It’s a great, expansive, deeply humanist work, angry but empathetic to its core. It gestures toward the end of the working world we know — and to the rise of the machines.

I suspect that, if nothing else, this astoundingly beautiful picture will stand the test of time.

It’s a series of moving paintings, tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory. It’s sui generis. It’s the damnedest thing.

His [Sidney Lumet] touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it’s hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling.

It’s funny and inspiring and harsh and depressing. It’s steeped in existential dread. I don’t know how Birbiglia pulled it off, but he gets the minutiae of an improv-comedy show thrillingly right while using the form to build a kind of allegory of the corrosive effects of capitalism.

Kids will be enchanted, adults will be enraptured. It’s somehow light as air yet overwhelming, both ineffable and unforgettable.

You should see Happy Feet--not only because it's stupendous, but also because it features the best dancing you'll see on the screen this year.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.

The most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil war since Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers."

Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.

Ferrari is elegant and restless, with a sense throughout that something horrific might be lurking around each corner. And when the director straps his cameras on those cars and sends them on their way, the picture transforms into something more visceral and chaotic, a fever dream (or maybe a nightmare) of speed and smoke.

For all its portentousness, this is the best Harry Potter picture yet. In some ways, it improves on J.K. Rowling’s novel, which is punishingly protracted and builds to a climactic wand-off better seen than read.

I watch The Old Guard and try to imagine a new world, one where other comic-book movies are this well made and breathtaking.

It’s an inclusive experience and a gorgeous tale of metaphysical Afrofuturism. For what it is, it’s great. The question once more is: How does she top this?

The Avengers is both campy and ­reverential. Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.

You've seen the rest; now see the best.

For grown-ups, the film will touch something deeper: the heartfelt wish that childhood memories will never fade.

That drifting, elegiac quality (which at times may recall his once-neglected, now-classic Jackie Brown) is the film’s great strength. There are several major set-pieces — some hilarious, some creepy, one absurdly violent — that will get people talking, but perhaps the most powerful is a lengthy, seemingly aimless one that comes smack dab in the middle.

It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.

It’s a work of masterful and almost unbearable melancholy.

Every scene adds another onion-skinlike layer, adding density and mass so slowly that you hardly notice the emotional weight of it all until it is suddenly overwhelming.

Assayas’s pace is easy, his structure linear: no tricky flashbacks, no jagged cuts. There’s so little in the way of histrionics that it’s hard to put one’s finger on why the film is so terrifically intense — except that each actress is, in her own peculiar way, preternaturally high-strung, able to convey momentous emotional stakes without raising her voice above the pitch of conversation.

It’s extremely moving and thrilling and it will both make and ruin your day.

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is huge and scary, moving and funny--another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.

It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

Avatar may be derivative, but it’s not insincere. Cameron clearly feels every beat of the story along with his viewer. He lets us discover Pandora through Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) eyes, first as a fearsome, terrifying place, then as a land of unimaginable awe and delight. [2022 re-release]

Across the Spider-Verse looks incredible, even better than the groundbreaking first installment, but what’s truly impressive about it is how willing it is to entrust its storytelling to its animation.

This teeming, tear-duct-draining, exhaustingly inventive, surreal animated comedy is going to be a new pop-culture touchstone. In all kinds of ways it’s a mind-opener.