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.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has perfectly wedded form to function by filming Boogie Nights in a style suggesting the grainy texture of porn and the ambivalence of the era.

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition.

Almodovar is adept at weaving together strands you'd never guess would match.

It took the German restorers four years to ready this print using dupe negatives and old prints found in archives around the world. Their work speaks for itself. Each frame of this classic is drop-dead stunning, the more so now that the movie no longer hiccups its way across the screen.

A gripping thriller whose terror -- unfortunately -- comes from real life.

It leaves the port of enterprise and arrives on the far shore of art.

The sunny, funny, toe-tapping Lagaan is the answer to those who ask why they don't make movies like they used to: They do, but in India.

Masterful.

For film buffs and Lynch fans, this is a glorious high.

A sunny-looking movie about the darkest paranoia.

Borderline brilliant. Tackles the war on drugs from a kaleidoscope of perspectives.

Universally appealing story that plays as well now as it did on opening day a half-century ago. Maybe better.

Normally the sound in movie theaters is of popcorn crunching. But the sound at theaters where Central Station is showing is of hearts breaking.

One of the freshest, richest, most original films to come out of Hollywood in a very long time.

A tart, funny and tremendously sobering movie about the deepest recesses of personal unhappiness.

An adorable, infectious work of true sophistication.

Steven Spielberg's best war film -- and one of the two or three best movies the director has made.

Gloriously inventive, delightfully nutty comic treasure is unlike anything you've ever seen. It's lunatic.

Handsome, passionate and fun. It's everything we go to the movies for.

Turns everything we know about the contemporary world on its head, and substitutes it with one in which spirits, monsters, magicians and animals mix it up in a carnival of energy, good humor and freewheeling illusion.

One of the most original and ultimately confounding mind games to reach the screen since "The Usual Suspects."

Garbus spent three years patiently mining for beauty in the ugliest of environments. The remarkable result stands as a challenge to anyone who would have seen only the worst and walked right by.

As darkness falls over the movie landscape comes the year's darkest and best movie of them all - Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams.

An insanely delicious animated feature.

The most emotionally satisfying because, in addition to having both more intimate drama and more spectacular battles, it resolves all of the issues raised before.

A masterpiece? Probably. Ingenious? Absolutely! Unforgettable? I'll see you at the 10th-year anniversary.

It's said to be an autobiography, but that pertains only in the loosest sense. It's a comedy. It's a 1920s silent movie. It is practically indescribable. And it is pure genius.

A marvel of character-driven drama that no serious filmgoer should miss.

The best comedy of 2004. In fact, it's so far the best movie of the year.

The most gorgeous movie of the year. This smashing martial-arts romance from Chinese director Zhang Yimou is stunning in other ways, too, like the eroticism that ripples just beneath the surface.

Brilliant. [24 December 1997, p. 24]

Based on a true story, the movie has abundant humor and uplift - but it's a heartbreaker of extraordinary dimension.

Exquisitely moving story.

You can reexperience the humor and magic -- and the essence of Streisand -- in this William Wyler classic.

This audience-pleaser is smart and acerbic. Jaoui has an uncanny ear - as director, co-writer and part of the inspired ensemble cast - for human foibles, self-deception, celebrity worship and female body issues.

The biggest little movie of the year - and one of the best ever about the news media.

Gently unfolds into an epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.

A generation-spanning journey that feels both comfortingly familiar and excitingly original.

What a movie! This is how the medium seduced us originally.

In the end, it's a sweeping, important film that overturns everything you learned in school about the birth of this nation.

Once in a great while there's a movie that's so funny, infectious and welcoming - a movie that makes you feel so good about America and the people in it - you just want to climb inside the screen and live there. That's the case with Dave Chappelle's Block Party - part comedy, part concert film, part avant-garde experiment, and all of it a joy.

Powerfully uplifting precisely because it's so horrifying.

Feuerzeig's film - everything a good documentary should be - is a story of family, friendship, art and fame, as seen through the prisms of exceptional beauty and deepest pain.

If you've had a hole in your heart since "Everybody Loves Raymond" ended, Tom Caltabiano's low-key documentary about star Ray Romano ought to fill the gap nicely.

It's a white-knuckler all the way, with most of that tension coming from the smallest facial expressions exchanged in uneasy silence between compatriots who knew what they were getting into, but were nevertheless unprepared for the moral and emotional fallout of their patriotic actions.

Whether the movie will make you believe a shocking-orange stock car has a future with a lavender Carrera, it's more fun to follow than a televised freeway chase.

America's favorite superhero reappears in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, and all we can say is, "Man, oh Man of Steel, it's good to have you back."

Andrew Bujalski's considerable gifts begin with his deep appreciation of the miserable, hilarious awkwardness of real life.

A movie-movie of the first rank.

Though Borat has been likened to "Jackass," there's a huge difference. The "Jackass" movies are about extreme stunts. Borat is about interaction and gullibility, and its success is unique to both Cohen and to this one-time-only movie.

It's the perfect antidote to overprocessed entertainment, for moviegoers of any age.

In the year of the animated movie, this one soars above them all.

Hudson, taking over the role of Effie played on stage by Jennifer Holliday, is in charge of Dreamgirls from her opening scene, blowing away Grammy-winner Beyoncé Knowles, Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx and anyone else who gets in her way.

"Letters" isn't about numbers or the battle or even the morality of war. It's about the sanctity of life and how we value our own.

A critic trots out the word "masterpiece" at his own peril, but there it is.

The incredibly moving post-9/11 drama Reign Over Me proves that behind the funny guy facades of former standup comedians Mike Binder and Adam Sandler are a pair of very serious talents.

A gorgeous, wonderfully inventive computer-animated comedy.

It's action-packed, darker, more epic and thankfully schmaltz-free. And it's the best "Harry Potter" film yet.

A great big sloppy kiss of entertainment for audiences weary of explosions, CGI effects and sequels, sequels, sequels.

This year’s foreign language Oscar scandal – there is always at least one – is the snub of director Cristian Mungiu’s disturbing, masterful realist drama following two college roommates as they carry out plans for one’s black market abortion in Communist Romania.

Joachim Trier's energetic, inventive debut takes such a novel approach to well-worn themes that it makes most movies look downright lazy.

Twisted, tortured, terrifying - and terrific.

A film that is both deceptively modest and deeply resonant.

The result is an often-anguished monologue built on pride, despair and self-defense. Accuracy aside, Tyson does work hard to analyze his own, clearly complex character. So while we only get half the picture, it makes for consistently compelling viewing.

What you'll remember most will be Renner's remarkably complex commander. By the time we finally figure him out, it's become clear we've witnessed a star-making performance, in a movie that deserves to stand as one of the defining films of the decade.

While the vocal performances of Hanks, Allen and company make up a perfect ensemble, and its visual leaps astound, TS3's real power sneaks up on you.

Gyllenhaal is charming and makes unexpected choices in her performance, but this is Bridges' show, and he's as Best Actor-worthy as he's ever been.

These three films (adapted from David Peace's novels by different directors), each a singularly gripping work, together form a towering and emotionally complex achievement.

If he has overlooked your favorites, have faith: There’s plenty left in the trunk for that promised encore.

The new Star Trek is more than a coat of paint on a space-age wagon train. It's an exciting, stellar-yet-earthy blast that successfully blends the hip and the classic.