internal affair, played out in one's soul, not in public.

In this engaging, understated comedy, it is the journey and not the destination that matters.

Varda's charmingly eccentric amble, wise in its seeming waywardness.

You'll care what happens in this film with more than enough freshness and originality to avoid succumbing to girls-on-the-run cliches.

The Jim Henson folks...come up with another winner.

Nobody's going to think of The Score as trail-blazing, but there's nothing small-time about its dramatic and acting payoff.

In all respects, from choice of material to fullness of execution on every level, The War Zone is an extraordinary piece of work.

The season's brightest piece of counterprogramming.

It's filled with vivid characters and action. Beneath its modesty of gesture, it's one of the year's richest, most humane films.

A witty yet fiery and, in the best sense, provocative play of ideas about freedom of expression.

Bell is utterly persuasive as the boy literally yearning to leap beyond the oppressively apparent confines of his world.

Miraculously, the opera comes off, simultaneously ridiculous and thrilling, in a blaze of pageantry.

Has the impact of a left-right combination to the chin.

The bleakness of Rosetta will not be for all, but it's one of the best films of the year.

It is haunting in its literal and symbolic meanings, which is the powerful, lingering effect of Yellow Asphalt.

A subtly comic, ultimately moving film about modern adult relationships.

Most of all it's the emotional and spiritual arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives ''Before Night Falls'' its power.

Ullmann's film is an achievement of heart and consequence, as full of integrity as Bergman, yet demonstrating more mercy.

A story about the ravages of one war on a single man's soul and psyche becomes an eloquent plea for peace.

It's sweeping yet intimate, stately yet impassioned, stylized yet immediate.

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

While it preserves his baseball feats, it looks beyond them to clarify Greenberg's place in American culture.

It's much closer to a European film in sensibility than to one of Hollywood's factory products.

There was little mirth or innocence in the world that Wharton was able to write her way out of (she was much happier living in Paris), and Davies and his leading lady lift the silks to reveal it as the minefield it was.

A film of great ingenuity and imagination, full of suggestive power, and it deserves to be seen.

Time of Favor, which boasts a haunting score, is an unflinching, complex portrait of a modern Israel that is rarely seen on-screen.

'Titanic'' was a case of a cheeseball story riding terrific effects. The Perfect Storm is in every important way deeper.

What you're not prepared for in Marziyeh Meshkini's astonishing debut film is the way its central image instantly leaps into the pantheon of world cinema with a rightness and an urgency that glue your eyes to the screen.

This is a warts 'n' all portrayal - there's no dodging the feelings of both disgust and amusement.

He's (Dafoe) the stuff bad dreams are made of. He's also the best movie vampire since Schreck's original. He deserves a bloody Oscar.

Has extraordinary depth and insight about the limitations and follies of human beings.

Plays like a dislocated version of ''Death in Venice,'' but in a dryer, higher climate that features exponentially more firepower.

The film's disturbing images are presented matter-of-factly, which makes them more powerful, not less.

It's a meditation on life and death, but it's less somber and more light-handed, subtle, and mischievously funny.

The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.

Another phantasmagorical tale of life among the Nazis, is upon us. This one works much better.

Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

Such moral outrage, apart from the artistry in which it is embedded, tells us that the forces of change are stirring in Iran.

More movies should be so funny and perceptive, with writing this sharp and acting this believable.

Richly compelling.

Richly textured, beautifully acted.

Magically transports the viewer across time and space. As it does so, it becomes a humbling reminder of the universality of the human experience.

A miracle of data retrieval as the grown schoolchildren are measured against their footage from the earlier films.

As a flawed but lovably lionhearted woman, Barrymore triumphantly comes of age as an actress.

Mines laughs from the ways in which its antihero's reductive philosophy consistently goes kerflooey in his face, but there's a weary sadness to it as well.

As bloody as any recent film. But it's shot through with a harsh, stony humor that's invigorating enough to be regarded as a slap back at death.

Like its subject, Pollock is a messy creation, but one whose depth of commitment and high attack keeps it on track.

Cantet's script and direction are flawless, and, matched step-for-step by Jocelyn Pook's mournful score, he builds the tension to near unbearable levels.

The film is rightfully carried by Nico and Dani and under Gay's artful helmsmanship it's carried with remarkable sympathy and believability.

Warm, smart, and funny!

Essential viewing for anyone who wants to know the roots -- and perils -- of modern political dissent.

May not be the best movie ever made about the perils of family life, but it is among the most ruthlessly comic.

Moore's roving essay feels even more urgent now than it did when the jury had to make up an award to honor it at the Cannes film festival in May.

It is Bowie's alter ego as the androgynous Martian rock star that remains, 30 years later, his most enduring artistic achievement.

That commendable sense of balance, which Dolgin and Franco use to approach this family reunion, ultimately makes the finished product devastating.

Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.

Richly allusive and eloquently stylized.

The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.

Earnhart's fundamental compassion toward his subjects elevates a riveting work that feels like a hybrid of ''Crumb'' and ''Nashville,'' with maybe a side of ''King of the Hill'' tossed on the barbecue.

The ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.

In ''Trials,'' Hitchens is almost endearing, stalking Kissinger from one event to the next like a bleary-eyed Michael Moore.

Proves acutely subtle. But its question of what we forgive art in the face of atrocity and immorality is one for the ages.

Roughly translated, Touchez pas au Grisbi means ''don't touch the loot.'' But in literal terms, this film version of Albert Simonin's blockbuster really couldn't care less who ends up with the cash.

An upsetting landmark. Don't take the children.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

Does a terrific job of evoking the electric magic of an extraordinary era.

The best movie Steven Seagal never made. Except that Statham, while just as marked for death, is harder to kill.

The kind of richly layered film that Hollywood seldom attempts, much less brings off. But it's more than brought off here in grand, solid style and beautifully crafted detail.

Resonates with intelligence and a poignancy made more sorrowful by what happened to all of us, but especially to New Yorkers, on that terrible day.

The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Delightful and original, the film conjures up a corner of Paris distinct and specific, yet fairy-tale fanciful.

It is an uncompromising family tale, one that's dark but lyrical and moving in its rendering of the ties that bind even the most dysfunctional families, despite valiant efforts to destroy them.

Poetic, surreal, and curiously powerful.

There's nothing paltry about its poultry.

Souffle-light and airily playful.

This is art paying homage to art.

Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

From start to finish there's a shimmer of discovery about it - our discovery of it, Coppola's discovery of how much she can do.

Hollywood filmmaking at its best, brimming over with feeling, texture, spirit, and several kinds of keenness that transmute experience into big pop myth.

Intimidated by the words "avant-garde film"? Then hand yourself over, without reservation, to the skills of documentarian Martina Kudlacek and her astonishingly accessible primer, In the Mirror of Maya Deren.

lluminating and exceptional docu-portrait.

A bleak road movie that often ambles. But its many moments of poetic grace make this haunting and harrowing journey a rewarding one.

As savage and as epic as film gets.

It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''

Awash in strangeness, a poem that details what it's like to be 13 at the end of a millennium.

You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre.

The filmmakers are smart to cut between their primary interview and later footage of Junge watching that interview and offering further commentary -- living footnotes, as it were.

A rarity among modern movies: a coming-of-age tale without cliche or sentimentality. Bolstered by a luminous lead performance from Lauren Ambrose.

Smart, unpredictable, and alive with the energies of actors who clearly are enjoying being stretched by their material.

I have seen the future of Hollywood movie stardom, and its name is America Ferrera.

More a bleak docu-melodrama than an esoteric morality play.

Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.

Sensual, funny, and moving film.

A tender genuflection to the women's energies that keep that spinning world from keeling over.

It's lively, edgy, full of zigs and zags, juicy performances, and offbeat fun.

If you thought ''Moulin Rouge,'' or, for that matter, ''Tommy,'' was trippy, Hedwig, with its glorious convergence of material and performer, will show you what you've been missing.

Like a whacked pinata, it spills over with treasures - and one of the best things to fall out is Steve Buscemi, doing a riotously meek variation on the mad-scientist-with-cracked-lenses-and-lab-coat bit.

Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.

It's slick, sleek, and stylish, and if it doesn't quite redefine cool, it certainly offers a snazzy update.

Sad, funny, brilliant.

The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.

Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.

A lively, invigorating comedy: a near-perfect mix of fresh characters, well-cast voices, superb visuals, and a fast-paced, fantasy-adventure plot.

The film is conducted in a delirious cinema-verite style; most of what you see has a brutal, you-are-there immediacy. You're not merely watching history, you're engulfed by it.

The cinematic equivalent of a high, arching rainbow of a three-pointer from midcourt.

A slick, twisty, top-of-the-line crime thriller with gorgeously sensual textures and a screenful of wickedly faceted performances.

It's the best drug-busting movie since ''The French Connection.''

One of the most compelling films the Holocaust has yet produced.

A rambunctious joy.

The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.

An inventive, propulsive office thriller.

What Christlieb and Kijak do so well is keeping these folks from not seeming like loons.

The movie's strength is its refusal to offer easy answers.

The film makes more apparent than ever that Howard is quite underrated as a filmmaker, possibly because he's been hidden in full view in the mainstream for so long.

As full of joy as pain, it's a perspective we need to see more often.

Superior and original filmmaking. You won't be able to take your eyes off it.

The film's bountiful warmth and gusto do their work. By the end, we feel part of the family, too.

Serendipity returns us, if only for a couple of hours, to the Manhattan of our dreams.

It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.

It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.

It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.

Elaborately layered movie about schemes and more schemes that pile up faster than chips on a blackjack table. The other half is realizing, about halfway through the film, that you won't figure it out until it's over.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

A quirky, welcome addition to Disney's cavalcade of animated stars.

Whatever portion of the alienated teen angst championship Thora Birch left unclaimed after ''American Beauty,'' she nails down brilliantly in Ghost World.

Fresh, original, and arresting.

As goofy action comedies go, Shaolin Soccer is one of the best.

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

It's Cronenberg's finest film, it's star Ralph Fiennes's riskiest role, it's a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson.

Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.

The most disorienting and trippiest data-retrieval caper in years.

A comedy, and for all its cliches and clumsiness, close to a great one.

A tremendous human drama, with each stage of its characters' journey a white-knuckle thriller in miniature.

Utterly adorable.

It's spookily touching to see this massed group of former rock gods gathered to honor one of their fallen. Bald spots and graying shags predominate; the giant velvet lapels of 1969 have given way to sensible sport coats; the granny glasses are for real.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.

The opening 15 minutes of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are so well crafted that they restore your faith in commercial cinema.

Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.

The triptych is a device but never a gimmick: three windows into one fractured soul.

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.

The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

As sagas of endurance in the face of ridiculous odds go, this story is up there with Shackleton and ''Into Thin Air.''

As casually insensitive and careless as you might expect from a film of this era, but it's also surprisingly crafty about finding ways to incite discussion

A straight-up drama and thus the only film in "The Trilogy" not forced into a genre straitjacket -- suspense thriller ("On the Run") or farce ("An Amazing Couple") -- "Life" is also the finest of the three. This isn't a coincidence.

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.

One of the most enjoyable movies I've seen lately, but it has a biting knowledge of that which history gives and history takes away.

Eloquent and unapologetically cute.

Despite its ultimate nuttiness, has a quiet, consuming power that sneaks up on you and doesn't go away. This is something new and ambitious for Von Trier: a work of compassion.

Ultimately, Bingenheimer seems underwhelmed with himself. The people who know him say, in the movie, that he's a relic. Mayor of the Sunset Strip makes heartbreakingly clear what a glorious relic Bingenheimer is.

The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months.

Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.

Turns out to be one of the finer peeks into the creative process of staging a play. Granted, that's a tiny genre, and the film's core audience -- theater majors and the people who love them -- is narrow. The lessons, however, are big.

MC5 is everything a rockumentary should be and usually isn't. Then again, MC5 was everything a rock band should be and usually isn't.

What an amazing presence Gorintin has. Never mind her hunched back and white hair, she's no crone. She makes Eka needy for happiness but susceptible to heartbreak. It's a great performance, full of both joy and the quiet, disappointing parts of being alive that come with knowing change is part of life.

Maddin's movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.

A definitive, low-tech stomping of every sci-fi clone that has sprung up in the original's wake.

Oasis is that rare miraculous whirlwind romance that moves from attempted rape to reverence without kicking up a lot of dust.

I don't usually make recommendations of this kind, but if you or your kids have gone to a burger joint in the last few weeks, you really do need to see this movie.

"No God and no religion can survive ridicule," wrote Mark Twain, but for once the sage of Hannibal was wrong.

[Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.

A much better movie than the one it honors.

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

The film is at its most quietly powerful, though, when telling the story of a group of African-American high school kids who took their discontent to the highest court in the land.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.

Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.

Adults should find its simmering drama at least as compelling as teens will, even if parental figures are only slightly more present here than in a " Peanuts" comic strip.

The director's cut has been getting a much warmer critical reception than the original release, but not necessarily because it's significantly better.

Turns out to be a grade-A B-movie that grounds its thrills in particulars of time, place, and character, so that when the time comes to make the leap into the wholly preposterous, we do so willingly. This is a movie that earns our trust -- and then happily abuses it.

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

The film is startlingly even-handed.

It's hugely entertaining.

As superbly crafted -- as good -- as this movie is, Condon never really owns up to the cloud of pessimism at its center.

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.