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The 12 Best Movie Critics of All Time, Ranked 

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Film critics are tasked with honesty, — and they are often seen as responsible for informing moviegoers of whether they should part with their hard-earned money or not. This has been the case from the prime of TV's Siskel & Ebert to the rise of Rotten Tomatoes.

Through the decades, there have been many movie critics who have made a particularly significant impact in the world of film, and each of these are worthy of mention. Each of these critics have left a lasting impression on moviegoers across the world, and an influence on film itself.

12 Joe Morgenstern

Writing as a film critic for almost twenty years at Newsweek, Joe Morgenstern made a name for himself as an authority in film. He went on to write for The Wall Street Journal for almost another thirty years. Morgenstern won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2005 for his work in film and television criticism.

RELATED: 10 Underrated Movies Recommended by Gene Siskel One of his claims to fame during his tenure at Newsweek is that he wrote a negative opinion of the film Bonnie and Clyde , but after careful consideration, published a retraction in a subsequent issue of the magazine. Which served to work as a great marketing opportunity for the film, noting that it caused a renowned film critic to change his opinion on the quality of the film.

11 Mark Kermode

An widely published critic, musician, radio and podcast host, Mark Kermode is a name many film buffs are familiar with. Kermode began his film critic writing career in Manchester's City Life magazine, then moving on to Time Out and NME in London. He has also written for The Independent , Vox , Empire , Flicks among others.

RELATED: 12 of Gene Siskel's Favorite Movies Ever In addition to his truly prolific career in writing, Kermode is also a double bass player and has played in various rockabilly bands. Kermode became chief film critic for The Observer in 2013. In 2014, he named The Babadook the best film of the year. His favorite film is The Exorcist .

10 Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris was a lover of film. Writing for the magazine, Film Culture , and then eventually moving to write for The Village Voice . Some regarded his writing as elitist, but was undeniably one of the most impactful and respected in his field. Eventually, he wrote for The New York Observer and then taught as a professor of film at Columbia University until he retired in 2011, a year before his death.

Sarris was married to fellow film critic Molly Haskell . Sarris claimed that for thirty years, if anyone were to ask what his favorite film was, his answer was unvaried: The Earrings of Madame de... , by Max Ophuls . Sarris consistently referred to this film as the most perfect film ever made.

9 James Agee

James Agee was an accomplished novelist, journalist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, and film critic. In the 1940s, he became one of the most widely known film critics as he wrote for Time Magazine . He wrote for Fortune , The Nation , and Life Magazine , as well.

RELATED: Behind the Scenes: 10 Great Films About Filmmaking That Aren't ENTOURAGE In 1958, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family . Additionally, he is well-known as the screenwriter for such revered film classics as The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter .

8 André Bazin

In his unseasonably short life, André Bazin was nevertheless a prolific critic and theorist of film. As the co-founder of the film magazine Cahiers du cinema , he regularly would provide criticism and feedback on films of that era.

Bazin's passion for realism often conflicted with other film theorists of his time. The influential voice was silenced to soon, when Bazin died of leukemia at age 40 in 1958.

7 Molly Haskell

Author and feminist film critic, Molly Haskell has been active in the field since the 1960s. Writing for publications such as The New York Times , The Guardian, Esquire, and many others, she has established a legacy as one of the most influential of all critics. Her most famous book is the searing, incisive From Reverance to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies .

On top of reviewing film and stage for decades, she is also an accomplished author with over a half dozen books written on the topic of film and film criticism. In 2019, she was the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of the Year.

6 François Truffaut

Not only was François Truffaut an esteemed and influential film critic, but he also was, of course, a director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave, and remains to this day one of the greatest icons in the French film industry.

RELATED: 'The 400 Blows' and 9 More of the Best French New Wave Movies, According to IMDb His career in film speaks for itself. He served as a director to over twenty films, an actor in over fifteen films, and a producer to at least five. He has over a dozen written books credited to his name ( Hitchcock/Truffaut is an essential read for all fans of film).

5 Vincent Canby

Vincent Canby was an accomplished writer who served as the premier film critic for The New York Times from the late 1960s until the early 1990s, moving only then to be their main theater critic from 1994 until 2000, when he passed away. Before the Times , he wrote briefly for the Chicago Journal of Commerce , then another brief stint at Variety .

Canby was known to be a supporter of filmmakers with a specific style, such as Stanley Kubrick , Spike Lee , and Woody Allen . Additionally, he was known to have a highly negative view of films that were generally well received, such as Blazing Saddles , Rocky , Rain Man , among others. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, Canby was truly a master with words, and will forever remembered in the world of film and theater.

4 Leonard Maltin

Film critic, published author and editor, podcast guest and host, noted television host... and Guinness World Record Holder?! Yes, Leonard Maltin holds the world record for the shortest movie review, which consists of his review of the 1948 film Isn’t It Romantic in which he merely stated: “No”.

RELATED: 9 Movies Roger Ebert Hated, But Audiences Loved

Voicing himself in South Park and The Simpsons (he also played himself in Gremlins 2 ) and writing or editing over 20 books, Maltin is not only accomplished, but he is beloved by all, being honored by the National Board of Review, the Telluride Film Festival, the Los Angeles City Council, and many others.

3 Gene Siskel

Most famous for being half of the duo of Siskel & Ebert , Gene Siskel has a very long history of providing the world with his opinion on film. He began his career writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1969. From there, he hosted a review program with Roger Ebert until his death in 1999.

In 1998, Siskel was diagnosed with a brain tumor and underwent immediate surgery to remedy the issue. Despite briefly returning to the show, in February 1999, he decided to take a leave of absence to allow himself to recover, only to pass away from complications 3 days later. His legacy will forever and always get two thumbs way up from friends and fans alike.

2 Pauline Kael

A critic from an earlier era than some of these others, Pauline Kael was one of the most influential film critics of her era. She was known as witty, biting, and being overtly opinionated, but still focused on getting her voice heard. She was known for regularly disagreeing with her contemporaries.

RELATED: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Movie Critic’ Is Set in 1977, But It’s Not About Pauline Kael

Writing for The New Yorker for over twenty years, Kael created a lasting impression with critics of several generations. Despite a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in the 1980s, she continued to write for New Yorker until 1991, when she announced her retirement.

1 Roger Ebert

When it comes to movie critics, the one name that is recognizable above all else is the truly unforgettable and inspirational Roger Ebert . His career lasted nearly a half-century, and his impact has lasted long after his death in 2013. He paved the way for virtually every critic who's followed.

Whether he was writing for the Chicago Sun-Times or hosting his widely beloved television series sharing his thoughts on film, Ebert was a worldwide treasure. He was the first film critic to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in 1975. While he may be gone, he will never be forgotten and will always be loved for what he brought to the world of film criticism.

NEXT: 15 Great Underrated Movies Recommended by Roger Ebert

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The 25 Best Movie Critics of All Time

Everyone else's opinions are optional.

Image via Complex Original

As self-ran blogs and online message boards continue to dominate pop culture conversations, one old adage seems more apt than ever: Everyone's a critic.

The days when new movies were reviewed exclusively by knowledgeable film scholars are gone. Anyone who knows how to navigate Wordpress can publish their written views about the latest art-house film, popcorn flick, or costume drama. And, chances are, somebody's going to read it.

The most frustrating thing about this online renaissance—aside from suffering ignorant comments from trolls—is the way it trivializes the grade-A essays and critiques penned by folks whose entire lives have been dedicated to cinema studies.

In our own humble ways, we operate this Pop Culture channel utilizing the fine examples left by the greatest women and men of film criticism, albeit without losing sight of the modern vibes of 21st century Internet methodologies. And by "the greatest," we're referring to The 25 Best Movie Critics of All Time . Anyone who takes cinema seriously is advised to read their work.

RELATED: The 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes RELATED: The 100 Best Movies of the Complex Decade RELATED: 20 Pieces of Hollywood Trivia That Will Blow Your Mind!

Written by Matt Barone ( @MBarone )

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25. David Edelstein

Publications: Slate , New York Post , The Village Voice , Boston Phoenix , The New York Times , Rolling Stone , Vanity Fair , Variety , New York Read Reviews Here

As filmgoers, we obviously prefer good movies over bad ones, but when it comes to reviews, it's always more fun to read a tear-down of a truly crappy movie. Few critics are able to eviscerate cinema's dregs quite like New York 's champion of snark, David Edelstein. It's exactly that brand of written scorn that immortalized Edelstein during the heyday of Saw and Hostel , wholly unpleasant horror movies that he famously dubbed "torture porn."

24. Kim Newman

Publications: City Limits , Sight and Sound , Empire Read Reviews Here

Highbrow movie critics have a tendency to downplay horror movies, and unfairly so. Kim Newman, on the other hand, has made a career out of championing the weirdest, most overlooked, and decidedly one-of-a-kind gore flicks, creature features, and every other kind of scare flick.

Hailing from London, Newman also moonlights as a horror fiction writer, but it's his regular Empire column, "Kim Newman's Video Dungeon," that still provides the 28-year veteran's most anticipated writings. Everything from Lucio Fulci pictures to schlock like Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks the Same  (yes, that's a real movie) gets the Dungeon treatment.

Those interested in catching up with Newman's pro-genre narratives should start with his massive, brilliantly comprehensive book Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s .

23. Wesley Morris

Publications: The Boston Globe , Grantland Read Reviews Here

Wesley Morris' resume speaks for itself. First, there's the college he attended: Yale University. Second, and most importantly, there's that measly honor he was bestowed with last year: the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Just imagine the sobs and head-smacks happening inside The Boston Globe 's office when Morris announced that he was leaving the newspaper to join Bill Simmons' Grantland full-time and become its biggest on-staff movie head.

22. Mike D'Angelo

Publications: Las Vegas Weekly , The Village Voice , Variety , Time Out New York , Nerve (website), Esquire Read Reviews Here

Mike D'Angelo caught onto the power of online film criticism way before anyone else. Back in 1995, he started the blog The Man Who Viewed Too Muc h , a popular cyber hub for D'Angelo's accessible yet brainy reviews. Through the success of that site, he scored a full-time gig with Time Out New York and handled a monthly column in Esquire .

These days, he's back on the World Wide Web via AV Club's recurring "Scenic Routes," where D'Angelo breaks down one key scene from a noteworthy film in extensive detail.

21. Todd McCarthy

Publications: Variety , The Hollywood Reporter Read Reviews Here

Movie junkies who impatiently wait for the first reviews of prestige pictures and pricey blockbusters should know Todd McCarthy's name well. Beginning in the late 1970s, McCarthy spent more than 30 years writing reviews for Variety , meaning his takes were, more often than not, the earliest published reactions to big studios' latest releases. And in that, he became a major authority whose dry, clinical observations helped to either build buzz or deliver a film DOA.

20. Glenn Kenny

Publications: The Village Voice , Premiere , The Auteurs (website), MSN (website) Read Reviews Here

Reading Glenn Kenny's reviews and essays is like being in a film class, but without the dry chafing of academia. As astute as he is witty, the former Premiere  critic has a strong knack for connecting current movies to old classics.

On his highly recommended blog, Some Came Running , Kenny regularly posts long, knowledgeable analyses of vintage films that draw insightful connections to today's pictures. In early January, for example, Kenny used the racial debate surrounding Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained to reflect upon D.W. Griffith's 1915 controversy magnet The Birth of a Nation .

19. Dana Stevens

Publication: Slate Read Reviews Here

To best appreciate Slate 's Dana Stevens, and in an effort to show her unpredictability and dedication to her own convictions, let's cite a few of her more recent reviews. As most of her peers were praising Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained , Stevens reacted from a place of inner disgust : "Tarantino’s intent may have been to showcase the horrors of slavery, but there’s something about his directorial delectation in all these acts of racial violence that left me not just physically but morally queasy."

But, at the same time, she's able to embrace the splattery weirdness of genre maverick Don Coscarelli's absurdist delight John Dies at the End , writing, "The story’s rabbit holes got so deep that I can’t actually tell you whether the movie’s title is a spoiler or not, but I loved John Dies at the End for so confidently whisking the viewer to a place where the question 'Well, did he die or didn’t he?' seems hopelessly un-nuanced and square."

18. Vincent Canby

Publications: Variety , The New York Times Read Reviews Here

During his 24-year run as the chief film critic for The New York Times , Vincent Canby's (1924-2000) words wielded the power of mighty swords. If he chastised a foreign or independent movie, which he so often did, said film didn't stand a chance of catching on in the Big Apple. Take British director Terence Davies, for example, who made two pictures that Canby ridiculed in print and inadvertently prevented from receiving healthy American distribution.

His reviews didn't read like scholarly texts; rather, Canby's writing favored whip-smart humor. When covering a young, seriously bulked-up Arnold Schwarzenegger, he described the Austrian bodybuilder as ""something the actor might want to shed in order to slip into something more comfortable."

17. Philip French

Publications: The Times , The Observer , Sight and Sound Read Reviews Here

Over in England, Philip French is a loud voice among film critics. In fact, he's arguably the UK's greatest living movie analyst. And if French has an area of untouchable expertise, it's in the cowboys-and-spurs sect of cinema: Originally published back in 1977, French's definitive book Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre is regarded as the greatest book ever written on the subject. And, best of all, you don't need to know Sergio Leone's birthday off the top of your head to appreciate the genre, thanks to French's lively writing.

16. Dilys Powell

Publications: The Sunday Times , Punch

Check those publication names above—far cries from the worldwide notoriety of periodicals like The New York Times , right? That's why the late Elizabeth Dilys Powell (who dropped her first name when writing) isn't frequently referenced when people discuss their favorite movie critics.

She worked in a vacuum of sorts, and her self-aware, pithy style of writing wasn't universally acknowledged until after her death in 1995. The source of her posthumous respect: cinephiles acquainting themselves with her sprawling, though now hard to find, book The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films .

15. Lisa Schwarzbaum

Publications: The Boston Globe , Entertainment Weekly Read Reviews Here

Earlier this week, the face of Entertainment Weekly began an unexpected face-change when Lisa Schwarzbaum, one of the magazine's two in-house movie critics (the other being Owen Gleiberman), announced that she's leaving the post after 22 acclaimed, productive years. It's a real blow to the glossy, easily consumed mag, since Schwarzbaum's loose, conversational reviews are, on a weekly basis, one of EW 's strongest components.

14. Manny Farber

Publications: The New Republic , Time , The Nation , New Leader , Cavalier , Artforum Read Reviews Here

Manny Farber (1917-2008) had a low tolerance for high art. Which isn't to say that the Arizona native had bad taste—on the contrary, Farber possessed a brave, against-the-grain fondness for otherwise frowned-upon fringe cinema. Most of his peers couldn't be bothered by the genre trappings of anti-prestige artists like Laurel and Hardy, Don Siegel, and Andy Warhol, but Farber, bless his soul, devoted most of his career to casting their kinds of creative minds in a celebratory, you-need-to-watch-this light.

See his landmark essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" for a look into this singular mind.

13. Janet Maslin

Publication: The New York Times Read Reviews Here

Those who currently read The New York Times solely to check out film critic Manohla Dargis' latest reviews should salute Janet Maslin, big time. From 1977 through 1999, the NYC-bred Maslin brought her sterling combination of smarts and wiles to the reputable newspaper, specifically riding hard for the independent movie scene.

12. A.O. Scott

Publications: Newsday , Slate , The New York Times Read Reviews Here

One look at Anthony Oliver (or, simply, A.O.) Scott's family background should quickly explain why he's such a poignant writer: Both his parents were college professors. Keeping the Scott brood's educated leanings alive and well, Mr. New York Times Movie Reviewer (working alongside Manohla Dargis) represents a younger breed of critical prestige. He's only 46-years-old, yet Scott's work can be placed next to the also currently active Roger Ebert's output. Don't be surprised if he's held in the same kind of reverential esteem as Mr. Ebert by the time he reaches 70.

11. James Agee

Publications: Time , The Nation Read Reviews Here

A true trailblazer, James Agee gave film criticism a boost of widespread credibility back in the 1940s, when he reviewed countless movies for both Time and The Nation . And he never hid his affinity for silent films, often saving his most positive thoughts for wordless cinema. As for every other kind, Agee is largely remembered as being a tough man to please. He wasn't the type to hand out middling criticisms—his standards were sky-high.

Clearly, he knew what he was talking about: After ending his critic hustle in the early 1950s, Agee went on to work on the screenplays for the greatly revered films The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). Plus, following his death in 1945, Agee posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Death in the Family .

10. Anthony Lane

Publications: The Independent , Independent on Sunday , The New Yorker Read Reviews Here

In a different reality, Anthony Lane could be a prolific comedy writer. Through his intelligent reviews, The New Yorker 's free-wheeling critic (he's been on staff there since 1993) always conveys a sharp sense of humor, addressing a film's faults and positive attributes with self-deprecation and jokes.

In his 2003 book, Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker , Lane provided a short list of must-do practices for anyone who's interested in following a similar career path, and it's quite indicative of the man's wit. Case in point, this tip: "Try to keep up with documentaries about Swabian transsexuals (or, see everything regardless of budget or hype)."

9. François Truffaut

Publication: Cahiers du cinéma Read Reviews Here

François Truffaut is remembered best for being a master filmmaker, and with good reason. With undisputed classics like The 400 Blows (1959) and the meta Day for Night (1973) under his belt, the icon of French filmmaking (1932-1984) stands as one of cinema's exemplary directors.

But all of the talk about his behind-the-camera work detracts from his impressive run as a movie critic, during which he earned a stigma as France's harshest voice, writing for Cahiers du cinema, the film magazine from which the Nouvelle Vague  movement sprang from. His polarizing negativity reached its apex with the article "A Certain Trend in French Cinema" (1954), a call-to-arms for those who weren't happy with the country's moviegoing trends.

8. Manohla Dargis

Publications: Los Angeles Times , LA Weekly , The Village Voice , Film Comment , Sight and Sound , The New York Times Read Reviews Here

You have to respect Manohla Dargis' anonymous gangster. Whereas every other movie critic on this countdown will gladly take pictures and go on camera to voice their opinions, the 50-something Dargis has enjoyed a respected, fruitful career without needing to put a widely-seen face to her byline.

Week in and week out, her learned, gorgeously written work enhances The New York Times Arts section, giving equal attention and excitement to films as diverse as Silver Linings Playbook and divisive as French writer-director Gaspar Noe's dizzying Enter the Void . Unlike most high-end critics, Dargis' name above a review of a genre film doesn't guarantee a wrongly slanted, probably disinterested point-of-view. For her, weirdo cinema has just as much potential as Oscar fare.

7. David Denby

Publications: The Atlantic , New York , The New Yorker Read Reviews Here

Consider David Denby the film critics' circuit's answer to the hip-hop community's Nas. Similar to how Nasir Jones made it his mission to question the existence of his once-prevalent and always cherished art form, The New Yorker 's chief film writer shook up the world of big-screen lovers with his controversial book Do the Movies Have a Future? . Largely avoiding snark, Denby's writing throughout the page-turner is earnest, focusing on the promotion of film's older ideals against the blockbusters and money-first products that major studios rush into theaters nowadays.

If written by a lesser critic, Do the Movies Have a Future?  would've came off as a real bitch-fest, one akin to an aged D.I.T.C. fan crying about Chief Keef and Trinidad James for 368 pages. But thanks to Denby's sterling, deserved reputation, it's an important conversation-starter from a master who's at the top of his game.

6. Jonathan Rosenbaum

Publications: Cahiers du cinéma , Film Comment , Chicago Reader Read Reviews Here

Jonathan Rosenbuam is a true crusader. Born in Alabama, the wide-eyed, then-26-years-old go-getter moved to Paris in 1969, where he routinely contributed film reviews to publications like Sight & Sound and The Village Voice . That time spent overseas filled Rosenbaum with an intense appreciation for non-American movies, and he's since made it his personal mission to promote international filmmaking here in the states.

For his most impassioned defense of non-Hollywood productions, the indispensable 2002 book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See is a must.

5. J. Hoberman

Publications: The Village Voice , Film Comment , The New York Times , The Virginia Quarterly Review , ArtInfo (website) Read Reviews Here

Simply put, there's no greater living film essayist than James Lewis Hoberman, better known as J. Hoberman. Starting at The Village Voice  in the '70s, the New York City native owned the paper's film reviews section with his beautifully composed, scholarly critiques until he was wrongly removed from his post in 2012.

The thing about Hoberman's reviews, though, is that they don't read like reviews; they're more like heavily researched narratives that relate the movie in question to larger, all-encompassing themes that touch upon society, cinema, and politics.

For incredibly informative and vibrantly penned time capsules, pick up any one of Hoberman's many books. Our recommendations: the cult community manifesto Midnight Movies (co-written with Jonathan Rosenbaum) and his most recent release, Film After Film , a compilation of Hoberman's post-9/11 writings that makes for a dynamic companion to Denby's Do the Movies Have a Future?

4. Pauline Kael

Publications: City Lights , McCall's , The New Republic , The New Yorker Read Reviews Here

It takes a lot of nerve to go against the popular consensus, no matter the contrarian's gender, but a female movie critic who doesn't fear pissing off her (male) contemporaries nor Hollywood's (male) elite? That's one tough person.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential film analysts ever, the late Pauline Kael filled her  New Yorker  reviews (published from 1968 through 1991) with fearless wit, often writing in the first-person to either attack or praise a motion picture. She thrived during times when jealous ones especially envied, weathering sexist insults and accusations of star-chasing favoritism.

Best of all, Kael championed genre filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Walter Hill, and Sam Peckinpah, artists who are revered now but initially released low-budget, unfairly B-pegged flicks. She was a rebel with a passionate cause.

3. Andrew Sarris

Publications: Film Culture , The Village Voice , NY Film Bulletin , The New York Observer Read Reviews Here

Every cinematic shotcaller working today, whether independent or major, owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Andrew Sarris. Strong-minded and blessed with the gift of fluid prose, the late Brooklyn-born writer is best remembered for his classic 1968 tome The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 , an exhaustive, opinionated dissection of pre-'68 sound films broken down by the individual filmmakers.

In The American Cinema , Sarris fully developed the influential auteur theory, bringing the daring pro-director beliefs practiced by the many great critics working for France's Cahiers du Cinéma and popularizing them in the United States.

2. Roger Ebert

Publication: Chicago Sun Times Read reviews here

Like Jay-Z is for rappers, Roger Ebert is the most widely recognized movie critic ever. He's been cranking out entertaining, witty, and often heartfelt reviews for the Chicago Sun Times since 1967, forging a 40-plus-year career that's seen him conquer print media, the online blogosphere, and even television. Of course you remember watching him on his groundbreaking At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert , which he co-hosted with his best confidante, the late Chicago Tribune  critic. Together, they made upward and downward thumbs iconic.

Ebert's congratulatory reviews are top-notch, yet it's his negative, gloves-off beatdowns of crappy cinema that have always been his most delightful to read. Read his 50 harshest review quotes for yourselves .

1. André Bazin

Publication: Cahiers du Cinéma Read Reviews Here

There's arguably no book about movies that's as mandatory as André Bazin's What is Cinema?  Still taught in film classes today, it's the definitive explanation of what makes the medium's proverbial heart beat, offering groundbreaking views on visual storytelling, with a special fondness for patience and duration. Bazin was a strong advocate of the long take, after all.

He's also responsible for co-founding the game-changing magazine Cahiers du Cinéma  in 1951, through which Bazin and his colleagues introduced the auteur theory that has since helped to contextualize the classic films made by the likes of Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock.

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The 10 Most Famous Movie Critics of All Time

Their reviews influenced the minds of moviegoers as well as the box office

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Since the earliest days of cinema, movie critics have played a crucial role in filling seats (or not filling seats) at movie theaters. Countless movie reviews have been published over the decades, but only a select few film critics have become well-known for their work. The following famous movie critics have made a lasting mark on the film industry.

André Bazin

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France's André Bazin was one of the earliest major film critics, having started his career in 1943. He was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. More important than Bazin's reviews are his extensive writing on film theory, including essays on the importance of realism in cinema that are still widely read by film students.

Judith Crist

Judith Crist was one of the first female film critics to gain widespread recognition from her reviews in the New York Herald Tribune , New York magazine, and TV Guide , as well as her appearances on NBC's The Today Show throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. She was perhaps the first female film critic whose criticism was published widely outside of "female-focused" magazines.

Roger Ebert

Arguably the most famous U.S. film critic of all time, Roger Ebert reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for nearly fifty years. With former television partner Gene Siskel, Ebert popularized the basic "thumb's up" or "thumb's down" rating system. Because of his popularity in both print and on television, a review from Ebert could often make or break a movie's box office chances. He also started his own annual film festival, Ebertfest, which often highlights overlooked movies.

As famous as he was for thoughtful, in-depth film criticism, Ebert is also remembered for his savage and often hilarious negative reviews. His review of the 1994 movie North became famous for its vicious prose, including the lines, "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it."

Pauline Kael

The New Yorker

Pauline Kael began her career as a film critic when the editor of a San Francisco magazine overheard her talking about films with a friend in a coffee shop and offered her a job.

Later as a critic for women's magazine McCall's , Kael became famous for her in-depth analysis, as well as for weaving her personal life and experiences into her reviews. She is also known for giving negative reviews to movies that were otherwise popular favorites, such as her extremely negative assessments of It's a Wonderful Life and The Sound of Music .  

In 1968, Kael became a film critic for The New Yorker , where she regularly championed films that other critics ignored or dismissed. She also gained notoriety for her since-discredited 1971 essay Raising Kane that alleged that Orson Welles wrote very little of the Citizen Kane screenplay.

Leonard Maltin

Leonard Maltin began his career as a movie critic before he even graduated high school. Published regularly from 1969 to 2014, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide was one of the most popular film reference guides, containing Martin's short reviews of hundreds of movies. He was also the film critic for the television show Entertainment Tonight for 28 years.

Maltin has since become one of the go-to critics for projects relating to the history of American cinema. He has hosted a variety of television programs about the history of movies.

Andrew Sarris

Longtime Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris was a strong proponent of the "auteur theory" of cinema, which gives credit to a film's director as its primary author.

Sarris was also known for his book The American Cinema , which ranked filmmakers by their output and generated endless debate among film fans. Sarris was married to fellow Village Voice film critic Molly Haskell.

Gene Shalit

Best known for his unique look—bushy hair, mustache, and ever-present bow-tie—Gene Shalit wrote for a variety of publications before becoming the film critic for NBC's The Today Show , a role he held for 40 years (1970–2010).

Shalit was also a comedy writer who integrated puns into many of his reviews ("When it comes to oddball titles, The Men Who Stare at Goats would be hard to bleat!"). Shalit's puns, physical appearance, and overall jovial attitude have made him a popular subject of fond parody, even after he stepped out of the public eye.

Peter Travers

Longtime Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers is one of the most popular film critics of all timeespecially to Hollywood's publicity and marketing departments.

Travers has a tendency to lavish high praise on many films, which means his words are very frequently quoted on publicity materials like posters, trailers, and advertisements.

That doesn't mean Travers gives everything he sees a good review. He has written eviscerating reviews about otherwise very popular movies like A River Runs Through It , Barbershop and Jackass: Number Two . But if you do see a few quotes on a movie poster or television commercial, there's a good chance one of them originated from Travers.

François Truffaut

Unlike most film critics, France's François Truffaut didn't just review movies—he also made them. After a few years of writing famously tough reviews in the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, Truffaut put his money where his mouth was and began directing movies, starting with 1959's The 400 Blows . Truffaut proved he knew what he was talking about when The 400 Blows won him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. His 1973 film, Day for Night , won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film .

As a critic, Truffaut is best known for developing the "auteur theory" of cinema. He used Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he published a book-long interview, as an example of an auteur.

Armond White

Armond White has written movie reviews for a variety of publications, including the New York Press and National Review . But rather than famous, many would refer to him as "infamous."

White is best known for giving negative reviews to otherwise nearly universally-acclaimed movies like Incredibles 2 , Get Out , Black Panther , Toy Story 3 , The Shape of Water , and The Florida Project . He is also known for giving positive reviews to otherwise negatively-received films, like The 15:17 to Paris , Justice League , and Transformers: The Last Knight . He has been labeled everything from a "contrarian" to a "troll," with many film fans calling for him to be removed as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Yet White's against-the-grain criticism is often valuable, as it inspires thoughtful consideration of what makes his views so different from his fellow critics and moviegoers. 

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List of Famous Film Critics

In the world of cinema, film critics hold a prominent position as they have the power to influence an audience's perception of a movie. Among these influential voices, some have become especially important, leaving a great mark on film history. These famous film critics represent the pinnacle of their craft, guiding countless cinephiles through the landscape of motion pictures. 

These notable individuals have gained recognition not only for their mastery in dissecting films but also for their significant impact on the industry. Their distinct approaches to film criticism have set them apart from their contemporaries, earning them a place among the best movie critics of all time. With their unwavering dedication to the medium, these experts have shaped the art of film criticism by forging a deeper understanding of the various elements that constitute a great cinematic experience.  Among the best movie critics in history, some stand out by providing thought-provoking analysis, imbuing their critiques with depth and nuance. A few individuals who embody the essence of top film critics are Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and Pauline Kael. 

Roger Ebert's keen eye for detail and ability to convey complex ideas in accessible language made him a trusted source for moviegoers. Gene Siskel, Ebert's long-time sparring partner, made an equally compelling contribution to the realm of film criticism. Their dynamic partnership provided an informative and entertaining discourse that resonated with audiences worldwide. Similarly, Pauline Kael's wit and erudite analysis earned her a loyal following, making her a force to be reckoned with in the industry. These luminaries are just a few of many remarkable film critics who have left an indelible mark on cinema. 

The distinctive voices of renowned film critics continue to resonate within the world of cinema, acting as a beacon for those seeking to navigate and appreciate the art form. Through their passion, expertise, and commitment, they have earned their place among the most famous film and movie critics in history, forever enriching the world of cinema with their profound insights and new perspectives. 

Roger Ebert

Gene Siskel

Pauline Kael

Leonard Maltin

A. O. Scott

Richard Schickel

Greatest Film Critics of All Time

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As long as there have been films, there have been those who dedicate their lives to writing about them. It takes love, passion, and time to forge criteria and consideration towards the seventh art. Film critics and theorists have, for over a century, played a pivotal role in the cinematic world, as their words have filled movie seats (or not), birthed (or ended) careers, and became eternally bound to the films they refer to.

While some go through film school, or start as actors or in some other role in film production, some of history’s most renowned filmmakers began as critics, and through their studying and countless hours of movie-watching, eventually became creators themselves. No matter what you think about them, film critics and theorists are crucial to the development of film and of society’s consciousness towards them. These 10 critics (listed in alphabetical order) stand apart from the rest, as their influence and work is to this day precious to life and film.

André Bazin

What is Cinema? is still arguably the most important book about movies, and its author, André Bazin , is responsible for film criticism as it is today. The co-founder of Cahiers Du Cinema is one of the most respected names when it comes to filmmaking and film theory.

Bazin's expansive essays on the importance of realism, and what makes films conjure so many emotions, and even influence everyday life, are keystones to film schools throughout the world. Without Bazin, there would be little critical consciousness regarding films, and thus, no film criticism as we know it today.

Peter Bogdanovich

The dearly-missed Peter Bogdanovich not only was one of the key figures in the New Hollywood movement , but he also was one of the most important film critics and historians of all time. As a kid, he would keep a record of all the films he saw in an index card with a review of each one included, a practice he would continue for nearly 20 years.

In average, he would see nearly four hundred films a year, a passion that drove him to be part of film programming teams at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, film critic at Cahiers Du Cinema, and writer of many important books on film history, and in-depth interviews with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. Of course, Bogdanovich's film career was also formidable, in which classics such as The Last Picture Show or Paper Moon stand out.

Peter Bradshaw

For over twenty years, The Guardian’s film section has featured the precise writings of Peter Bradshaw . After spending most of the 90s as a columnist for the Evening Standard, in 1999 he began working as chief film critic for The Guardian , and has since established himself as one of the most trusted and respected modern critics.

In an age where reviewers have received backlash by actors just for doing their job, Bradshaw is one of those raising the flag for the continuity and importance of film critics.

Manohla Dargis

This celebrated critic and author is one of the chief film w riters for The New York Times and a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. A look at Manohla Dargis ' best film list of each year will give you an idea of what an eclectic and interesting mind is at work here.

Her cultured and beautifully written work, has graced week in and week out the newspaper’s Arts section, taking in from underground art house cinema to mainstream Hollywood blockbusters. As an author, she has written books focusing on the role of women in cinema throughout history.

Roger Ebert

Loved, feared, and hated, his name is synonymous with film criticism. Roger Ebert is the undisputed best-known movie critic of all time. His work at the Chicago Tribune and on PBS introduced the “thumbs up/thumbs down” ranking that has become a staple of cinema, and his take would become a decisive factor on whether audiences would swarm to a theater, or wouldn’t even care to show up.

Related: 10 Greatest Movies of All Time According to Roger Ebert

In 1975, he became the first film critic to be awarded a Pulitzer prize, and despite the relevance of his opinion, he wasn’t as tough as the mythology that has been built around his work. A staple of his, was the inclusion of witty personal anecdotes in his reviews, which also made him sympathetic to thousands of readers. His death in 2013 left a void in the film world that is felt to this very day.

Pauline Kael

No one, absolutely no one would have expected for Pauline Kael to be the subject of Quentin Tarantino’s final film , yet it feels so appropriate. Hopefully, Tarantino’s love of film and its history will make Kael a known and beloved figure for more than just the film community, for which Kael is a sacred figure as relevant as all the films she wrote about.

Her nearly autobiographical approach to criticism set her apart from the academic form of prior critics and changed the way film was written about forever. She was famous for being unapologetic, unafraid of arguing, and a champion of films often discarded by most critics, and inversely, a critic of widely beloved movies.

Dilys Powell

All-time best film critics lists hold a historical debt to female critics, who have been as good and important throughout history as men. Most only include Pauline Kael, leaving behind the legacy of critical icons such as Dilys Powell .

For over 50 years, Powell contributed to The Sunday Times and was one of the 20th century critics who was most open to societal and cultural changes. This can be indebted to her tireless traveling and hunger for understanding foreign cultures, which made her writing elaborate and incredibly knowledgeable.

Dan Sallitt

The love of film is hopefully what drives someone to become engaged more closely with the art form; that love is felt in every bit of writing from Dan Sallitt , which is gorgeously translated in his film work as writer and director.

One of the world’s most underrated critics and filmmakers has been at it for more than four decades, and thankfully in recent years, his work has achieved a higher recognition by the film community. His writing has been featured on MUBI, The Village Voice, Slate, and other famous outlets, while his films, ever since 2012's brilliant The Unspeakable Act, have appeared in several film festivals.

Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader is mostly known as a great screenwriter and director, but he is also one of the filmmakers that has acknowledged and championed the importance of film studies and criticism in the development of the art form. He became a film critic in the late '60s and early '70s, and published the renowned book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer before he was even 30.

Related: Exclusive: Gregg Turkington on Useless Film Critics and the Comic Universe of On Cinema

By the mid-'70s, he made the transition to scriptwriting and directing, a career that has lasted half a century (most recently with the mysterious movie Master Gardener ) could have easily left critical assessment of films aside, but he’s always had it so present, to the point that to this day he continually shares his opinions on his Facebook page .

Francois Truffaut

No one bridged the gap between European and American cinema quite like Francois Truffaut . He would make some of the most important films of the 20th century while still being able to understand and appreciate what made someone like Steven Spielberg make the films he did. His dedication for the seventh art was clear right from the beginning of his career through his harsh though passionate reviews for Cahiers Du Cinema in the 50s.

As a writer, he is best remembered for his 1954 call-to-arms article, “A Certain Trend in French Cinema” which is seen today as partly responsible for the ignition of the French New Wave . He is also responsible for the development of “auteur theory,” which sets the director as the major creative force behind films, for which he used Hitchcock as an example, with whom he would develop an endearing friendship. His book, Hitchcock/Truffaut , was turned into a 2015 film, it was so influential.

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Who Are the Most Influential Movie Critics of All Time?

By Film Threat Staff | February 14, 2020

We humans are an incredibly insecure species at times. We constantly crave the opinions of others in order to help us form our own views, or at least to provide affirmation that what we are thinking is right. Not convinced? Just look at the way we choose what to watch on the big and small screen.

In this internet age, we’ll be checking out the reviews and opinions of our contemporaries on platforms like Amazon and imdb, often before, during and after watching a movie. But when it comes down to it, EFE syndrome is a symptom of the internet age. It stands for everyone’s a film expert, although some substitute the word film for something else. 

As a result, the opinions we trust most are those of the real experts. You see it in numerous other areas in the internet age, for example in the gaming sector when choosing what games to play (especially when money is involved) or which online platform to use or when making a big ticket purchase like a car or even a family vacation.

When it comes to movies, we place similar faith in the experts, just as we have since the golden age of Hollywood. Here are some of the people who have informed, influenced and affirmed public opinion over recent years.

Roger Ebert

He’s probably the best known movie critic of all time, and despite a US-centric career spent reviewing movies for the Chicago Tribune and on PBS, his name became known, and in some quarters feared, across the globe. Ebert introduced the “thumbs up/thumbs down” ranking that has become a staple and his was the last and decisive word in what’s hot and what’s not for more than 50 years. In 1975, he became the first movie critic to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize , and even when cancer treatment robbed him of his speech, he continued to write for the Tribune right up until his death in 2013.

Leonard Maltin

Here’s a man who has movies in his blood. He started out as a critic before he’d even graduated high school and his Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide series has been the go-to resource since 1969. The book is regularly republished and contains information on hundreds of movies, all in Maltin’s fair but no-nonsense style.

Peter Travers

It’s safe to say that movie critics are not always beloved of directors and producers. Peter Travers, however, is the exception that proves the rule. The flamboyant New Yorker started out at People magazine in the 1980s before becoming the movie critic for Rolling Stone in 1989. His enthusiasm, along with his tendency to lavish praise on movies, means he is quoted more often on movie posters and blurbs than any other critic. 

Mark Kermode

The King’s Speech , Spectre, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows… The British movie industry is alive and well, so it’s appropriate that we have a British critic on our list. Mark Kermode is movie critic for The Observer newspaper and Time Out magazine. However, he became a household name thanks to his BBC television and radio slots. He is famed for his acerbic wit and has become something of a “people’s champion,” often speaking out in criticism of the British Board of Film Classification for its censorship of horror movies.

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Ok. Any list of influential critics that doesn’t include Andrew Sarris, James Agee, and (above all other critics) Pauline Kael, seems to me to be perfunctory.

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The Best Movie Reviews We’ve Ever Written — IndieWire Critics Survey

David ehrlich.

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Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

While this survey typically asks smart critics to direct readers toward good movies, we hope that the reverse is also true, and that these posts help movies (good or bad) direct readers towards smart critics. 

In that spirit, we asked our panel of critics to reflect on their favorite piece of film criticism that they’ve ever written (and we encouraged them to put aside any sort of modesty when doing so).

Their responses provide rich and far-reaching insight into contemporary film criticism, and what those who practice it are hoping to achieve with their work.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SidizenKane), Freelance for The Village Voice and /Film

Let’s cut right to the chase. Christopher Nolan is probably my favourite working director, and going five thousand words deep on his career after “Dunkirk” was an itch I’d been waiting to scratch for nearly a decade. “The Dark Knight” was my dorm-room poster movie — I’m part of the generation that explored films through the IMDb Top 250 growing up — though as my cinematic horizons expanded and my understanding of storytelling grew, I didn’t leave Nolan’s work behind as I did the likes of “Scarface” and “The Boondock Saints.” What’s more, each new film by Nolan hits me like a tonne of bricks. I’m waiting, almost eagerly, for him to disappoint me. It hasn’t happened yet, and I needed to finally sit down and figure out why.

In “Convergence At ‘Dunkirk,’” by far the longest piece I’ve ever written, I’d like to think I unpacked a decade worth of my awe and admiration, for a filmmaker who uses the studio canvas to explore human beings through our relationship to time. Tarkovsky referred to cinema as “sculpting in time.” Time disorients. Time connects us. Time travels, at different speeds, depending on one’s relationship to it, whether in dreams or in war or in outer space, and time can be captured, explored and dissected on screen.

What’s more, Nolan’s films manipulate truth as much as time, as another force relative to human perception, determining our trajectories and interpersonal dynamics in fundamental ways. All this is something I think I knew, instinctively, as a teenage viewer, but putting words to these explorations, each from a different time yet connected intrinsically, is the written criticism that I most stand by. It felt like something that I was meant to write, as I interrogated my own evolving emotional responses to art as time went on.

Carlos Aguilar (@Carlos_Film), Freelance for Remezcla

At the 2017 Sundance premiere of Miguel Arteta’s “Beatriz at Dinner,” starring Salma Hayek, I found myself in shock at the reactions I heard from the mostly-white audience at the Eccles Theatre. I was watching a different movie, one that spoke to me as an immigrant, a Latino, and someone who’s felt out of place in spaces dominated by people who’ve never been asked, “Where are you really from?” That night I went back to the condo and wrote a mountain of thoughts and personal anecdotes that mirrored what I saw on screen.

This was a much different piece from what I had usually written up to that point: coverage on the Best Foreign Language Oscar race, pieces on animation, interviews with internationally acclaimed directors, and reviews out of festivals. Those are my intellectual passions, this; however, was an examination on the identity that I had to built as an outsider to navigate a society were people like me rarely get the jobs I want.

My editor at Remezcla, Vanessa Erazo, was aware of the piece from the onset and was immediately supportive, but it would take months for me to mull it over and rework it through multiple drafts until it was ready for publication in time for the film’s theatrical release. In the text, I compared my own encounters with casual racism and ignorance with those Hayek’s character faces throughout the fateful gathering at the center of the film. The reception surpassed all my expectations. The article was shared thousands of times, it was praised, it was criticized, and it truly confronted me with the power that my writing could have.

A few months later in September, when Trump rescinded DACA, I wrote a social media post on my experience as an undocumented person working in the film industry, and how difficult it is to share that struggle in a world were most people don’t understand what it means to live a life in the shadows. The post was picked up by The Wrap and republished in the form of an op-ed, which I hope put a new face on the issue for those who didn’t directly knew anyone affected by it before. Once again that piece on “Beatriz at Dinner” regained meaning as I found myself filled with uncertainty.

Ken Bakely (@kbake_99), Freelance for Film Pulse

Like many writers, I tend to subconsciously disown anything I’ve written more than a few months ago, so I read this question, in practice, as what’s my favorite thing I’ve written recently. On that front, I’d say that the review of “Phantom Thread” that I wrote over at my blog comes the closest to what I most desire to do as a critic. I try to think about a movie from every front: how the experience is the result of each aspect, in unique quantities and qualities, working together. It’s not just that the acting is compelling or the score is enveloping, it’s that each aspect is so tightly wound that it’s almost indistinguishable from within itself. A movie is not an algebra problem. You can’t just plug in a single value and have everything fall into place.

“Phantom Thread” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s dreamy cinematography. It is Jonny Greenwood’s impeccably seductive, baroque music. It is Vicky Krieps’s ability to perfectly shatter our preconceptions at every single turn as we realize that Alma is the movie’s actual main character. We often talk about how good films would be worse-off if some part of it were in any way different. In the case of “Phantom Thread,” you flat-out can’t imagine how it would even exist if these things were changed. When so many hot take thinkpieces try to explain away every ending or take a hammer to delicate illusions, it was a pleasure to try and understand how a movie like this one operates on all fronts to maintain an ongoing sense of mystique.

Christian Blauvelt (@Ctblauvelt), BBC Culture

I don’t know if it’s my best work, but a landmark in my life as a critic was surely a review of Chaplin’s “The Circus,” in time for the release of its restoration in 2010. I cherish this piece , written for Slant Magazine, for a number of reasons. For one, I felt deeply honored to shed more light on probably the least known and least respected of Chaplin’s major features, because it’s a film that demonstrates such technical virtuosity it dispels once and for all any notion that his work is uncinematic. (Yes, but what about the rest of his filmography you ask? My response is that any quibbles about the immobility of Chaplin’s camera suggest an ardent belief that the best directing equals the most directing.) For another, I was happy this review appeared in Slant Magazine, a publication that helped me cut my critical teeth and has done the same for a number of other critics who’ve gone on to write or edit elsewhere. That Slant is now struggling to endure in this financially ferocious landscape for criticism is a shame – the reviews I wrote for them around 2009-10 helped me refine my voice even that much more than my concurrent experience at Entertainment Weekly, where I had my day job. And finally, this particular review will always mean a lot to me because it’s the first one I wrote that I saw posted in its entirety on the bulletin board at Film Forum. For me, there was no surer sign that “I’d made it”.

Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The New Yorker

No way would I dare to recommend any pieces of my own, but I don’t mind mentioning a part of my work that I do with special enthusiasm. Criticism, I think, is more than the three A’s (advocacy, analysis, assessment); it’s prophetic, seeing the future of the art from the movies that are on hand. Yet many of the most forward-looking, possibility-expanding new films are in danger of passing unnoticed (or even being largely dismissed) due to their departure from familiar modes or norms, and it’s one of my gravest (though also most joyful) responsibilities to pay attention to movies that may be generally overlooked despite (or because of) their exceptional qualities. (For that matter, I live in fear of missing a movie that needs such attention.)

But another aspect of that same enthusiasm is the discovery of the unrealized future of the past—of great movies made and seen (or hardly seen) in recent decades that weren’t properly discussed and justly acclaimed in their time.”. Since one of the critical weapons used against the best of the new is an ossified and nostalgic classicism, the reëvaluation of what’s canonical, the acknowledgment of unheralded masterworks—and of filmmakers whose careers have been cavalierly truncated by industry indifference—is indispensable to and inseparable from the thrilling recognition of the authentically new.

Deany Hendrick Cheng (@DeandrickLamar), Freelance for Barber’s Chair Digital

It’s a piece on two of my favorite films of 2017, “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name”, and about how their very different modes of storytelling speak to the different sorts of stories we tell ourselves. Objectively, I don’t know if this is my best work in terms of pure style and craft, but I do think it’s the most emblematic in terms of what I value in cinema. I think every film is, in some way, a treatise on how certain memories are remembered, and I think cinema matters partly because the best examples of it are prisms through which the human experience is refracted.

Above everything else, every movie has to begin with a good story, and the greatest stories are the ones that mirror not just life, but the ways in which life is distorted and restructured through the process of remembering. Every aspect of a film, from its screenplay on down, must add something to the film’s portrayal of remembering, and “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name” accomplish this organic unity of theme with such charm yet in such distinct ways, that they were the perfect counterpoints to each other, as well as the perfect stand-ins for cinema as a whole, for me.

Liam Conlon (@Flowtaro), Ms En Scene

My favorite piece of my own work is definitely  “The Shape of Water’s” Strickland as the “Ur-American.”  I’m proud of it because it required me to really take stock of all the things that Americans are taught from birth to take as given. That meant looking at our history of colonialism, imperialism, racism, anticommunism and really diving into how all Americans, whether they’re liberal or conservative, can internalize these things unless they take the time to self-examine. Just as “Pan’s Labyrinth’s” despotic Captain Vidal was a masterful representation of Francisco Franco’s fascism, Richard Strickland represents a distinctly American kind of fascism. Writers Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor took great care in Strickland’s creation, and my piece was my own way of self-examining to make sure I never become or abide by a person like Strickland ever again.

Robert Daniels (@812filmreviews), Freelance

This is tricky, but “Annihilation” is definitely my favorite piece of film criticism that I’ve written. My writing style is a combination of criticism and gifs, and sometimes the words are better than the gifs, and the gifs are better than the words. With “Annihilation,” I thought the balance was perfect . My favorite portion: “Lena is just an idea, part of an equation that’s been erased from a chalkboard and rewritten with a different solution. The shimmer is part of her, even down to the DNA” is up there as one of my best. It was also a struggle to write because that film had more wild theories than the Aliens in Roswell. Also, the amount of research I had to do, combining Plato’s Ideal Forms, Darwin, the Bible, and Nietzsche, was absurd. However, it did make it easier to find matching gifs. The result made for my most studious, yet lighthearted read.

Alonso Duralde (@ADuralde), The Wrap

I’m the worst judge of my own material; there’s almost nothing I’ve ever written that I don’t want to pick at and re-edit, no matter how much time has passed. But since, for me, the hardest part of film criticism is adequately praising a movie you truly love, then by default my best review would probably be of one of my favorite films of all time, Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.”

David Ehrlich (@davidehrlich), IndieWire

I can’t summon the strength to re-read it, but I remember thinking that my piece on grief and “Personal Shopper” was emblematic of how I hope to thread individual perspective into arts criticism.

Shelley Farmer (@ShelleyBFarmer), Freelance for RogerEbert.com and Publicist at Film Forum

My favorite piece is a very recent one: For this year’s Women Writers Week on Roger Ebert, I wrote about “Phantom Thread”, “Jane Eyre,” and twisted power dynamics in hetero romance . I loved that it allowed me to dig deep into my personal fixations (19th century literature, gender, romance as power struggle), but – more importantly – it was exciting to be part of a series that highlighted the breadth of criticism by women writers.

Chris Feil (@chrisvfeil), Freelance for The Film Experience, This Had Oscar Buzz Podcast

My answer to this would be kind of a cheat, as my favorite work that I do is my weekly column about movie music called Soundtracking that I write over at The Film Experience. Soundtracks and needle drops have been a personal fascination, so the opportunity to explore the deeper meaning and context of a film’s song choices have been a real labor of love. Because of the demands and time constraints of what we do, it can be easy to spend our all of our energy on assignments and chasing freelance opportunities rather than devoting time to a pet project – but I’ve found indulging my own uncommon fascination to be invaluable in developing my point of view. And serve as a constant check-in with my passion. Pushed for a single entry that I would choose as the best, I would choose the piece I wrote on “Young Adult”‘s use of “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub for how it posits a single song as the key to unlocking both character and narrative.

Candice Frederick (@ReelTalker), Freelance for Shondaland, Harper’s Bazaar

“ Mother ” written for Vice. It’s one of my favorites because it conveys how visceral my experience was watching the movie. It’s truly stifling, uncomfortable, and frantic–and that’s what my review explains in detail. I wanted to have a conversation with the reader about specific aspects of the film that support the thesis, so I did.

Luiz Gustavo (@luizgvt), Cronico de Cinema

Well, I recently wrote a piece for Gazeta do Povo, a major outlet at Paraná state in Brazil, about Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” (it is not on their site, but they were kind enough to let me replicate on my own website ). I don’t know the extent of the powers of Google Translator from Portugese to english, so you have to rely on my own account: is a text in which I was able to articulate de cinematographic references in the work of Mr. Del Toro, as well his thematic obsessions, the genre bending and social critique. All of this topics were analyzed in a fluid prose. On top of that, it was really fun to write!

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The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time

The movies are now more than 100 years old. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). But they’re just old enough to make compiling Variety ’s first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been. Think about it: You get an average of one film per year. A great deal of ardent discussion and debate went into the creation of this list. Our choices were winnowed from hundreds of titles submitted by more than 30 Variety critics, writers and editors. As we learned, coming up with which movies to include was the easy part. The hard part was deciding which movies to leave out.

Variety , which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. (We invented box office reporting, in addition to the words “showbiz” and “horse opera.”) And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the beautiful, head-spinning variety of the moviegoing experience. We don’t just mean different genres; we don’t just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of spine-tingling eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that — to honor the movies we love most, whatever categories they happen to fall into.

Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That’s the nature of the beast — the nature of the kind of protective passion that people feel about their favorite movies. We invited prominent filmmakers and actors to contribute essays about the movies that are significant to them, and that passion comes across in all that they wrote. No doubt you’ll say: How could that movie have been left off the list? Or this one? Or that one? Trust us: We often asked that very same question ourselves. But our hope is that in looking at the films we did choose, you’ll see a roster that reflects the impossibly wide-ranging, ever-shifting glory of what movies are.

We invite you to find out how many films from the list you’ve seen on this poll .

These film writers and critics contributed suggestions for movies: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge, Matt Donnelly, William Earl, Patrick Frater, Steven Gaydos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Laffly, Brent Lang, Joe Leydon, Guy Lodge, Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordine, Naman Ramachandran, Manori Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alissa Simon, Jazz Tangcay, Sylvia Tan, Zack Sharf, Adam B. Vary, Nick Vivarelli, Meredith Woerner.

The Graduate (1967)  

Mike Nichols’ indelible comedy of alienation is that rare thing, a movie that really does define a generation. That’s because there has never been another movie like it (and no, “Rushmore” doesn’t count). Dustin Hoffman, with the halting prickly-pear neurotic charisma that would make him a star, plays a clueless college graduate who drops out without quite rebelling, and it’s that combination of hostility and passivity that elevated Hoffman into a culture hero. His Ben has an affair with Anne Bancroft’s deliriously blasé Mrs. Robinson, then stalks her daughter (Katharine Ross) to campus and breaks up her wedding by screaming like a banshee. Now that’s an original romantic comedy. One that showcases the new spirit of antisocial passion in a socially acceptable — and divinely infectious — way.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “The Graduate .” Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video.

12 Angry Men (1957)  

How elemental — and riveting — is this: an entire courtroom drama set inside the jury room, where Henry Fonda, as the only member of the jury who suspects that a teenage defendant might not be guilty of murder, questions, cajoles and gradually convinces his fellow jurors to look more closely at the evidence. Sidney Lumet’s direction makes the back-and-forth dialogue so electrifying that it’s almost like music. The greatness of “12 Angry Men” is that it finds drama in discovering what America really is: a place where one man with an open mind can change the world.   

Read Variety ‘s original review of “12 Angry Men,” and stream “12 Angry Men” on Prime Video.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)  

You never forget your first. That may be how many American art-house habituésthink of Pedro Almodóvar’s riotous comedy. It wasn’t his first film to get international distribution, but with its vivid palette and lush score, the movie heralds his genius and obsessions: women; their moods, hysterical and amusing; Hollywood cinema, camp, desire and, yes, spiked gazpacho. Before Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura was for a spell the director’s muse. Here she plays a voice-over artist whose co-worker and lover is leaving her. The director gathered artists — on camera and on the set — who became his go-to company and underlined his wholly original sensibility.   

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown “. Stream the film on Prime Video.

Alien (1979)   

A smothering tentacled thingy attaches itself to an astronaut’s face. Several scenes later, an alien fetus erupts right out of his belly, and the cinema would never be the same. Director Ridley Scott, drawing on the imagery of H.R Giger, staged a kind of Skinner box sci-fi nightmare that left audiences in a state of primal shock. Scott envisioned the film’s spaceship not in clean Kubrickian whites but in shades of murk that could speak to the film’s queasy fusion of the organic and the inorganic. And once Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley starts to take on the monster all by herself, a paradigm shift is born: the female action hero, who Weaver invested with such fierce, industrious, yet tossed-off authority that it’s as if she’d always been there.   

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Alien” here , the film is available for streaming on Starz.

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)  

The most transportive rock ’n’ roll movie ever made. Richard Lester, drawing on cutting-edge film techniques that are still bracing, fulfilled his assignment of directing a Beatles movie at the dawn of Beatlemania by staging it all as a day in the life of the Beatles as they really were. It’s like seeing a documentary, a postmodern backstage burlesque and a joyful early-Beatles musical all wrapped up into one black-and-white vérité rock reverie. The beauty of it is that the band members, with faces as beguiling as that of any movie star, had the instinctive showbiz wit to portray themselves as gods who’d swooped down on earth and were mingling with everyone else, the happy joke being that they suffuse every encounter with magic.   

Read Variety ‘s original review for “A Hard Day’s Night” here , and stream “A Hard Day’s Night” on HBO Max.

Toy Story (1995)  

In the early ’80s, director John Lasseter tried to convince Disney to invest in CGI. Instead, the studio fired him, so he went to work for the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. When the team (scooped up by Steve Jobs and renamed Pixar) released the first fully computer-animated feature, the engineers still hadn’t perfected human skin — or feathers or fur, for that matter. Practically every surface looked fake, like plastic, which made a buddy comedy starring a bunch of toys ideal for the new medium. Bugs and fish and monsters would follow, but even as the technology evolved — liberating the heretofore hand-rendered form — nothing has surpassed that first toon, thanks to great writing and voice work that, even more than the CGI, brought Woody, Buzz Lightyear and their pals to life.  

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Toy Story” here , the Pixar film is available for streaming on Disney+.

Bridesmaids (2011)  

A decade has passed since “Bridesmaids” launched a thousand think pieces about the future of female-driven films, but Hollywood has yet to produce a funnier movie from any corner. With most comedies, audiences are lucky to get one hall-of-fame set piece. “Bridesmaids” serves up no fewer than five, from Maya Rudolph’s food-poisoned dress-fitting to Kristen Wiig’s mile-high anti-anxiety high to the scene on an airplane that single-handedly catapulted Melissa McCarthy to superstardom. Wiig said she and Annie Mumolo set out to write “not a female comedy, just a comedy that has a lot of women in it.” That they did, collaborating with producer Judd Apatow to create an uproarious, insightful look at personal insecurity and self-delusion.   

Read Variety’s original review of “Bridesmaids” here . The film is available to stream on Peacock.

Le Samouraï (1967)  

Long before Tarantino, Jean-Pierre Melville obsessed about movies, admiring American directors and absorbing their codes. In the early ’50s, when the restrictive French film industry wouldn’t let him direct, Melville opened his own film studio and did it anyway, inspiring the nascent New Wave (and later, John Woo’s “The Killer”). Melville made crime movies mostly, taking the essence of film noir from Hollywood and filtering it through his own streetwise sensibility. “Le Samouraï” is his chef d’œuvre, featuring a stone-faced Alain Delon in one of cinema’s most understated performances: a gun for hire who dedicates his life to protecting the eyewitness pianist who spares him from the slammer. Featuring meticulous attention to procedural detail and long stretches of near silence, it’s the essence of cool, with an existential twist.   

Read Variety’s original review of “Le Samouraï” here . Stream the Melville film on HBO Max.

Pink Flamingos (1972)   

It was panned by  Variety , which called it “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made.” And, of course, it became famous for the scene in which Divine, its snarling drag-queen star, eats a handful of dog poop. (Eat your heart out, P.T. Barnum!) But we’re here to tell you that  Variety  was wrong. John Waters’ ultimate midnight movie is, in fact, one of the funniest, most audacious and scandalously compelling films ever made. That’s because every moment in it is touched with a gleeful outlaw rageaholic danger too weirdly joyous to be faked. Divine was a stupendous actor, and in “Pink Flamingos,” he’s the clown demon of the Baltimore underground taking revenge on the world.   

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Pink Flamingos” here.

Scenes From a Marriage (1974) 

In the ’50s and ’60s, Ingmar Bergman became the poster boy for the mystique of art-house cinema by filling his black-and-white movies with symbols, metaphors, dreams. Yet his great searing drama about the experience and meaning of divorce carries none of that literary burden. It’s a straight-up naturalistic drama about a bourgeois Swedish couple going through the five stages of marriage, and Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson bring these loving, warring characters to life in a way that makes them feel like people in your own orbit. Bergman, tearing into the very meat of middle-class experience, made what now looks like the defining cinematic statement about how modern marriages live and die.  

Stream “Scenes From a Marriage” on HBO Max.

The Shining (1980)   

No offense to Stephen King, who’s vocally dismissive of Kubrick’s adaptation of his work, but “The Shining” is a mind-bending (and wildly entertaining) horror masterwork, encapsulating the filmmaker’s signature labyrinthine fixations. Stalked by a snaky camera alongside an ear-splitting tricycle, the spine-tingling Overlook Hotel on the brink of  redrum  with torrents of crimson blood is its own battlefield here. So is the mind of Jack Nicholson’s superbly maniacal Jack Torrance, host to the creepiest writer’s block in history. It’s the most insidious of nightmares.    

Read the original Variety review of “The Shining” here and it’s available to stream on HBO Max.

Belle de Jour (1967)   

Catherine Deneuve comes across like an alabaster doll in Luis Buñuel’s still-shocking, since-unparalleled exploration of the erotic fantasies of a bourgeois French housewife, who dabbles in prostitution by day (or does she?). Whereas the character’s seemingly impassive face betrays only a fraction of what she is really thinking, the film — from the key pioneer of surrealism on screen — reveals to us alone what’s really going on in her head: The sound of bells heralds sadomasochistic daydreams, in which she is whipped and humiliated. This isn’t just some male director’s fetish, mind you, but an empowering portrayal of forbidden sexuality, depicted almost entirely through suggestion, as with buzzing box and bloody towel, which leave so much up to the imagination.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Belle de Jour” here , and stream the film on HBO Max.

Malcolm X (1992)   

The studio initially wanted Norman Jewison to direct this monumental biopic of the human rights activist, but Spike Lee lobbied hard for Warner Bros. to hire a Black filmmaker instead. Lee won that fight, with severe restrictions. Then the studio and bond company pulled the plug, so he solicited donations from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, a strategy that allowed Lee to make the film as he saw fit. Malcolm X was an undeniably controversial and widely misunderstood figure, and Lee dedicates no fewer than 201 minutes to capturing the deep introspective complexity of a man who was constantly leveling up in his pursuit of justice, from teenage criminal to Muslim convert to Black nationalist leader and beyond. Denzel Washington is there at every step, working with his director — who fuses prestige-movie gravitas with his own curveball style — through the seismic shifts of a man who had the courage of his fury, but ultimately sought a greater enlightenment. Every bit as impactful as the assassination sequence is the montage that precedes it, which evokes all that could have been as Malcolm drives to the Audubon Ballroom, haunted by the perception that martyrdom would be his final evolution.    

Read the original Variety review for “Malcolm X” here , and stream the film on HBO Max or Paramount+.

The Sound of Music (1965)   

Julie Andrews is most famous for two movies, “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music” (made in 1964 and ’65), and her character in the latter film — a nun-turned-governess who looks after the seven Von Trapp children, teaches them to sing and brings them to life, all under the watchful gaze of their stern military father (Christopher Plummer) — is such a goody-two-shoes that her stardom, on occasion, gets mocked and dismissed. Yet if you really watch her in “The Sound of Music,” you’ll see that Julie Andrews has her own sublime and saintly incandescence. The whole movie makes goodness into something larger-than-life. Yes, it turns the true story of the Von Trapp Family Singers into the squarest of romantic fairy tales, yet the songs lift the film into the heavens, and so does Andrews’ beaming belief in every note.    

Read the original Variety review of “the Sound of Music” here . The musical is available for streaming on Disney+.

Close-Up (1990)  

Hailing from a country with some of the strictest limits on cinematic expression, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s rule-bending docufiction hybrid dissolves the line between representation and reality. The hook: In the late ’80s, a nobody was arrested for passing himself off as director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a wealthy Tehran family. He flattered them into thinking they might appear in his next movie, borrowing money before he was busted. Intrigued by the case, Kiarostami visited the impersonator in jail, filming their conversations and the subsequent trial. He also re-creates the so-called crime, making good on the con man’s promise by casting the parties involved as themselves in a playful meta-examination of how ordinary people can be seduced by the allure of filmmaking.   

Read more about “Close-Up” here . The film is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.

Natural Born Killers (1994) 

 Oliver Stone possesses a hypnotically fierce, at times reckless talent that, for 40 years, has sprawled in all directions. But his greatest period arrived in the ’90s, when he made “JFK” and fastened onto a new kaleidoscopic aesthetic — a born-again burst of filmmaking energy that culminated in his mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind head-trip psychodrama about two homicidal criminals in love. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play Mickey and Mallory Knox like Bonnie and Clyde on a psychosis bender, but the black magic of the film’s MTV-on-peyote imagery is that it literally becomes the experience they’re living inside. “Natural Born Killers” is about love and murder and tabloid sensationalism, but more than that it’s the cinema’s great hallucination of media-age madness, rendered haunting by the music of Leonard Cohen.    

Read the original Variety review of “Natural Born Killers” here . The film is available for streaming on Netflix.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)   

With “Pinocchio,” Guillermo del Toro has finally made a fairy tale for children. Prior to that, the Mexican fabulist wove fantasies much too dark for impressionable eyes. Although this id-tickling anti-fascist allegory stars an 11-year-old girl, the grimmer-than-Grimm inversion of “Alice in Wonderland,” set in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, would give underage audiences nightmares for life. For adults, it’s like witnessing someone else’s dreams, as young Ofelia escapes into a macabre underworld of now-iconic characters, including the Faun and the Pale Man. Together with compatriots Cuarón (“Roma”) and Iñárritu (“Birdman”), del Toro elevated Mexican cinema to international attention. All three are visionaries, but this film leaves the strongest imprint.    

Read Variety’s original review of “Pan’s Labyrinth” here , and stream Guillermo del Toro’s film on Starz.

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)  

Landing the first of three Oscar wins for Meryl Streep, this dramatic study of a family reshaping itself through divorce — at a time when separations were skyrocketing — pits the chameleonic star against fellow acting titan Dustin Hoffman. Where Streep’s future roles sometimes called for elaborate accents and physical transformations, this one demands vulnerability and a willingness to be unlikable. Meanwhile, Hoffman’s performance caught mainstream American manhood at a key moment of transition, trying to balance old-fashioned “strength” with a new kind of nurturing. “Kramer vs. Kramer” benefits from having been made as popular entertainment, trading straightforwardly in big, relatable feelings and demanding suitably broad, open-hearted reactions from us in turn. It’s piercingly perceptive grown-up filmmaking, all too rare today.   

Read Variety’s original review of “Kramer vs. Kramer” here . The film is available on Showtime.

Parasite (2019)

The wealthy Park family lives high on a hill; the broke Kims wallow below in the slums of Seoul, sometimes in sewer water up to their waists. Social mobility — in this case, ascending from their city’s literal bottom to its top — is impossible unless the poorer clan is willing to lie, betray and even kill, and yet, Bong Joon Ho’s breakthrough best picture winner refuses to make the Kims the villains, when the class system itself is to blame. It’s a thriller both pointed in its intentions and universal in its appeal, which today marks a tipping point both in the global conversation about the one percent, and in the Academy Award’s sense of what kinds of films can seriously contend for the big prize.   

Read Variety’s original “Parasite” review here . The film is available for streaming on Hulu.

The Dark Knight (2008)   

The greatest comic book film ever made, Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie has the sprawling urban film noir grandiloquence, and the ripe sense of evil, to live up to its operatic ambitions. It’s at once a heady treatise on corruption and one of the most innovative action spectaculars of our time, with Christian Bale’s seething, obsessive Batman poised between two poles of moral decadence: the mangled Gotham City district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Heath Ledger’s Joker, a scarred sick puppy who dominates the movie wearing crooked lipstick the actor slicked on himself to create a character of pure disruptive insanity. Co-star Michael Caine lauded Ledger’s as “one of the scariest performances I’ve ever seen.” He was right; it has yet to be topped.

Read the original Variety review of “The Dark Knight” here . The film is available for streaming on Hulu.

Pixote (1980)    

Brazil was still under dictatorial control when Héctor Babenco directed this shocking indictment of how terribly authorities had been treating street kids in São Paulo, testing the limits of what state censorship permitted at the time. With the film’s nonprofessional cast and stripped-down, documentary-style realism, you can draw a line from De Sica’s “Shoeshine” to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados” to “Pixote” — and on to such eye-openers as Larry Clark’s “Kids” and Fernando Meirelles’ “City of God.” So much of the power of “Pixote” depends on the tough scowl of young Fernando Ramos da Silva, who, in a cruel turn of fate, was killed by Brazilian police at age 19. It’s both a time capsule and cutting edge,   especially in its nonjudgmental depiction of Pixote’s trans friend Lilica.

Read the original Variety “Pixote” review here . The film is available for streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Waiting for Guffman (1996)   

Christopher Guest’s cracked ensemble comedies are as funny as anything by Woody Allen, Monty Python, or the “Airplane!” crew, yet they have a personal quality that sets them apart — an obsessiveness about how human ego and human cheesiness dance together. Guest’s most delectable creation is this mockumentary about a small-town theater troupe struggling to put on a musical; it’s a comedy as touching as it is hilarious. Guest’s performance as the troupe’s director, Corky St. Clair, with his beaming eyes and bowl cut, his flamboyant-but-closeted mannerisms, his flat-out passion equaled only by his lack of talent, is one for the ages. He’s a character at once so retrograde and so affectionately observed that “Guffman” became the ultimate cult film for a newly liberated generation. 

Read the original Variety review of “Waiting for Guffman” here . The film is available for streaming on HBO Max .

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)   

For three minutes, middle-aged single mother Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) sits peeling potatoes. She washes the dishes. She makes the bed. Belgian director Chantal Akerman radically expanded what movies could and should be with this cornerstone entry in the slow-cinema canon — a rigorous style of filmmaking that emphasizes duration over action. Confined largely to the kitchen, dining room and hallways of a nondescript apartment, Akerman’s debut challenges what the experimental auteur called the “hierarchy of images,” concentrating on mundane domestic rituals associated with women, typically overlooked in movies. Over three-plus hours, the film re-creates tasks that Akerman observed her mother practicing for years, though in this case they’re disrupted by Jeanne’s double life as a prostitute — a feminist twist that builds to a shattering climax. Maddening at times yet never less than mesmerizing, it’s the very best film of its kind. But hardly the best film of all time.     

Stream “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” on HBO Max.

Goldfinger (1964)   

The DNA of the James Bond series was forged in “North by Northwest,” and the series itself came into being with startling finesse in “Dr. No” (1962), the first Bond film. But it wasn’t until two years later, in “Goldfinger,” that the Bond films hit their quintessential pitch of pop exhilaration — a note-perfect blend of audacity and spectacle, danger and ’60s erotic cool, unforgettable theme song and iconic villain, not to mention Sean Connery at his most royally cutthroat and commanding. The Bond series is in all our DNA now, and there’s a reason: It’s one of the greatest escapes the movies have ever given us. “Goldfinger” marks the moment it becomes a popcorn epiphany.

Read the original Variety review of “Goldfinger” here . The film is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.

The Tree of Life (2011)   

Time will tell how much higher this film can climb. Despite being one of the younger entries on the list, Terrence Malick’s metaphysical wrestling match with grace and grief — and God’s very existence — has already made an indelible imprint on other directors, most notably in its reverence for the natural world and the way DP Emmanuel Lubezki’s gravity-defying camera captures it. Malick takes the loss of his brother as subject, factoring the creation of the universe into his soul-searching exercise. He casts movie stars, but refuses to treat them as such, stripping them of their lines and the chance to “act,” while privileging impressionistic fragments from his own memory (plus empathy among dinosaurs!). It’s like “2001” turned inward, posing impossibly big questions.

Read the original Variety review of “The Tree of Life” here . The film is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.

Boogie Nights (1997)   

Every Paul Thomas Anderson film now seems to be greeted with reviews more awestruck than those that greeted the previous one. But sorry, we’ll stick with his youthful gem about the ’70s and ’80s porn world — a drama of such empathy, virtuosity and Tarantinoid sprawl that every moment in it gives you a buzz. As Dirk Diggler, Mark Wahlberg plays a simpleton of sweetness teetering into the hedonistic outer limits. The film’s drama, more than just a ride, is driven by a visionary perception: that as measured by the ironic yardstick of porn, the rise of technology paralleled the rise of a more detached and doom-struck world.

Read the original Variety review of “Boogie Nights” here. The film is available to stream on Paramount+.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)   

Walt Disney may have pioneered the field of hand-drawn animated features, but Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki elevated it, bringing down-to-earth storytelling and attention to everyday detail (raindrops falling in puddles, a snail inching its way up a plant) to the realm of the fantastic, where a plush orange Catbus offers lost kids a lift. Later Studio Ghibli achievements, such as “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away,” may have been bigger hits in the U.S., but this bucolic trip down memory lane is by far Miyazaki’s most beloved achievement around the world. Through its title character, “Totoro” introduced a benevolent forest spirit — whose fuzzy, round, owl-eyed design rivals Mickey Mouse in its appeal — that generations have adopted as their imaginary friend of choice.

Read the original Variety review of “My Neighbor Totoro” here . The film is available for streaming on HBO Max.

Intolerance (1916)   

In the silent era, D.W. Griffith did nothing less than build the ground floor of what filmmaking became, inventing the nuts and bolts of visual storytelling and doing it with breathtaking imaginative sweep. Yet the movie in which he first codified this achievement, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), was a scandalous and morally toxic epic — a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan that helped to construct Hollywood on a foundation of racism. It was “Intolerance,” the film Griffith made in response to the outrage triggered by “The Birth of a Nation,” where he rose to his most visionary heights. A three-and-a-half-hour parable spanning 2,000 years and told in four parts (a modern saga of poverty and crime; the story of Jesus; the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre; and the fall of the Babylonian empire, complete with elephants), the movie is one of the most soul-boggling spectacles ever attempted: tender, hyperbolic, spellbinding and half-mad. It seems to contain the glorious seeds of everything that movies could, and would, be.

Read the original Variety review of “Intolerance” here . The film is available to stream on Prime Video or Paramount+.

Breaking the Waves (1996)   

Lars von Trier’s greatest work was shot on film with a hand-held camera and then transferred to video, and it looks and feels like a home movie — yet it’s about a woman, a winsome Scottish newlywed named Bess (Emily Watson), who speaks directly to God, and the film’s herky-jerky naturalism makes you believe that that’s actually happening. Especially when she asks God to bring her husband (Stellan Skarsgård) back from a construction site, and sure enough the husband returns … after sustaining a paralyzing injury. Did God do that? And if so, what’s she going to do in return? Von Trier, striking a tone of solemn enchantment that begs comparison with that of Dreyer or Bergman (even the ’70s-glam-rock chapter interludes are like something out of the world’s most electric church mass), creates a drama of loss, faith and soul-scalding sacrifice that will move you to the core, as Watson’s heroine of destiny becomes the very essence of love.    

Read the original Variety review for “Breaking the Waves” here . The film is available to and rent or purchase on Prime Video.

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)   

When you think of Julia Roberts, you think of her 1,000-watt smile — and behind that, her complete and total movie-star radiance. Yet in P.J. Hogan’s splendid romantic comedy, Roberts gives a performance rooted in moodiness and anger and despair, and it’s the most transcendent acting of her career. She plays a food critic who arrives at the wedding of her lifelong friend (Dermot Mulroney) with a plan to sabotage it, all because she realizes she’s really in love with him. You may think you know where this is going, but you don’t, and that’s one reason (along with Rupert Everett’s slashing wit and the all-time perfect use of a Burt Bacharach song) why “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” with apologies to Nora Ephron, remains the most delectable and heartbreaking rom-com of its era.

Read the original Variety review of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” here . The film is available to purchase on Prime Video.

12 Years a Slave (2013)   

How do you make a film that stays true to the brutal obscenity of America’s “peculiar institution” yet is also a compelling and, at moments, even hopeful drama? British director Steve McQueen brings off that staggering balancing act in his grueling and essential adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir. Chiwetel Ejiofor, in an intensely physical yet stunningly internal performance, plays Solomon, a free man living in New York State who, in 1841, was kidnapped and trafficked to a plantation owner. This horrific scenario allows McQueen to dramatize the evils of slavery with more detail, psychological understanding and complex emotional power than we’ve ever seen in a dramatic feature. An extended image of Solomon with a noose around his neck, his tippy toes working the dirt so that he can breathe, is one of many that sear themselves into your memory.

Read Variety’s original review of “12 Years a Slave” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

Beau Travail (1999)   

Whether in “Beau Geste” or Van Damme’s ludicrous “Legionnaire,” the French Foreign Legion tends to be treated on film with a kind of reverent machismo — one brilliantly unraveled in French auteur Claire Denis’ audacious reworking of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” Foregrounding the homoerotic yearnings in Melville’s moral tale of military power plays, Denis turns it into a sinuous, mesmerizing film ballet of male beauty and physicality, shot by Agnès Godard in stark, orderly formations against the African desert, in which desire becomes as competitive an exercise as everything else in the army. No other filmmaker has better captured the military’s masculine crisis.    

Read Variety’s original review of “Beau Travail” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

King Kong (1933)   

The 1930s was an astonishing decade for Hollywood monster movies. “Frankenstein,” “Dracula,” “The Mummy,” “The Invisible Man” — these divinely spooky fairy tales of humanized horror colonized our nightmares. Yet the grandest of them all was a creature feature about an island beast who was less monstrous than misunderstood. That was Kong, the giant ape who remains the most innocently awesome and poetic special-effects feat in film history. The Skull Island sequence has a primeval magic, yet the longevity of Merian C. Cooper’s landmark also hinges on scenes where the filmmaking is stripped to its spine, notably an unbroken shot of a fledgling ingenue being guided through her first screen test. Fay Wray raises her eyes toward an imaginary monster, feigns to choke on her own terror and unleashes a scream that has echoed for 90 years.

Read Variety’s original review of “King Kong” here . Stream the film on Peacock .

Bicycle Thieves (1948)   

The timeless humanist gem of Italian Neorealism. With urgent working-class concerns around financial despair at its center, Vittorio De Sica’s soul-crushing classic delicately perceives its unforgiving post-World War II Italy where the poor must own bikes for below-minimum-wage jobs. There’s no holding back tears while De Sica’s dignified yet underprivileged Antonio desperately searches for his stolen pedals and tries to set an upstanding example for his impressionable young son, a luxury heartbreakingly denied to him that De Sica affectionately showers with empathy.

Read Variety’s original review for “Bicycle Thieves” he re . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Paris Is Burning (1990)   

While a list like this could include any number of documentaries, Jennie Livingston’s legendary celebration of the queer haven that Harlem drag balls provided for Black and Latino, gay and trans youth signifies a pre-reality-TV apotheosis of the form: It educates and inspires, while illuminating a vibrant demimonde all but invisible to mainstream society at the time — despite Madonna’s hit “Vogue” appropriating the scene’s strike-a-pose dance style. After immersing herself in that world, Livingston brought the culture of rival “houses” (ersatz families with names like Xtravaganza and LaBeija) into the light, letting the fierce den mothers define such concepts as  reading ,  realness  and  shade . The movie paved the way for RuPaul and “Pose,” while exponentially expanding LGBT visibility at large.    

Stream “Paris is Burning” on HBO Max.

A Man Escaped (1956)   

The economical style developed by French auteur Robert Bresson reached a pinnacle with his fourth film. The dispassionate prison-break procedural, based on a memoir, proved a perfect vehicle for the “pure” filmmaking now known as “Bressonian” in which nonprofessional actors (here François Leterrier plays Fontaine, the aspiring escape artist) are often shot in close-ups of hands and faces, with minimal dialogue but minute attention to offscreen sound, to create an extraordinarily absorbing cinematic experience. To watch Fontaine painstakingly shave wood from his cell door, or quietly assess the other convicts, or tap messages on his wall, is like watching a colossal mechanism being assembled piece by piece from scratch. Once it’s finally set in motion, you may have to remind yourself to breathe.    

Rent or purchase “A Man Escaped” on Prime Video .

Carrie (1976)   

Brian De Palma, with his virtuosic film-freak fetishism, is one of the most celebrated directors of the past half century, and if you ask De Palma stans what his greatest movie is, a lot of them will tell you it’s “Blow Out.” Actually, it’s this delectable and terrifying gothic bloodbath “Cinderella.” Adapted from Stephen King’s first novel and starring the incomparable Sissy Spacek as a telekinetic high-school wallflower who gets invited to the prom as a prank, plus Piper Laurie as her seething fundamentalist mother (a relationship as resonant as anything in Tennessee Williams), “Carrie” is a mesmerizing emotional chiller that remains the most revered movie fairy tale of former teen geeks everywhere.

Read Variety’s original review for “Carrie” here . Stream the film on Pluto TV .

Bambi (1942)

Animation may not strictly be a children’s medium, but one reason it’s thought of as such is the splendid way Walt Disney used the hand-drawn form to bring dreams to life. In “Snow White,” the wildlife doesn’t talk, but within five years, Disney was making it seem perfectly normal that wide-eyed forest animals might chatter among themselves (e.g., “He can call me a flower if he wants to”). There’s a purity to “Bambi” — evident in the scene where Thumper encourages the wobbly fawn to walk — unmatched by any cartoon since, though the death of the mother at the hands of man has traumatized countless kids. What makes this Disney’s best is the simple way it invites audiences to empathize with creatures.

Read Variety’s original review for “Bambi” here . Stream the film on Disney+ .

Dazed and Confused (1993)

Richard Linklater’s free-flowing comedy about the last day of high school in 1976 is the cinema’s most shaggy-dog lyrical and authentic depiction of teenage life … ever. It’s also the greatest Robert Altman film that Altman never made. Every detail (the cars, the clothes, the jocks who look like hippies, the stoners who look like nerds) makes you feel like you’ve entered a time machine, as Linklater lets his characters ramble and roam, turning every setting — a Little League game, a midnight kegger in the woods — into an opportunity to eavesdrop that leaves the audience feeling alright, alright, alright. He also captures that pivotal moment when the idea of “counterculture” first became embedded in the culture it was countering.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Dazed and Confused” here . Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video .

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Somehow stringently severe and ecstatic at the same time, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s imposing obelisk of silent cinema is one of the most soulful and emotionally immediate historical portraits ever made. Sticking to the record of the 15th-century French warrior’s trial and execution, Dreyer’s film offers little in the way of dramatic embellishment, relying instead on the extraordinary, transparently expressive face of star Renée Jeanne Falconetti for its steadily escalating, finally devastating power, with no words required.

Read Variety’s original review for “The Passion of Joan of Arc” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

The movie musical, already not a genre given to restraint, has never been so gloriously maximalist as it is in Baz Luhrmann’s fin de siècle jukebox romance, which throws so many contrivances, naked anachronisms and ornamental formal flourishes at the screen that they somehow balance each other out into the purest kind of old-Hollywood showmanship — one that appears to believe its naive credo (Truth! Beauty! Freedom! Love!) with such sincere intensity that you can’t help but buy into it too. It’s a neon-lit landmark that changed the way musicals could be constructed in the 21st century, did for Elton John’s “Your Song” what “Muriel’s Wedding” did for “Dancing Queen,” and relaunched Nicole Kidman as the gutsiest actress of her generation.

Read Variety’s original review for “Moulin Rouge!” here . Stream the film on Starz .

Vagabond (1985)

In 1955, while still in her mid-20s, a young French photographer named Agnès Varda picked up a camera and made a movie, beating the likes of Godard and Truffaut to the task. For the next six decades, she continued to make films on her own terms, without asking permission or worrying about commercial prospects. Varda was as independent a filmmaker as the medium has ever seen, and that uncompromising but deeply humanist sensibility is best reflected in “Vagabond.” The intricately crafted film opens with the discovery of homeless Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) dead in a ditch, then works backward as the people whose lives she touched seek to explain this elusive free spirit. Thus, Mona serves as a mirror for them and the audience.

Read Variety’s original review for “Vagabond” here .

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 

Seven films into his career, the child inside of Steven Spielberg finally shot a movie that sees the world as if the towering director were still just 4½-feet tall. This generational touchstone about an alien who befriends a home of free-range kids portrays adults as intimidating shapes shielded behind masks and impenetrable mutterings about contagions. Empathy and awe, curiosity and adventure — these emotions are for the young, and are made literal in E.T.’s beating heart. While it’s no easy task to settle on Spielberg’s masterpiece, “E.T” is his only film to bring Princess Diana to sobs, inspire the United Nations to award him a Peace Medal and, upon its Cannes premiere, move François Truffaut to send Spielberg a telegram that read, “You belong here more than me.”    

Read Variety’s original review for “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Taiwan-born Ang Lee had already made a Marvel superhero movie (“Hulk”) and the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) when he assumed the relatively intimate task of adapting Annie Proulx’s short story about two cowboys’ decades-spanning secret. Now considered among the most indelible Hollywood love stories, the tragic queer romance might have been a niche release, as opposed to the culture-shifting crossover phenomenon it became, were it not for a pair of peerless movie-star performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and especially Heath Ledger, who conveys so much within the character’s muffled reticence to speak. Lee has often credited his grasp of America’s aching truths to his status as an immigrant, but it’s his poetic capacity for restraint that makes “Brokeback” so powerful.

Read Variety’s original review of “Brokeback Mountain” here . Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video .

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Some say “The Exorcist” is the scariest movie ever made. But even the explicit way the devil reveals himself in that classic of demonic possession doesn’t get under your skin the way the devil does in Roman Polanski’s majestically creepy everyday nightmare about the Satan cult next door. It’s a thriller worthy of Hitchcock, with Mia Farrow’s Rosemary — a woeful waif, hair shorn like a prison-camp victim — going through a pregnancy from hell, which the film elevates into a feminine trauma of shuddery profundity.

Read Variety’s original review of “Rosemary’s Baby” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Pather Panchali (1955)

Long before Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” there was Satyajit Ray’s exquisitely paced and structured Apu Trilogy, the holy peak of all chaptered coming-of-age narratives. Restrained but also universally relatable, the Bengali filmmaker’s debut is the first of those three movies, which put Indian cinema on the international art-house map. Like a regional riff on Italian Neorealism, the inherently humanist “Pather Panchali” is both a loving portrait of a mostly matriarchal upbringing and an awe-inspiring vision of rural life, as reflected through the impressionable eyes of its young protagonist. The film’s captivating images include chasing after a passing train and playing in a monsoon, which add up to a pure and soul-nourishing experience.

Read Variety’s original review of “Pather Panchali” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

The Road Warrior (1981)

Hollywood has given us some good action films in the past 100 years. But no one, simply put, has made an action film as great — as combustible and thrilling, as surgically shot and edited, as poetic in its close-to-the-ground nihilism — as George Miller’s “Mad Max” films. We adore all of them (well, OK, not “Beyond Thunderdome”), but this is one that lives in our dreams. It’s the movies’ most vivid and threatening dystopian fairy tale, with Mel Gibson’s Max going up against a crew of terrifying punk marauders. The vehicular chases (we’re hesitant to call a number of these contraptions cars) are such extraordinary duels of velocity and aggression that they make speed itself into the film’s main character.

Read Variety’s original review of “The Road Warrior” here . Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video .

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Easily one of the most beautiful movies ever made, Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai’s rapturously repressed romance unfolds between two never-more-gorgeous stars: Maggie Cheung, an elegant sliver of sadness in a high-necked silk cheongsam, and Tony Leung, the model of smoldering, yearning hesitance. Christopher Doyle’s sensuous cinematography glories in jewel tones, frames-in-frames and the smoky layers of separation between the pair, drawn together when they discover their spouses having an affair. But most of the mood flows from Wong’s feel for the tantalizing erotics of the near miss: the door left ajar, the phrase left unspoken, the burning gaze met then reluctantly broken. Wong has made more complex films, but none that lingers quite like this one, like incense and unconsummated desire.

Read Variety’s original review of “In the Mood for Love” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

The General (1926)

Upon its release, critics considered this tight Civil War epic to be Buster Keaton’s least funny film, missing what has since made it his most respected achievement: The vaudeville-trained silent-film comedian took the true story of the robbery and recovery of a Confederate steam engine as a creative opportunity to stage reckless stunts aboard a moving train. His comic timing and daring combine in the scene where he stands astride the General’s cow-catcher, tossing a railroad tie to dislodge another blocking the tracks ahead. To understand his genius, watch how Keaton pantomimes clumsiness in order to mask the precision required to pull off the gag. Keaton, who co-directed, was meticulous about historical detail, creating images — like the climactic collapsing-bridge crash — of an immortal quality.

Read Variety’s original review of “The General” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Apocalypse Now (1979)

A war movie that’s never been surpassed for sheer cataclysmic spectacle. In 1976, Francis Ford Coppola journeyed into the jungles of the Philippines, emerging more than a year later after a shoot ravaged by a typhoon, the heart attack of 36-year-old star Martin Sheen and Coppola’s own cultivation of chaos. Yet in the movie that emerged, we see elements of all that disaster and madness onscreen. Coppola’s delirious and druggy Vietnam bad trip features one of the greatest sequences ever filmed — the “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter attack, which channels the adrenalized rush of war that’s inseparable from its horror — and the rest of the movie works on you with a slow-burn hypnosis. The vigorous excess of Coppola’s visual language and the spiritual force of its antiwar messaging all slap you in the face every time.

Read Variety’s original review of “Apocalypse Now” here . Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video .

Breathless (1960)

Jean-Paul Belmondo glances at a vintage movie still, traces his lips with his thumb and utters the enchanted word “Bogie.” In that simple moment, a cinematic ocean gets crossed. The baton of Old Hollywood has been passed to the French New Wave — but what that means is that it has passed into a new way of seeing. Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing first feature is the breakneck tale of Belmondo’s small-time car thief and the American cub reporter he fancies, played by a perfectly pert Jean Seberg. Their affair still feels strikingly “modern,” as the two hang out in an apartment, together but separate. Yet the film’s most indelible gestures come from Godard, the director who revolutionized movies. In “Breathless,” he teases sound and silence, layers musical themes and casually invents the jump cut, so that what looked at first like the tale of a petty gangster turns into a tsunami of new perception.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Breathless” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

A vanful of kids snaking their way down a sunbaked highway. An old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The most terrifying psycho since “Psycho” — a human runt, hidden behind a mask of human skin, wielding his buzzing phallic chain saw not just as a weapon of death but as an instrument of sadistically surreal torture and fear. Tobe Hooper’s brilliant grindhouse landmark has been imitated so often that it has become nothing less than the paradigm of contemporary horror. Yet the film’s mastery is that it’s an existential nightmare told with lyrical cunning, right down to the legendary final shot of insanity at dawn. 

Read Variety’s original review of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

The Piano (1993)

There has never been another character like Holly Hunter’s Ada, a mute Scotswoman who journeys to the bleak colonial bush of 1850s New Zealand to join in an arranged marriage, and who wills herself to silence just because. Jane Campion’s masterful drama is hypnotically torn between inchoate feminist fury and a kind of desolate romantic yearning. Ada is not about to confess her soul to the men who lay claim to her, be it her husband (Sam Neill) or the tattooed lover (Harvey Keitel) who controls her access to a piano, her supreme instrument of self-expression. Yet Hunter’s austerely powerful performance becomes a testament of silent passion, speaking to the audience so directly that it’s as if she were wired to us.

Read Variety’s original review of “The Piano” here . Rent or purchase the film on Apple TV .

Mean Streets (1973)

Martin Scorsese has made many masterpieces (who’d want to live in a movie world without “Taxi Driver” or “Raging Bull”?), yet the film that established him as a major artist — not to mention the cinema’s foremost chronicler of mob life from the ground up — still stands above nearly all of them. It’s that electrifying and memorable an experience. “Mean Streets” is brilliantly staged (to the most ecstatic rock ’n’ roll score in film history), yet every scene in it just seems to happen , as Charlie, a Little Italy numbers runner played with wormy ambition by Harvey Keitel, tries to rein in his firecracker of a cousin, Johnny Boy, played by Robert De Niro as the very id of ’70s Hollywood. Imagine Coppola, Cassavetes and Kenneth Anger mixed into one explosive cocktail, and you have the timeless genius Scorsese showed here. 

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Mean Streets” here . Stream the film on Prime Video or Paramount+ .

Notorious (1946)

Of the 50-odd features Hitchcock made in his career, this is the one where every element fits together perfectly, like a Swiss watch. The director’s technical brilliance shines through at multiple points, as in the crane shot from the balcony to the key hidden in Ingrid Bergman’s hand. But it’s the three lead performances that make this cloak-and-dagger love triangle so engaging … and perverse: A secret agent (Cary Grant) falls for the woman (Bergman) he recruited to dupe a dapper Nazi (Claude Rains), complicating the mission to uncover the MacGuffin — as Hitchcock called the whatsit everybody wants — locked in his wine cellar. The movie is elegant, sexy and the most suspenseful of his oeuvre, because we sense how much is at stake for the couple.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Notorious” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

Titanic (1997)

It’s possible that no movie in history has been as simultaneously beloved and attacked as James Cameron’s jaw-droppingly spectacular love story. It’s arguably the only disaster movie that’s a work of art. Yet the carping began almost immediately (“The script is terrible!” — actually, it’s quite good, though with a few lines that clink), to the point that the movie became one of the foundation stones of hater culture. Yet listen to the heart of the ocean and forget that noise! “Titanic” has a primal sweep that evokes the majesty of D.W. Griffith, and there’s a regal irony built into the romance that the haters all missed. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have an enchanting chemistry, yet the film knows all too well that these two characters are just having a starry-eyed youthful fling. It’s only the close encounter with an iceberg that renders their love timeless.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Titanic” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

L'Avventura (1960)

A young woman goes missing during a pleasure-boat vacation. Her best friend (Monica Vitti, in a star-making role) and her lover search for her, but gradually fall in love. Michelangelo Antonioni’s first masterpiece — there are several more, notably “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse,” also starring Vitti, which form a thematic trilogy with “L’Avventura” — has the bones of a Hitchcock thriller. But this solution-less mystery is essentially an inversion of that model, which is what made it, and Antonioni, so revolutionary: He renders the eerie areas of story and character psychology, which would ordinarily be the negative space between plot beats, not only visible but achingly, inexpressibly beautiful.     

Read Variety’s original review of “L’Avventura” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

Shoah (1985)

Many a cinephile has put off watching Claude Lanzmann’s expansive, illuminating and cumulatively shattering Holocaust documentary in the course of their film education: Nine and a half hours of confrontation with the victims and perpetrators alike of systematic genocide is no easy watch, after all, and nor should it be. Yet there’s an essentially human pull to the film’s witnessing of lives and communities broken and sometimes rebuilt in the 40 years following the Holocaust that makes it riveting — an urgent historical chronicle recorded at the precise time it needed to be done, distant enough from the events to take in their multigenerational impact, and close enough to hear its voices firsthand.  

Rent or purchase “Shoah” on Prime Video .

Moonlight (2016)

The dramatic Oscar-night twist — which saw Barry Jenkins’ queer Black indie drama upset old-school front-runner “La La Land” — revealed a major shift in sensibility from the Academy, which had snubbed “Brokeback Mountain” and “Do the Right Thing” (the unacknowledged best pictures of their respective years). At a moment when the industry was coming to terms with a lack of diversity in its stories and storytellers, “Moonlight” sublimely illustrated what had been missing: an opportunity to discover someone like Chiron, deemed “soft” by his peers, taken under the wing of a compromised father figure (Mahershala Ali), who gives in to love and aggression alike. Told in three distinct chapters, this hopeful portrayal of what the character’s future might bring paved the way for so many other voices.

Read Variety’s original review of “Moonlight” here . Stream the film on Hulu .

The Wild Bunch (1969)

For the first half-century of cinema’s existence, the Western was the medium’s defining genre, in America at least. But hundreds of movies — plus primetime television series like “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” — wore it out, until Sam Peckinpah gave things a New Hollywood kick. The director learned at the feet of action maestro Don Siegel (master of the montage) but brought his own macho sensibility to “The Wild Bunch,” subverting the idealism of “Shane” and other iconic Westerns. Even the kids are violent by nature here. The film focuses on an aging gang of outlaws who go down in a blaze of glory. It’s bloody as hell, culminating in an epic shootout that rivals the “Psycho” shower scene or the “Saving Private Ryan” beach landing in sheer bravura.  

Read Variety’s original review of “The Wild Bunch” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

Fargo (1996)

Over the course of their eccentric, uncompromising careers, the Coen brothers have contributed some of cinema’s most colorful characters: human meltdown Barton Fink, baby-snatching H.I. and evil-incarnate Anton Chigurh. But their greatest invention is pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the Midwestern-accented voice of reason in this sly, subzero crime drama, which is just deranged enough to sell its cheeky “true story” claim. Look past the carnage and the Coens’ more-serious-than-it-seems colloquial satire serves as a contrast in marriages. On one hand, you have a spineless used-car salesman (William H. Macy) so desperate for cash that he kidnaps his own wife. On the other, there’s good-natured Marge — as diligent a detective as any Dude — who takes time away from the stressful investigation to pep-talk her husband.  

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Fargo” here . Stream the film on Hulu .

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Men dressing as women has been fuel for comedy for longer than cinema has been around, but never so cleverly or chaotically as in Billy Wilder’s note-perfect bauble, which races through one genre template after another — gangster thriller, backstage musical, bedroom farce — without missing a comic beat. Playing Jack Lemmon’s nebbishy charm against Tony Curtis’ alpha suaveness is a recipe for laughs, while their fumbling attempts to pass as two classy dames subversively critique the duo’s own sexism. Wilder, who had directed Marilyn Monroe’s iconic subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch,” recognized better than anyone the hyper-feminine star’s potential, using her luminous, so-dazed-it’s-almost-Zen comic timing to upstage her cross-dressing co-stars. It’s a treat with teeth.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Some Like It Hot” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Six decades of changing attitudes toward colonialism, feminism and militarism should have dated this men-only story of an arrogant British Army lieutenant’s exploits in the Middle Eastern theater of World War I. But David Lean’s epic, shot by Freddie Young with unparalleled panoramic majesty, is both a spectacular celebration and a lacerating critique of such endeavors. From his sand-gold hair to his sky-blue eyes, Peter O’Toole plays T.E. Lawrence as a man possessed by the Arabian Desert, a towering hero and a hubristic narcissist, a manipulator and a pawn, a genius tactician and a monster of repressed sadomasochistic impulse. Such fertile contradictions mean that aside from its eternally jaw-dropping technical virtues, exemplified by Omar Sharif materializing on camelback out of the heat-hazed desert horizon, “Lawrence of Arabia” still feels thrillingly current.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Lawrence of Arabia” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

Annie Hall (1977)

For most of the first decade of his movie career, Woody Allen made what we now call his “early, funny films,” and some were as inspired in their lunacy as the movies of the Marx Brothers. So it was a pleasurable shock when he embedded his hilarious sense of surrealist vaudeville in a romantic comedy that turned out to be as sophisticated and transporting as it was funny. Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall, all adorable thrift-shop charm and enchanting ditherer, became an immortal screen heroine of the ’70s, and Allen pushed the neurotic narcissism of “the Woody Allen character” to such a pesky, honest extreme that he seemed, at least for that cultural moment, to stand in for a generation of men who had never learned to commit.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Annie Hall” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

On the Waterfront (1954)

Marlon Brando redefined American acting, first onstage and then on-screen with “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But it was this reunion with The Actors Studio founder Elia Kazan that repped the pair’s greatest collaboration: a street-level redemption story about an ex-boxer (Brando) who decides he’s tired of being pushed around by the corrupt union bosses — the same guys who forced him to take a dive in the ring. In his pursuit of realism, Kazan insisted on shooting on the New Jersey docks, while trusting Brando’s instincts to bring the character to life. The “I coulda been a contender” scene with Rod Steiger is classic, but study how Brando picks up and plays with Eva Marie Saint’s glove to appreciate the unpredictable, improv-ready brilliance of his Method.  

Read Variety’s original review of “On the Waterfront” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The serial killer has become a talismanic figure in pop culture, maybe because one can’t rationalize away his drive to murder. And no drama of serial killers — their dread, fascination and mystery — has cast a greater spell than Jonathan Demme’s exquisitely crafted landmark of a thriller. It’s a plunge into evil made with so much humanity — as well as a perverse spirit of play — that it leaves you both unnerved and exhilarated. Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Hannibal Lecter, the genius serial-killer cannibal, didn’t take long to become a meme, and that’s because Hopkins makes Lecter as witty as he is mad, dispatching his victims as a cathartic form of superiority. And Jodie Foster, as the FBI agent who bonds with Lecter to catch a killer of twisted terror, gives her most valiant performance, playing a solo woman warrior poised against a patriarchy of fear.  

Read Variety’s original review of “The Silence of the Lambs” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Stagecoach (1939)

It took John Ford, one of the greatest American filmmakers, to elevate the image of the Western and earn the genre the respect it deserved. For more than half a century, Ford found poetry in frontier stories, and though his thorny rescue saga “The Searchers” (which came much later) is his most modern, this groundbreaking love and revenge picture set the high-water mark. Starring an iconic John Wayne as a reckless outlaw, in a collaboration that would span 12 movies, and navigating the tale of a band of outsiders against the majestic backdrop of Monument Valley, Ford’s influential epic is sweepingly rich with artistic shots and exacting framing, as well as surprisingly intimate in its exploration of a much fabled land.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Stagecoach” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

After achieving international acclaim with increasingly expressionistic portraits of the world as he saw it — from the simple circus performers of “La Strada” to the decadent Roman nightlife of “La Dolce Vita” — Italian maestro Federico Fellini lost confidence in his capacity to create. Instead of giving up, he channeled that artistic despair into his most uninhibited triumph: a freewheeling and shamelessly autobiographical movie about a philandering filmmaker’s crippling case of directile dysfunction, full to bursting with past mistresses, childhood memories and psychoanalytic symbology. From the opening anxiety dream, in which Marcello Mastroianni (as Fellini’s self-flattering/flagellating stand-in) claws his way out of a traffic jam, to the climactic rondelet around the rocket set, the blocked director found surrealistic inspiration in his subconscious.  

Read Variety’s original review of “8½” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

Vertigo (1958)

No, it’s not Hitchcock’s greatest film. But it is his most rapturous and formally head-spinning dream-poem of romantic fatalism. The entire movie seems to take place in a hypnotic trance, as James Stewart’s wayward San Francisco detective follows, and falls in love with, Kim Novak’s walking specter of a temptress, only to learn that she’s not who she seems. But can he turn her back into who she seemed? “Vertigo,” a mystery tucked inside an enigma, is really the cinema’s most solemnly fantastic vision of fetishism, and the gliding-camera visuals turn the Bay Area into a deliriously sculptured game board of fate.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Vertigo” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video.

Network (1976)

In the sharpest, most scathing screenplay in American cinema, Paddy Chayefsky gave us the line, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” blurted from the lips of a mad prophet, burned-out UBS anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch). Since the introduction of television, the movies saw their existence threatened by the boob tube’s lowest-common-denominator approach. In “Network,” the big screen bites back, taking to task the culture of distraction — what Neil Postman called “amusing ourselves to death” — and fearmongering practiced by ratings-thirsty execs, like Faye Dunaway’s ethically challenged programming chief. Without the cynical spitfire genius of Chayefsky’s script (in Sidney Lumet’s hands), there would be no Aaron Sorkin, no “The Morning Show,” no film by which the industry could keep itself honest. 

Read Variety’s original review of “Network” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

The “long, long ago” preamble at the top of “Star Wars” established George Lucas’ interstellar adventure saga as a kind of space-age fairy tale. But it wasn’t until the sequel — when Luke Skywalker discovered Darth Vader was his dad, Leia was his sister and he could bench-press X-wings by using the Force — that the series showed its full potential. Handled differently, the Irvin Kershner-directed follow-up could’ve killed the franchise. But instead of merely repeating the thrills of the blockbuster original, “Empire” introduces new information — and characters, like Yoda — that lend an emotional dimension to what had come before. Plus, the heroes really take a beating, all of which made audiences profoundly invested in seeing the revenge of the Jedi (as the next movie was tentatively called).

Read Variety’s original review of “The Empire Strikes Back” here . Stream the film on Disney+ .

Double Indemnity (1944)

The moody seductive apex of film noir, Billy Wilder’s lustrous drama sizzles with the most elegant offerings of a filmmaking style defined by the era’s World War II-infused paranoia: a gleaming cinematography of dark shadows, deceit, homicide and plenty of cigarette smoke. Emerging out of the picture’s Los Angeles enclave of Spanish-style houses is Barbara Stanwyck’s definitive femme fatale and Fred MacMurray’s defenseless insurance salesman, who can’t help but get caught in the conniving double-crosser’s scheming web. With this gripping tale of the dark side of romance, the genre-defying director set the bar for the famously hard-boiled genre.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Double Indemnity” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

City Lights (1931)

Four years after the invention of talkies, Charlie Chaplin stuck to what made him the world’s biggest star: keeping his mouth shut. The silent comedian had spent years finding the right mix of silliness and sentimentality, and the combination was never more sublime than in this romantic pearl of a film. Chaplin reprises his signature “Little Tramp” character, who falls for a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill). Unable to see his tattered suit, the young woman falls for what she thinks is a millionaire. To get the poetic moment where these two meet just right, Chaplin shot and reshot the scene a total of 342 times. Better still is the moment after her sight is restored where she touches his hand and recognizes the truth.

Read Variety’s original review of “City Lights” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

A gangster movie so fresh and bold, so brazen in its eroticism, so shocking in its bullet-in-the-eye violence that it effectively became the stake through the heart of the Hollywood studio system. Yet the aesthetic secret of “Bonnie and Clyde” is that it’s actually poised, with a one-of-a-kind perfection, between the cinematic world that came before it and the one that came after. Telling the story of the infamous 1930s bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who are played with breathtaking glamour and heartbreaking vulnerability by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the film kicked open the door to the flowing freedom of the New Hollywood, yet Arthur Penn directed it with a visual rigor and an iron-clad design that can only be called classical. 

Read Variety’s original review of “Bonnie and Clyde” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

The 400 Blows (1959)

Many a canonized classic has had its edges softened by intervening years of admiration. But the debut from foundational French New Waver François Truffaut, a film critic of notoriously brutal insight, resists this certain tendency, just as Truffaut, although mining his own childhood, resists nostalgia. Instead, this portrait of parentally neglected adolescent Parisian truant Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud, in one of the greatest-ever juvenile performances) remains beautifully raw, playing not as memories meticulously re-created but as incidents being lived for the first time. After this, Léaud would be an actor, and Truffaut not just a director but an auteur (a theory he’d passionately advocated). But here, nothing is yet written and “The 400 Blows,” from its classroom opening to its stunningly evocative final freeze frame, stays eternally new.

Read Variety’s original review of “The 400 Blows” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

The funniest, and most zany-sublime, of the four Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn collaborations, Howard Hawks’ uproarious farce is fast, wild and awash with feisty chemistry in all the ways the screwball genre of speedy wisecracks and chaotic couplings demands. But what’s perhaps most special about “Bringing Up Baby” is its commitment to high levels of absurdity in a disorderly and unusual playpen, one that embraces both an on-the-loose leopard and a misplaced dinosaur bone. From ahead-of-its-time observations on gender norms to blistering zingers exchanged between a nerdy paleontologist and a frantic socialite, Hawks’ dizzying romantic comedy is an ageless classic.

Read Variety’s original review of “Bringing Up Baby” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video .

Tokyo Story (1953)

Over and over in his astonishing career, Japanese legend Yasujirō Ozu proved his miraculous facility for a piercingly precise, intimate humanism that unfurls in every direction into an epic thematic landscape. The last film in Ozu’s “Noriko trilogy,” after “Late Spring” and “Early Summer,” “Tokyo Story” takes the director’s deceptively quiet domestic focus to its most transcendent height. Out of the minutely observed story of an aging couple visiting Tokyo and treated with different flavors of neglect and disrespect by their grown-up children, Ozu, abetted by a superlative cast led by Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama as the elderly parents, fashions simply the greatest and most devastating film about the generation gap ever made.  

Stream “Tokyo Story” on HBO Max or Prime Video .

The Apartment (1960)

In 1960, Billy Wilder was convinced that corporations were ruining Hollywood. He spun that cynicism into this mordant comedy that casts a cold eye on the effect of big business on human decency, where Jack Lemmon’s cubicle worker Bud Baxter might sell out the woman he loves (Shirley MacLaine) for a key to the junior executives’ washroom. As MacLaine’s depressive elevator operator sighs, “Some people take and some people get took.” Many critics took offense at the film itself, discomfited that Wilder refused to lecture audiences that Baxter was acting like a louse. That ambiguity gives Wilder’s film its lasting depth — its satire feels more relevant every year — and, in a stroke of irony, proved that great art could be made under corporate Hollywood after all. 

Read Variety’s original review of “The Apartment” here . Stream the film on Sling TV .

Chinatown (1974)

A stray bullet, a car horn, a thin scream, and Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” pulls off perhaps the greatest dumb-luck downer ending in American cinema. But the ironic finale derives its tragic heft from a cast (Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston especially) working, alongside every crew department, to career-best form, on a Robert Towne screenplay dripping with malice and bristling with hidden agendas. Drought, incest, orange groves, murder and money, this is the L.A. neo-noir to end all L.A. neo-noirs, so controlled you could clone the entire gloriously grimy affair out of any single detail, from the bandage across Jake Gittes’ nose to the flaw in Evelyn Mulwray’s eye.

Read Variety’s original review of “Chinatown” here . Stream the film on HBO Max or Hulu .

Gone With the Wind (1939)

For a long time, it was simply the quintessential Hollywood movie: the spellbinding definition of how star power and spectacle, soap opera and history, could merge into an experience that swept audiences away. There are two ways that we now see it differently. Embedded in the film’s romantic vision of the South during and after the Civil War is a shameful insensitivity to the lives of Black Americans who were enslaved on plantations. Time has not been kind to “Gone With the Wind’s” blinkered vision of race. Yet it’s been very kind indeed to the thorny majesty of the film’s drama. Once viewed as the province of “women’s pictures,” the saga of Scarlett O’Hara now stands more clearly than ever as an American narrative of transcendent power, with Vivien Leigh delivering the most wrenching performance by a female actor of the studio-system era.  

Read Variety’s original review of “Gone With the Wind” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Blue Velvet (1986)

In the 1980s, the roots of the independent-film revolution sprouted overnight when David Lynch released his most sensational and talked-about movie. It was a mesmerizing freak-show dream that was equal parts shock theater and film noir, with a performance by Dennis Hopper that seemed to redefine evil, a scene with Dean Stockwell that’s as strange and hypnotic as any scene in history, and an ominous wide-eyed storytelling eagerness that looked back at old movies and forward into how they could be reconfigured as surely as Quentin Tarantino would do in the next decade. Some think Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” upped the ante on “Blue Velvet.” In more ways than not, we think it — brilliantly — rehashed it, and that “Blue Velvet” remains the essential thriller symphony of Lynch’s career.

Read Variety’s original review of “Blue Velvet” here . Stream the film on Prime Video.

The Godfather Part II (1974)

The most masterful sequel ever made, which is one reason that some think it’s superior to “The Godfather.” Yet with the rigid cold stare of Pacino’s Michael Corleone at its center, his soul already in its death throes, this Shakespearean gangster epic shot in shades of pitch-black expands “The Godfather’s” heart of darkness in a way that’s more tragic but not, perhaps, as emotionally devouring. Its most operatically stunning achievement — destroyed by Coppola in his assorted alternate versions — is the cross-cutting between Michael’s descent and the rise to power of the young Vito Corleone, played by Robert De Niro as a family man and close-to-the-vest killer who chooses crime because it’s the only way to join America that has chosen him.

Read Variety’s original review of “The Godfather Part II” here . Rent or purchase the film on HBO Max .

Persona (1966)

As revered as he is, Ingmar Bergman also gets something of a bad rap as a dour intellectual, isolated from humanity on his windswept island. “Persona” may be his most daunting achievement, an avant-garde two-hander that has confounded and fascinated audiences for more than half a century. (At the time of its release, it was a massive art-house phenomenon.) The formal and philosophical playfulness of this prismatic psychodrama is exhilarating — not to mention bracingly modern — as Bibi Andersson’s obsessive nurse melds with the recovering stage star, played by Liv Ullmann, in her care. Where most directors seek clarity, Bergman embraces a certain blurring of the lines uniquely suited to cinema, deviating from the formal and narrative rulebook in intimate sympathy with his characters’ mental breaks, ruptures and reversals.

Read Variety’s original review of “Persona” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Nashville (1975)

In the 1970s, Robert Altman devised a way of making movies that was so intoxicatingly lifelike — the overlapping dialogue, the slow-zoom documentary look, the characters who seemed to drop in and out of the narrative until their dropping in became the narrative — that it’s as if he’d reinvented cinema as an entrancing new form of social vérité mirror. In “Nashville,” his densely packed and ebullient tour de force, Altman follows the seemingly random actions of 24 characters over five days in the country-music capital, and what it all adds up to is an astonishingly moving and forward-looking vision of an America that’s falling apart and coming together at the same time. 

Read Variety’s original review of “Nashville” here . Purchase the film on Prime Video.

Casablanca (1942)

Studio director Michael Curtiz wasn’t exactly what the French would call an “auteur.” Turns out, that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. “Casablanca” illustrates how well the Hollywood system could work, no matter who was behind the camera — especially when those in front included Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (and their respective accents). In just 102 minutes, the movie telegraphs a deep personal history between these two ex-lovers, reunited at Rick’s Café Américain in Morocco; a terrific romantic dilemma in the picture’s World War II present (to pick up where they left off or send her packing with her Resistance fighter husband?); and a bittersweet sense of the future without regrets … or each other.

Read Variety’s original review of “Casablanca” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Released just two weeks before “The Jazz Singer,” F.W. Murnau’s turbulent love-triangle drama marked the pinnacle of silent expressionism, including dramatic lighting (a signature of German directors at the time, imported here to Hollywood), elaborate tracking shots and impressive in-camera effects. While the acting clearly belongs to an earlier time — one that made intertitles nearly unnecessary — “Sunrise” still looks downright avant-garde compared with the relatively conservative direction film language took once sound recording forced production back indoors, making it impossible for talkies to replicate the way Murnau moved the camera through outdoor scenes and custom-built sets (like the busy street scenes). There’s no telling what movies might look like today had cinema continued in this direction.

Read Variety’s original review of “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” here . Stream the film on Prime Video .

Do the Right Thing (1989)

When Spike Lee’s outspoken portrait of interracial, inner-city tensions was first reviewed, several critics voiced concerns that it might spark riots. The film was plenty provocative at the time (Barack and Michelle Obama famously made this conversation starter their first date), but Lee’s prescience explains how it achieved the status of American cinema’s most potent protest statement. The film’s fight-the-power finale — in which the director’s livid alter ego, Mookie, chucks a trash can through the window of Sal’s Bed-Stuy pizzeria — anticipated the contemporary wave of demonstrations against police brutality. From Rosie Perez’s defiantly hyperkinetic opening-credits dance, Lee plunges audiences into a heat-wave-heightened version of his own Brooklyn neighborhood, where the locals loom larger than life. He shows members of the Black, Latino and white communities trying to coexist. But the divisions become impossible to ignore after what happens to Radio Raheem, still one of the most upsetting fates in screen history. It wasn’t until Spike Lee came along and rocked the status quo that Hollywood seriously started making room for the consciousness of Black voices.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Do the Right Thing” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

A searing sociopolitical satire of France’s ruling class on the brink of World War II, Jean Renoir’s immersive and studiously choreographed ensemble drama — once destroyed after the furious response it received, later reconstructed — still stuns through graceful camera movements in deep-focus long takes. “‘The Rules of the Game’ taught me the rules of the game,” Robert Altman once said. With an operatic ensemble portraying the two ends of an upstairs-downstairs class divide during a countryside hunting party, Renoir’s cumulatively dizzying comedy of manners indeed came to influence countless filmmakers all the way into the 21st century, if a gleaming New Year’s Eve sequence in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” is any indication.

Read Variety’s original review of “The Rules of the Game” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video.

Goodfellas (1990)

“The Godfather” may be the great mob-saga-as-Greek-tragedy, but it was also a work of fiction, adapted from a novel, whereas Martin Scorsese’s slick, no-apologies treatment of Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy” was rooted in reality. That’s at once the film’s appeal and the thing that makes it so unsettling: These brutal suburban gangsters really existed and seemed relatable enough to be our next-door neighbors … or ourselves. Scorsese overtly encourages such identification, seducing us with the roller-coaster run-up of the first act, while breezing past the moral compromises made by charismatic antihero Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). It looks sexy at first from the perspective of his wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco): DP Michael Ballhaus’ famous Steadicam shot through the side door of the Copacabana puts us in her position, swept up in Henry’s swanky new world. Then the whackings start and the mood changes, unpredictable as Joe Pesci’s trigger-happy Tommy DeVito, and we realize what an astonishing balancing act this elaborate network of allegiances has been, not just between characters, but also with our sympathies.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Goodfellas” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

A quarter-century after movies found their voice, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen teamed up to honor that transition, using song and dance to show what’s so splendid about the medium. In a 2007 interview with Variety, Ray Bradbury described MGM’s glorious homage as a “great science-fiction musical.” In his words, “It is science fiction because it is about the invention of sound and how that invention changed the history of Hollywood.” The rest of the world sees this as a romantic comedy in which Debbie Reynolds’ ingénue gets swept off her feet — and onto the big screen — while Kelly taps his way into her heart. The swoony, seemingly spontaneous lamppost sequence is pure bliss, topping even Fred Astaire’s dancin’-on-the-ceiling number from “Royal Wedding” the year before.

Read Variety’s original review of “Singin’ in the Rain” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

No American director has demonstrated a more instinctive sense of how to engage and immerse an audience in someone else’s experience than Steven Spielberg, who (as big-screen memoir “The Fabelmans” reminds) started out making amateur combat films with neighborhood friends. By the time the born entertainer got around to orchestrating this epic World War II rescue, he’d convincingly brought sharks, aliens and dinosaurs to life — all fantasies compared with the brutal Omaha beach landing in this film. The D-Day invasion builds on the achievement of “Schindler’s List,” vividly re-creating history so we feel as if we’re experiencing it firsthand. Nothing in cinema can touch the virtuosity of that opening, but Spielberg keeps us riveted — amid sniper attacks and trial-by-fire bonding — as all-American Tom Hanks and his three-dimensional co-stars carry out their nail-biting suicide mission. The pinnacle of a spectacular but often cynical genre, this sobering call-of-duty drama brings us to the brink of hell while preserving the characters’ humanity in the process, thereby honoring the sacrifice of all who’ve served.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Saving Private Ryan” here . Stream the film on Paramount+ .

All About Eve (1950)

Bette Davis is the Godzilla of showbiz monsters in this fire-breathing satire of the fragility of stardom. In an industry that didn’t take long to figure out the easy-come-easy-go nature of success, Joseph L. Mankiewicz brilliantly transformed a short story from Cosmopolitan magazine in such a way as to amplify the shrewd insight of the woman who wrote it. The too-true fable sees aging Broadway legend Margo Channing (Davis) seduced by conniving up-and-comer Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who flatters her with praise, only to insinuate herself into the older woman’s life. Eve and Margo are such strong, universal characters that they’ve since become a kind of shorthand — gender-agnostic archetypes for the vain but vulnerable diva and the viper who serves as that person’s undoing.

Read Variety’s original review of “All About Eve” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video or Apple TV .

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Frank Capra’s heart-wrenching classic failed at the box office in its original release, only to become Hollywood’s ultimate populist Christmas fable. It’s one of the most touching movies ever made — and if you look closely, one of the darkest. (That may be why it didn’t connect in 1946.) Yet it’s also one of the most profound movies ever made. The tale of a small-town family man, George Bailey (James Stewart in his quintessential performance), who can’t seem to realize his big dreams until he realizes that the life around him is the dream he was seeking, it’s the movie that instructs all of us to wake up to the miracle we’re living.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “It’s a Wonderful Life” here . Stream the film on Prime Video.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The most exquisite line in the history of movie advertising got it just right. Stanley Kubrick directed what is still the ultimate trip — the only sci-fi spectacle that feels, at every moment, like it’s taking you to another world. From the awesome glory of the “Also sprach Zarathustra” planetary-alignment prelude to the ape using a bone to discover human intelligence (and violence), from the “Blue Danube” ballet of orbiting satellites to the mission to Jupiter that becomes an outlandishly suspenseful astronaut-versus-computer showdown, from the still-eyeball-blowing psychedelic wormhole climax to the Star Child who is all of us reborn, Kubrick’s trancelike thriller meditation on the place of man in the universe stands as one of cinema’s monolithic achievements.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “2001: A Space Odyssey” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Seven Samurai (1954)

Whereas Western action movies typically pit a lone hero against whatever evil might be threatening his family (“Die Hard”), town (“High Noon”) or planet (every Bond movie ever), Akira Kurosawa’s expansive ensemble drama is all about teamwork. The Japanese virtuoso, who had introduced the notion of competing perspectives with art-house breakthrough “Rashomon,” here worked to unify his cast toward a common goal: protecting a village of defenseless farmers from bandits. Despite its 207-minute running time, the resulting epic is ruthlessly economical in its storytelling. Kurosawa takes care to give each of his characters a distinct personality, some serious (e.g., “Ikiru” star Takashi Shimura as the group’s leader), others comical (like legendary scene-stealer Toshiro Mifune). Practically every rally-the-heroes movie since owes a debt to this OG testament to collective bravery.

Read Variety’ s original review of “Seven Samurai” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

We all know what a fertile time the 1970s were for Hollywood, but it’s a truth less commonly acknowledged that the ’90s brought every bit as great a cinematic revolution — this one from the margins — with Quentin Tarantino as its motormouth mascot. Where fellow indie directors Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Haynes, et al. dug into the grittier corners of reality, Tarantino took his louche film-geek obsessions and remixed them into this monumental homage to the junk food that had nourished him as a video store clerk and B-movie addict. Unapologetically profane and infinitely quotable, “Pulp Fiction” transformed movies overnight. It inspired countless knockoffs, liberated movies to come from chronological storytelling and restarted the careers of Bruce Willis and John Travolta, while bringing a kind of hipster credibility to genre cinema that forever changed audience tastes.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Pulp Fiction” here . Stream the film on HBO Max.

Citizen Kane (1941)

For decades it was commonly thought of as the greatest movie ever made, and there are a lot of reasons why: the visionary excitement of it, the through-a-snow-globe-darkly Gothic majesty of it, the joyous acting, the hypnotic structure, the playfulness, the doomy haunting symbolism of Rosebud, and on and on. Then-25-year-old Orson Welles charged into Hollywood as if it were the world’s greatest toy store, directing his debut feature with such an ebullient, rule-breaking force of virtuosity that it’s as if he’d made the first American independent film. That Welles took on the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (whom he plays a barely veiled version of), only to see his movie — and, in a way, his career — stomped by Hearst’s power, shows you that there were limits to what even a genius megalomaniac like Welles could bring off. But not many.

Read Variety ‘s original review of “Citizen Kane” here . Stream the film on HBO Max .

The Godfather (1972)

Riding the crest of the New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola made what is still the greatest film since the fadeout of the studio system: a classical epic of indelibly dark sweeping grandeur, and a movie that embedded itself so richly in the popular imagination that for 50 years it has spoken to audiences on every level of experience. Watching the saga of the Corleones, we’re plunged, vicariously, into a life of organized crime, in all its power and blood and influence and fear. At the same time, we’re immersed in the drama of an Italian American family who, in their dance of loyalty and rivalry and devotion, connect with us in a way that’s at once personal and primal. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and the rest of the singular cast embody their roles as if they’d been born to play them. The eternal shattering paradox of “The Godfather” is that the Corleones are at once a cozy clan of Old World romantic role models, ruthless paragons of the American dream and profoundly relatable monsters. Maybe that’s why their story became our story.

Read Variety’s original review of “The Godfather” here . Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video or Apple TV.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

Wholesome Hollywood entertainment at its most upbeat and pure, Victor Fleming’s joyous Technicolor classic has stood the test of time, gifting pleasure to multiple generations, while representing the gold standard against which all other cinematic enchantments are judged. That simple device of shifting from black and white to color when Judy Garland’s Dorothy enters the Land of Oz sets up audiences for the magical experience ahead, minting the template for the “Avatar,” “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” franchises. We marvel alongside our wide-eyed heroine as she sets off with her three new friends — and her little dog too — to prove their smarts, hearts and courage. At their most successful, movies feel like waking reveries, which is also how one might describe Dorothy’s fantastical quest. As it happens, this is how we as audiences engage with cinema, bringing every aspect of our life experience to the allegories presented on-screen, thereby making them our own. Meanwhile, in the character of the Wizard, young viewers get an essential warning about how the medium can be used to manipulate us into believing in an alternate reality.

Read Variety’s original review of “The Wizard of Oz” here . Stream the film on HBO Max or Hulu .

Psycho (1960)

There’s hardly a frame of Alfred Hitchcock’s cataclysmic slasher masterpiece that isn’t iconic. If you don’t believe us, consider the following: Eyes. Holes. Birds. Drains. Windshield wipers. A shower. A torso. A knife. “Blood, blood!” A Victorian stairway. Mother in her rocking chair. For decades, “Psycho” enjoyed such a cosmic pop-cultural infamy that, in a funny way, its status as a work of art got overshadowed. Hailing it as Hitchcock’s greatest movie — let alone the greatest movie ever made — wouldn’t have seemed quite respectable. Yet there’s a reason that every moment in “Psycho” is iconic, and that Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, as Norman Bates and Marion Crane, became fixed in our imaginations like figures out of a dream. The entire movie, while shot on late-’50s TV sets and conceived by Hitchcock as a prank-the-audience Gothic trapdoor thriller, came to exist (and, really, it always had) on the level of riveting mythology. In 45 seconds, the shower scene rips the 20th century in half; what Hitchcock was expressing was profound — that in the modern world, the center would no longer hold. And once the movie kills off its heroine (killing off, in the process, the very idea that God will protect us), it turns into the cinema’s most hypnotic, seductive and prophetic meditation on fear, lust, innocence, violence and identity. More than perhaps any movie ever made, “Psycho” is a film you can watch again and again and again. It’s a movie that speaks to us now more than ever, because it shows us, in every teasingly sinister moment, how life itself came to feel like a fun house poised over an abyss.

Read Variety’s original review of “Psycho” here . Rent or purchase the film on Apple TV or Prime Video .

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Critic Resources

See the full list of individually-designated top critics.

In 2020, we revamped our Top Critic criteria  to reflect the ever-changing media landscape and recognize critics’ individual contributions to their field. The following are critics currently receiving Top Critic status, no matter where they publish.

A.A. Dowd A.O. Scott Adam Nayman Alan Sepinwall Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Alison Herman Alison Willmore Alissa Wilkinson Allison Keene Allison Shoemaker Alonso Duralde Amy Amatangelo Amy Nicholson Angelica Jade Bastién Angie Han Ann Hornaday Anna Smith Anne Cohen Anthony Lane Anupama Chopra Aramide Tinubu Ben Travers Bilge Ebiri Brian Tallerico Candice Frederick Carlos Aguilar Caroline Framke Caroline Siede Carrie Rickey Caryn James Cath Clarke Charles Bramesco Chris Stuckmann Christina Newland Christopher Orr Christy Lemire Clarisse Loughrey Claudia Puig Dan Fienberg Dana Stevens David Ehrlich David Fear David Rooney David Sims David Stratton Deborah Ross Donald Clarke Dorothy Rabinowitz Dwight Brown Ed Gonzalez Ela Bittencourt Elizabeth Weitzman Ella Taylor Emily Nussbaum Emily VanDerWerff Eric Deggans Eric Kohn Esther Zuckerman Fionnuala Halligan Glenn Kenny Guy Lodge Hannah Strong Inkoo Kang J. Hoberman James Poniewozik Jason Bailey Jeannette Catsoulis Jen Chaney Jen Yamato Jessica Kiang Joe Morgenstern John Anderson Jonathan Romney Jordan Hoffman Joshua Rothkopf Judy Berman Justin Chang K. Austin Collins Kambole Campbell Karen Han Kate Erbland Katey Rich Kathryn VanArendonk Katie Rife Katie Walsh Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya Keith Phipps Keith Uhlich Kimber Myers Kristen Lopez Kristen Yoonsoo Kim Kristy Puchko Larushka Ivan-Zadeh LaToya Ferguson Leah Greenblatt Leonard Maltin Leslie Felperin Linda Holmes Linda Marric Lindsey Bahr Lisa Kennedy Liz Shannon Miller Lorraine Ali Lucy Mangan Manohla Dargis Marjorie Baumgarten Mark Kermode Matt Singer Matt Zoller Seitz Matthew Gilbert Maureen Ryan Max Weiss Meagan Navarro Melanie McFarland Melissa Anderson Michael O’Sullivan Michael Phillips Mike Hale Monica Castillo Namrata Joshi Nell Minow Nick Schager Noel Murray Odie Henderson Owen Gleiberman Perri Nemiroff Peter Bradshaw Peter Debruge Peter Rainer Peter Travers Philip de Semlyen Rachel Cooke Radheyan Simonpillai Rebecca Nicholson Richard Brody Richard Lawson Richard Roeper Robbie Collin Robert Daniels Roxana Hadadi Ryan Gilbey Sam Adams Sandra Hall Sara Michelle Fetters Sara Stewart Scott Tobias Sean T. Collins Sheila O’Malley Sheri Linden Shubhra Gupta Simon Abrams Simran Hans Sonia Saraiya Sophie Gilbert Sophie Monks Kaufman Soraya Nadia McDonald Stephanie Zacharek Steven D. Greydanus Tara Brady Tasha Robinson Thelma Adams Tim Cogshell Tim Grierson Tim Robey Todd McCarthy Tomris Laffly Tre’vell Anderson Ty Burr Udita Jhunjhunwala Valerie Complex Wendy Ide Wenlei Ma Wesley Morris Willa Paskin

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A Celebration of His Work: 13 of Roger Ebert’s Most Essential Reviews

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It felt right to commemorate the second anniversary of Roger Ebert’s passing with a celebration of his work. The entire front page of the site—which makes space for 13 reviews—is hereby given over to Roger today and tomorrow. We’ve tried to select pieces that give a sense of the length of his career and the breadth of his talent. 

You’ll see a reviews here that you’ve encountered or heard quoted many times, and some others that you’ve never seen before. Taken together, we hope they’ll give a sense of the totality of what he represented. While Roger’s work was quotable, it was much more than that. His reviews say a lot in few words. He had a knack for finding the essence of a film in a fairly tight space, and for making singular observations that lodged in your mind long after you’d read the piece, sometimes to the point where it became impossible to watch or think about a particular movie without remembering what Roger said about it. 

“ Galia ” (April 7, 1967)

This is the first review Roger ever published in a professional newspaper. He was 24. The opening paragraph is vintage Roger, situating the film within the context of then-current trends in filmmaking while also giving you a sense of how those same trends were becoming tired through shallow misuse: “ Georges Lautner’s Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it’s pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave. “

“ Bonnie and Clyde ” (September 25, 1967)

One of Roger’s most famous early reviews was of “ Bonnie and Clyde ,” a sardonic and tonally daring take on a Depression-era crime spree that spoke directly to the spirit of the late-’60s counterculture. Written by Robert Benton and directed by Arthur Penn , the movie mixed jaunty populist anti-establishment comedy and shocking brutality in a way that felt new. Although it was later treated as a milestone and a masterpiece—a consensus classic—it was off-putting to many mainstream critics at the time; few reviewers of any profile supported it with great enthusiasm. The New Yorker ‘s Pauline Kael was one. Roger was another. His review gives a powerful sense of the movie’s unique energy—nobody who saw the film after reading this could plausibly claim that he didn’t warn them what they were getting into. But it also bridges the gap between straightforward, consumer-oriented reviewing and the kind practiced in  The New Yorker ,  The Village Voice and  Film Comment . In plain language, it explores the film’s aesthetics, and connects them to what was going on at that moment in the United States during an especially tumultuous decade, when violent antiwar protests and bloody images from Vietnam were appearing in mainstream newspapers and magazines and on TV screens.

“ When people are shot in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ they are literally blown to bits, ” Roger wrote. “ Perhaps that seems shocking. But perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone, and that they don’t make nice round little holes like the Swiss cheese effect in Fearless Fosdick. We are living in a period when newscasts refer casually to ‘waves’ of mass murders, Richard Speck’s photograph is sold on posters in Old Town and snipers in Newark pose for Life magazine (perhaps they are busy now getting their ballads to rhyme). Violence takes on an unreal quality. The Barrow Gang reads its press clippings aloud for fun. When C.W. Moss takes the wounded Bonnie and Clyde to his father’s home, the old man snorts: ‘What’d they ever do for you boy? Didn’t even get your name in the paper.’ Is that a funny line, or a tragic one? “

“ Persona ” (November 6, 1967)

On the heels of his “Bonnie and Clyde” review, Roger published an evaluation of Ingmar Bergman’s “ Persona ,” which might have been the Swedish filmmaker’s most thematically and aesthetically daring work up to that point, which is saying a lot. It was, by any measure, a difficult film for viewers accustomed to conventional Hollywood stories and techniques; it’s still not an easy sell, as any film professor today will tell you. But Roger eases the viewer into Bergman’s mindset in a no-fuss way, explaining what the director is up to in an accessible way that still preserves the mystery of the film’s effects.

“ Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie, ” he writes, “ But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ At a crucial moment in his plot the film seemingly breaks, and after it rips for a dozen frames it seems to catch fire within the projector. We see it melting on the screen. Then blackness, then light and then the old silent comedies again, as ‘Persona’ starts again at the beginning. “

“ Who’s That Knocking at My Door? ” (March 17, 1969)

This is, to paraphrase “ Casablanca ,” the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Roger was an early champion of Martin Scorsese —you can sense his joy at publishing a regular review of a movie he first saw at the Chicago Film Festival two years earlier—and when you read his review of “Who’s That Knocking At My Door?” you can see why the director’s work spoke to him; why they became close friends and stayed close even when Roger didn’t like his movies (as was the case with “ The Color of Money “); and why Roger would eventually write an entire book about Scorsese and his films (2008’s “ Scorsese by Ebert “). 

The director and the critic shared certain life experiences, including a Catholic upbringing and a youthful tendency to fear and/or idealize women, and perhaps as a result, some passages here sound like bits and pieces of an as-yet-unpublished memoir, or one of the tough-yet-lyrical, journalism-influenced American writers that Roger loved so much: “ [W]e enter a world of young Italian-Americans in New York City who sit around and kill time and look at Playboy and cruise around in a buddy’s car listening to the Top 40 and speculating aimlessly about where the action is, or might be, or ever was. Occasionally on Saturday night they get together at somebody’s apartment to drink beer, watch Charlie Chan in a stupefied daze and listen to some guy who says he knows two girls whom he might be able to call up. In this world, still strongly under a repressive moral code, there are two kinds of girls: nice girls and broads. You try to make the broads and you place the nice girls on an inaccessible, idealized pedestal. ” More intriguing still is an observation buried at the end of the second paragraph, which may seem prescient to those who like Scorsese’s early movies better than his later ones: “ It is possible that with more experience and maturity Scorsese will direct more polished, finished films–but this work, completed when he was 25, contains a frankness he may have diluted by then. “

“ 3 Women ” (March 15, 1977)

Coincidentally, this review of one of Robert Altman’s masterpieces invokes Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (see above), and showcases Roger, then ten years into his career, easing into his role as American film criticism’s preeminent explainer, masterfully giving viewers a sense of what kind of movie they’re about to see, what they should notice about it, and why they should care about it. As in many reviews of Roger’s favorite films, the filmmaking process and the director’s awareness of it are never far from the writer’s mind, and yet these concerns never edge out Roger’s dogged determination to tell us what the film is about, who the characters are, and what it feels like to watch it. “ The movie’s story came to Altman during a dream, he’s said, and he provides it with a dreamlike tone, ” he writes. “ The plot connections, which sometimes make little literal sense, do seem to connect emotionally, viscerally, as all things do in dreams .”

“ Blue Velvet ” (September 19, 1986)

Roger’s review of David Lynch’s “ Blue Velvet ” is often quoted by people who never cared for Roger’s work, or who admired aspects of it but were frustrated when he made what they considered bad calls on films that many considered great or important. “Blue Velvet” was and remains a hugely influential movie, a formative influence on more directors, films and television series than can be listed here, but Roger just flat-out didn’t like it, because he thought its scenes of “ stark sexual despair ” were undercut by Lynch’s tendency to “ [deny] the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it’s all part of a campy in-joke. ” He was particularly incensed by the sexual abasement of the heroine, played by Isabella Rossellini . “ Rossellini goes the whole distance, but Lynch distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the Hopper character. ” I don’t necessarily agree with Roger myself, but every time I see “Blue Velvet”—indeed any film or TV program in which women are sexually abused or humiliated—I think of this review, which is not at all a bad thing.

“ Do the Right Thing ” (June 30, 1989)

Justly regarded as one of Roger’s best and most significant reviews, this one spoke up loudly and passionately on behalf of Spike Lee’s race-tinged urban drama, praising it as a complex and worthy work of personal art at a time when many mainstream media outlets seemed mainly worried about whether it was racist or reverse-racist (it wasn’t) or might spark riots in theaters (it didn’t). What registers most strongly today is Roger’s insistence that Lee be given the same latitude afforded to any “serious” White director, to work through his conflicted and contradictory feelings on a subject throughout the course of a movie’s running time without being knee-jerk condemned for not being 100% laser-focused on delivering a single message. “ Of course it is confused, ” he wrote. “ Of course it wavers between middle-class values and street values. Of course it is not sure whether it believes in liberal pieties or militancy. Of course some of the characters are sympathetic and others are hateful. And of course some of the likable characters do bad things. Isn’t that the way it is in America today? Anyone who walks into this film expecting answers is a dreamer or a fool. But anyone who leaves the movie with more intolerance than they walked in with wasn’t paying attention. “

“ Hoop Dreams ” (October 24, 1994)

Roger and his TV reviewing partner Gene Siskel made the fortunes of this documentary and its director Steve James in January of 1994, giving this account of two young Chicago basketball players the top slot on their TV program the week that it premiere at Sundance. James would later repay this gift by directing “ Life Itself .” This piece is also an example of Roger’s determination to champion the unseen and under-appreciated. Unlike a lot of critics who had risen to positions of prominence, one never got the sense that he was content to review only Hollywood films or art films that had effectively been pre-screened through the festival awards circuit. “ Hoop Dreams ” was completely off-the-radar until Gene and Roger championed it. 

“ Deja Vu ” (May 1, 1998)

Another example of Roger sticking up for worthy underdogs in American cinema’s brutal marketplace, this one brings together two of his recurring fascinations: with films about people telling stories to each other (exemplified by “Persona,” cited above, as well as “ My Dinner with Andre ,” one of Roger’s favorite ’80s dramas); and with “ Citizen Kane ,” mentioned here in the review’s longest paragraph, a meditation on the enduring power of the ferry monologue from Orson Welles’s film.

“ The Passion of the Christ ” (February 24, 2004)

“ This is the most violent film I have ever seen, ” Roger writes high up in his review of Mel Gibson’s still-controversial Biblical drama, then goes on: “ I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done. ” Then Roger’s Roman Catholic upbringing comes into play, giving him an insight into the film’s methodology that other critics either didn’t have or wouldn’t bring to bear; he quotes lines from a chant he used to say as an altar boy ( At the Cross, her station keeping/Stood the mournful Mother weeping/Close to Jesus to the last)  then warns, “ This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it. “

“ Synecdoche, New York ” (November 5, 2008)

It is impossible to read this review of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut and not think about Roger’s struggles with cancer, a disease that would ultimately claim him less than five years later. It is personal criticism at its best, connecting with readers on the most basic level, and in the process, reminding us that for all its tricky formal devices and conceits, this is ultimately a simple film about how every story is one story. “ Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it’s about you. Whoever you are. Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die. ” 

“ Knowing ” (March 18, 2009)

In some ways the inverse of Roger’s “Blue Velvet” pan, this is an example of a critic standing up proudly on his dedicated soapbox and saying, “Hey, everybody, listen up: that film everyone is telling you is terrible made a big impression on me, and I believe there’s something to it.” In this case, Roger sees a film about “ the most fundamental of all philosophical debates: Is the universe deterministic or random? Is everything in some way preordained or does it happen by chance? If that question sounds too abstract, wait until you see this film, which poses it in stark terms: What if we could know in advance when the Earth will end? “

“ The Spectacular Now ” (August 2, 2013)

This was one of the last reviews Roger wrote, and to my mind one of his best, bringing to bear all the craft he’d learned in the preceding four-plus decades as well as an unabashed optimism and love of youthful energy that he never lost to age. “ What an affecting film this is. It respects its characters and doesn’t use them for its own shabby purposes. How deeply we care about them. “

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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10 Of The Greatest Film Critics Every Movie Buff Should Know

You can go as far as 1896, the year cinema was born, to find the first pieces of writing on film. Maxim Gorki wrote a beautiful text called “The Kingdom of Shadows” where he described some reactions to film still resonant to this day: “You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim…”

Throughout the history of cinema many brilliant writers and thinkers described what they saw, listened and felt at the movies. They put their opinion down, on paper or screen, so that readers could make plans for date night or family outings. For readers who wanted to know more about a movie, who wanted to find someone who shared their opinion, or someone’s opinion to criticize.

Of those film critics, not many had their writing remain interesting and current in the 21st century. But some of them did.

1. Otis Ferguson

Colin Burnett recently called Otis Ferguson “one of the most quietly influential critics in the history of American movies.”

During the 1930’s Ferguson became a pioneer film criticism in part due to his different approach to film criticism. Unlike his peers, Ferguson’s writing was light-hearted. His prose was colloquial and informal, often-using-hyphenated-word-composites, even changing his voice depending on theme.

This couldn’t have been farthest from the way critics approached film at the time, in no way different from a book review in style and content. In his own words this approach was “obediently dull and uninformative” and “unworthy of so lively and immanent a subject.”

He understood that film was a medium in its early stages and he approached it that way:

“The movies were upon us before anyone had time to grow up and become a professor in them.”

“There are not words enough yet for the different ways in which movies affect us”

Even today it’s hard to find such a paradoxical example of a film critic as him. One of the earliest film specialist and, at the same time, a populist. On one side he studied film extensively and was one of the first critics to understand how movies were made and to exhibit technical acumen when the subject required it.

In the other, he defended slapstick, light comedies and gangster movies. That movies should move. He found there was no place in movies for static images. Plots should be unassuming and maintain a clear line, but leave space for details which don’t serve story.

He revelled in Hitchcock’s details “He loads his set with them without loading down his action; and because everything and everybody aren’t direct accessories to the plot, so many mechanical aids, you get the effect of life, which also has its dogs and casual passers-by who are real without having anything to do with any plot you know about.”

Among his pet-peeves was “Citizen Kane”, which he emphatically took down in two separate pieces and his innovative contempt for movies and authors who relied too heavily on montage: “what we have got to single out is the difference between a picture that catches you up in its movement, and a picture that stammers, stands doubtfully, hammers at a few obvious meanings, and leaves you with a feeling of all the mechanism used to capture emotion, without the emotion.”

Before Ferguson went off to war not to come back, he left this invitation which was taken on by his two successors:

“More people go to good and bad movies than read good and bad books, and surely the top layer of this vast audience is as discriminating of taste and exacting of standards as the top layer of the reading public. . . . There are plenty of young people growing up to whom the films are so natural that they do not have to play the snob about them.”

2. Dwight Macdonald

You’ll find a trend with all these critics that seems to be outdated with the torrent of internet critics, 100 word reviews and rating systems close to replacing words: a good film critic you MUST be a good writer.

At the height of his talents, “Macdonald made modern American English seem like the ideal prose medium.” He wrote transparently and with wit. His writing was conversational and rhythmic. He was able to capture the rhythm of an everyday conversation without falling into vulgarity. Dwight MacDonald was one of the great ists.

Born in 1906, his life contained so much more than film criticism. He was known as a writer, political radical, philosopher, and social critic. As a film critic, his colloquial style contrasted with his highbrow taste. He was a fan of Chaplin, Stroheim, and the Russians of the 20’s, especially early Eisenstein, which later became a matter of politics – Macdonald was a known leftist.

He remembers fondly going to the theatre to watch the Soviets, “One went to the ‘little’ movie houses which showed Russian films as one might visit a celebrated cathedral or museum. In the darkened auditorium of the theatre, one came into a deep and dynamic contact with twentieth century life.”

In 1981 some of his writing was compiled in a book called “On Movies”. You can find these insightful passages there:

(on Doris Day) “She has only one expression besides her usual pleasantly bovine one – she opens her eyes wide.”

(on Otto Premminger) “A great showman who has never bothered to learn anything about making a movie.”

(on “The Last Year at Marienbad”) “Not a masterpiece, but so curiously fascinating that I saw it 3 times in one week.”

(on Hitchcock and “The Birds”) “The only point of interest is that it’s by Hitchcock… background has become foreground… everything looks fake.”

(on the Auteur Theory) “It seems to be no more a precise instrument than a prejudice in favour of certain directors.”

(on biblical epics) “Instead of sex, we get sadism.”

(on the Close-Up) “It’s the most powerful drug in the cinematic pharmacopeia, but it must for that reason be used with moderation.”

(Dwight Macdonald will always be remembered at least for what Trotsky said of him: “Every man has a right to be stupid on occasion but Comrade Macdonald abuses it.”)

3. James Agee

Born in 1909, James Agee was a multifaceted writer. He was an author, worked as journalist, poet, screenwriter, and film critic. Contrary to what most people think, it wasn’t Roger Ebert the first film critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize. James Agee beat Two Thumbs to the prize by 20 odd years.

Granted, it was awarded posthumously for his novel “A Death in The Family” and not for his film criticism, but that just serves as a testament to his prose and literary prowess. Dwight MacDonald praised that prowess by saying “he had the poet’s eye for detail … He could get magic into his writing the hardest way, by precise description.”

The poet W. H. Auden called his regular column in the liberal weekly publication “The Nation” a “newspaper work of permanent literary value” and “the most remarkable regular event in journalism today.”

Garnering respect and admiration even outside of the film criticism spectre, his reviews were read by people who hadn’t even seen the movies discussed, and appreciated nonetheless. His writing provoked on his most dedicated readers awe and respect. Envy even. Writers to this day wish to write as well as he does. As well as someone “The Saturday Review” called “the best movie critic this country has ever had.”

In 1958, three years after his death, “Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments” was published. It popularized the long thoughtful piece about movies, becoming a model for similar collections by critics like Kael, Sarris, Macdonald, Kauffmann and others. It came at a time the status of film criticism in the USA was changing, with a rise of interest in movies by intellectuals, and it was a crucial part in it, a stepping stone for the ascent of film criticism into the world of letters.

James Agee became also know for writing “Night of the Hunter,” a movie you either love or hate.

4. Manny Farber

In early 1942 Farber, at just 25, he took up the position of Otis Ferguson as the house critic for “The New Republic”. He stopped writing for 2 years and in 1949 he took up James Agee’s position in “The Nation”. Good critics seemed to orbit in smaller circles in the 40’s.

Much like his predecessors, Farber held in high regard Griffith, Chaplin, and the remainder of the silent film canon. Movies should seek “the idea in the visual world of action and movement, which is the more suitable, and so more emotionally vital, manner for the movies.”

In part due to his celebrated work as a painter, Farber emphasized the importance of framing, staging, cinematic space, the geometry of pictorial composition; if those components are weak, “there is nothing in the people, costuming or acting that will intrigue your eye enough to keep it focused on the story,” Farber argued.

David Bordwell talks about the way he had to distinguish himself from Agee and Ferguson. He argues he did it through his style. “Every paragraph is a freewheeling adventure in slang, mixed metaphors, and yoyo syntax.” Curiously enough, Farber cited the sportswriters of his time as an influence, often using sports-related metaphors.

In 1977, looking back at his career as a film critic, he described his work as an attempt “to set out the movie before the reader’s eye in as much completeness as I could, in that topography.” He adds that his work was to “pull the audience in and give them these sights without their realizing it, and which would divulge the landscape of the film as accurately as I could get it. That involved a lot of colour work in the language and in the insights—colour work in the sense of decorative quality.”

He coined the term “underground film” as the work of directors such as Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh who “played an anti-art role in Hollywood.” He was their early supporter, as he was of upcoming directors like Werner Herzog, Anthony Mann, Andy Warhol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among others.

5. André Bazin

Bazin is one of the only two theorists on this list. Incidentally, the other one (Andrew Sarris) developed his ideas when he brought them from France along with two baguettes and a croissant.

Bazin started to write on the subject of film in 1943 and 8 years later he co-founded the revered magazine “Cahiers du Cinema”. Most of his work was published there and compiled posthumously. Some of the best were compiled in a two part book called “What is Cinema?” His work was also compiled in books about Orson Welles, Chaplin, or Jean Renoir.

The impact of Bazin is anything but neglectable. He started the conversation which lead to two of the big theories of film: auteur theory and realism.

Bazin described the auteur theory as “a way of reading and appraising films through the imprint of an auteur (author), usually meant to be the director.” It was Truffaut who coined the phrase politique des auteurs, but it was Bazin who started to differentiate movies through the world view and style of particular directors and with “Cahiers” he created the ideal environment for the growth of the theory.

His input on the realistic predilection was much bigger, being a fierce opponent of montage and manipulation of the image, like Eisenstein’s or that of the German Expressionists, which calls attention to itself. Long shots, deep focus and shot-in-depth are artifices which better reveal what Bazin called “objective reality.”

There’s another concept defended by Bazin which, if adopted by other critics, would deprive us of words like these “To call it an anti-climax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes” (Ebert on “The Village”). Such concept is “appreciative criticism”, the notion that only critics who like a film should review it, thus encouraging constructive criticism.

Unsung Hero movie gets surprise top review on Rotten Tomatoes

A Christian movie all about the power of family and faith has taken the highest rating any film can on a top critic review website this year. 

The movie Unsung Hero is the true story of the Smallbone family's adventures and misfortunes, moving six children with one on the way from Australia to America. Three well-known Christian singers come from the family, including Luke and Joel Smallbone of for King & Country, as well as Rebecca St. James. The oldest daughter, St. James, is highlighted throughout the movie with her incredible singing talent. 

The Rotten Tomatoes score of Unsung Hero is a surprising 61 per cent on their Tomatometer, the highest rating for any film this year. As for their audience score labelled the 'Popcornmeter,' it sits at an incredible 99 per cent. 

"Engaging and compelling, this is a heartfelt tribute to the power of family and faith," says Linda Marric, one of the site's top critics. "The film's emotional depth and honest depiction of real-life struggles make it a must-watch, especially for those crying out for more believable faith-based dramas."

This rating beat out many big-budget films released this year including Deadpool & Wolverine , as well as the highest-grossing animated film in history, Inside Out 2 . 

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Sing Sing review: "Colman Domingo’s soulful performance keeps this prison story gripping and gritty"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

Domingo’s soulful performance keeps this moving tale of jailhouse redemption gripping as well as gritty.

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

A thoughtful US prison story that swerves felon-style yard fights for rehearsal-room revelations, Greg Kwedar’s powerful reality-based drama explores the redemptive power of community drama in the otherwise brutal life of Sing Sing maximum-security jail.

Colman Domingo’s John, the talented theater-group top dog, finds himself challenged by smart, volatile newbie Eye (Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin), whose explosive rage (and the knife in his waistband) threatens to get them shut down. A film that concentrates on the prisoner, not their crime, Sing Sing’s grainy, up-close 16mm camerawork gives the central pair’s friction-filled relationship a keen intimacy. 

Maclin (an ex-prisoner in real life, like most of the cast) is astonishingly good as a Hamlet-playing tough who discovers that his gangster life is just another role that trapped him. He goes toe-to-toe with Domingo in their fractious scenes with the intensity of a seasoned pro, as their fortunes see-saw through a tough season.

Domingo, alternately mellow and quietly despairing as a lifer prepping intensely for his last-chance clemency hearing alongside the group’s ambitious show, is as good as ever. Leisurely pacing and a restrained style gives Kwedar room to dig into how staging theater productions brings hope and playfulness to inmates who’ve been battered by predatory prison life.

Touching rather than touchy-feely, it’s a high-stakes story with its fair share of fights, deaths and the jail-or-joy tensions of parole hearings. If it’s also a tad starry-eyed about drama as a cultural cure-all, Kwedar’s empathy for the life-battered inmates makes this a rare, graceful work.

Sing Sing is out now in US theaters and is released in UK cinemas on August 30. 

For more, check out our guide to the upcoming movies to get on your radar.

Kate is a freelance film journalist and critic. Her bylines have appeared online and in print for GamesRadar, Total Film, the BFI, Sight & Sounds, and WithGuitars.com.

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‘beetlejuice beetlejuice’ review: winona ryder and michael keaton help tim burton rediscover the ghoulish mischief of his glory days.

Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega and Justin Theroux also star in the Venice opener, a sequel to the 1988 horror comedy about a renegade “bio-exorcist” liberated from the afterlife.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Venice jury president isabelle huppert voices concern for "very weak" state of film industry, sigourney weaver tears up pondering legacy of 'alien's' ripley and the rise of kamala harris, beetlejuice beetlejuice.

Any sequel coming 36 years after its predecessor is best approached with caution, this one especially so given that with the main exception of 2012’s Frankenweenie , Burton seemed to have misplaced his mojo somewhere around the turn of the new century — at least for this critic.

Tapping into the maniacally playful spirit of one of his enduring golden-era hits, the director seems reinvigorated. He serves up comparable tonic as well for two actors who were a big part not just of the original Beetlejuice but also of Burton’s Batman movies and Edward Scissorhands : Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder , respectively. The name in the credits of a second Batman Returns alum is no secret, but that actor’s droll extended cameo merits spoiler treatment.

Hollywood’s cynical strip-mining of successful IP in its quest for the everlasting franchise has taught us to be suspicious, so there’s something restorative for the audience, too, in experiencing a resuscitated screen property that’s actually fun — not to mention one that asserts its own reason to exist.

Warner Bros. has been trying on and off to make a sequel happen since the early ’90s, most notably after the studio in 2011 hired Seth Grahame-Smith, who shares story credit here with screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Burton’s success pulling off such a zesty follow-up after so many years on the shelf is due as much to those writers, with whom he worked on Netflix’s Wednesday . That series’ star, Jenna Ortega , is chief among welcome new additions to the holdover crew of Keaton, Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and shrunken-headed Bob.

Still wearing the jagged black bangs she rocked as a goth teen, Ryder’s Lydia Deetz is now a widowed mother famous for hosting a reality show called Ghost House , where from a studio attic set she invites viewers to “Come in, if you dare.” Mimicking the formula of countless paranormal shows, Lydia coaxes guests to share chilling experiences of unexplained phenomena in their homes. But a triggering vision of Keaton’s Beetlejuice sitting among the studio audience reveals that the psychic mediator has not put her own haunted past behind her.

Tensions between Lydia and her artist stepmother Delia (O’Hara) have eased over the years, despite the latter becoming even more self-absorbed in her shift from sculpture into mixed media. Her latest show is called The Human Canvas , and that canvas of course is Delia’s face and body.

The writers find a crafty solution to the awkward question of what to do about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones, who played Lydia’s father, Charles. In a spry Claymation sequence that’s classic Burton, we learn of Charles’ recent gruesome death — though naturally in the Beetlejuice world, death is more a pitstop than a destination, so the character lingers even if his original physical form is erased.

Barbara and Adam Maitland, the sweet, prematurely deceased couple played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, are gone, however, as Lydia explains they’ve found a loophole. “How convenient,” scoffs Astrid, with a wink from the writers.

Charles’ funeral — whimsically accompanied by a boys choir singing a hymnal version of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O,” another lovely callback — brings the family back to Winter River. Accompanying them is Lydia’s producer and soon-to-be fiancé, Rory ( Justin Theroux ), whose ridiculous tiny ponytail tags him as a phony, and whose “New Age, over-bonding, yoga-retreat bullshit” Astrid finds beneath contempt.

While all this is going on, Bellucci’s Delores is terrorizing the netherworld, killing denizens “dead-dead” on her mission to claim the rotten soul of her husband, Beetlejuice. In a riotous touch that got huge laughs at the Venice press screening, their short-lived ghost marriage is recapped as a black-and-white, subtitled Italian mini-movie. Investigating Delores’ trail of destruction is Wolf Jackson ( Willem Dafoe ), a former TV action star now playing detective, with lots of cheesy direct-to-camera glances for dramatic emphasis.

The living (or “fleshbags,” as Jackson calls them) and the dead get tangled up when Astrid is tricked into a potentially fatal pact and Lydia is forced to summon Beetlejuice to help her cross over and save her daughter. Given that Beetlejuice doesn’t believe in free favors, an alternative wedding plan emerges to rescue him from Delores, a nightmarish scenario in which Lydia’s familiarity with the predatory sandworms of the afterlife’s exile desertscape comes in handy.

The zippy pacing, buoyant energy and steady stream of laugh-out-loud moments hint at the joy Burton appears to have found in revisiting this world, and for anyone who loved the first movie, it’s contagious. That applies also to the actors, all of whom warm to the dizzying lunacy.

His most exhilarating sequences include a stint as a trickster couples counselor when Rory decides Lydia needs to face “this construct of your trauma.” (The uproarious birth of a diabolical baby Beetlejuice during that scene yields one of animatronics chief Neal Scanlan’s most brilliant creations.)

If the use of Belafonte’s “Day-O” was a memorable high point of Beetlejuice , what the filmmakers and Keaton do with “MacArthur Park” in a wedding-from-hell climax takes the possessed lip-syncing and dance moves several steps further. The wedding cake with “sweet green icing flowing down” is a jubilant celebration of some of the daffiest lyrics ever set to music. And the fate of an assembly of cellphone-clutching influencers gathered in the church by Rory (“Nothing less than 5 million followers”) will bring bliss to anyone who ever rolled their eyes about that “career” path.

Ryder goes beat for beat with Keaton as the yin of the movie to his rancidly irreverant yang. The actress transports us back to the enchanting screen persona of her late teens, not just in Beetlejuice but also in movies like Edward Scissorhands , Mermaids and Heathers , in which she radiated a singular mix of smarts, sweetness and innocence but was just as effective when she veered into darkness. As much as anything, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a poignant mother-daughter story, played with real heart by both Ryder and Ortega.

CG work is no doubt extensive but one of the sequel’s charms is how much its physical sets, puppetry and phantasmagoria stick to a hand-crafted look in line with the far more limited effects tools available in the late ’80s. It’s rewarding to have Burton back in full creative command of the humor, the fantastical imagination and the gleeful morbidity on which he built his name.

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