The overall result is a romantic comedy that indulges fantasies, calms insecurities (can an ordinary bloke stack up?), and breaks and mends hearts with surgical precision.

It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.

Washington can bank on an Oscar nomination for the most forceful work of his career.

One of the most skillful, mesmerizing, tense and satisfying time-warp thrillers ever made.

Gorgeous, fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful.

The best movie I've seen this year.

Film makers Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker dig deep into the story and its ramifications, exposing how the twin evils of racism and anti-Semitism combined to foment institutional injustice, and led — if a silver lining could be found — to the triumphs of the civil-rights movement two and three decades later.

Among the funniest and most satisfying films I've seen in years.

A juicy noir stew of amorality that's the best thing since "Chinatown."

Levinson is so skillful at developing personalities, even among the story's would-be villains, that by the halfway point of the movie, every gesture and expression has unexpected depth and texture. The performances are across-the-board superb.

The stop-the-presses news from The House of Mirth is the number of fine performances from people you never knew had it in them.

It's an uplifting movie about the rewards of perseverance and community.

Schrader and Nolte are both at the height of their expressive powers in a film that, in its concentration and sobriety, leaves a lasting impression.

One of the most emotionally devastating movies of the decade.

Don't miss The Fast Runner. If you do, you will deprive yourself of not only one of the most intriguing feature-film projects in decades and enough plain-spoken anthropology for three credits at Harvard, but one of the most flat-out entertaining movies of the year.

"Amadeus is about as close to perfection as movies get," I wrote in 1984. Now, it's 20 minutes closer.

At times, Chicago has the feel of a revue, with the major characters taking turns at their own show-stopping numbers. If it's too much of a good thing, I say, bring it on.

The Two Towers moves faster, covers more ground, has more action and -- with the introduction of the marvelous character Gollum -- packs some much-appreciated laughs.

As joyously energetic now as the day it arrived.

May be the best movie of the year.

Pure, eye-popping pleasure.

Beaming back on screens for its 20th anniversary, holds up spectacularly well.

It's an antidote to complacency. The question is, whom is it trying to wake up?

Here is something great and startling -- not necessarily the kind of comforting, consensus-creating film that wins Oscars, but unquestionably a movie that will live in the history of the medium.

A great movie -- and the best movie ever about the '70s rock era.

With its agile, clever script and winning characters, Toy Story 2 is that rare thing -- an excellent children's movie with no upper age limit.

Smith's gleeful, touching documentary records the agony and the ecstasy of realizing your dream, and intangible ways that such dreams help keep people alive.

A daring, teeth-grinding experience that doesn't let the viewer rest easy.