The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films

评语："Set in the sad yet deeply romanticized world of Hong Kong in the early to mid-'60s, Wong's ravishingly beautiful In the Mood For Love may be classified as a period piece, but only in the technical sense. In detailing the intimate friendship and love between two unhappily married lonelyhearts, Wong collects vivid moments out of time as they might play out in a person's memory many years later… In the Mood For Love captures the inherent alienation of city life, but in the process, he intensifies the romantic longing between the two characters… In the Mood For Love casts a dreamy and melancholic spell that remains unbroken long after the closing credits have rolled." - Scott Tobias, A.V. Club

评语："Fashioned from the ruins of a two-hour TV pilot rejected by ABC in 1999, Lynch's erotic thriller careens from one violent non sequitur to another. The movie boldly teeters on the brink of self-parody, reveling in its own excess and resisting narrative logic. This voluptuous phantasmagoria is certainly Lynch's strongest movie since Blue Velvet and maybe Eraserhead. The very things that failed him in the bad-boy rockabilly debacle of Lost Highway—the atmosphere of free-floating menace, pointless transmigration of souls, provocatively dropped plot stitches, gimcrack alternate universes—are here brilliantly rehabilitated." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

评语："The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi, directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-age father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century." - The Criterion Collection

评语："Anderson's epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric. A strange and enthralling evocation of frontier capitalism and manifest destiny set at the dawn of the 20th century, There Will Be Blood recounts the tale of a ferociously successful wildcat oil driller with the allegorical handle Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis). The telling is leisurely and full of process: From the deliberately dark and fragmented prologue to the wildly excessive denouement, this movie continually defamiliarizes what might sound like a Giant-style potboiler… This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

评语："Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a title that evaporates from your consciousness almost before it's apprehended—and that's partially the point of this deft, witty, and vastly enjoyable movie, directed by French music-video ace Michel Gondry from Charlie Kaufman's screenplay. It's a head trip… Filled with the writer's trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

评语："Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love… This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

评语："Spirited Away has emerged as one of Miyazaki's finest works to date, striking a delicate balance between the joyful simplicity of one half of his oeuvre (as exemplified by My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service...), and the sprawling spectacle of the other half (i.e. Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke). It's a best-of-both worlds creation, in other words, an almost free-form fantasy piece which feels at once sweepingly large and touchingly intimate… Spirited Away is an animation film of the highest technical calibre. A visual triumph, both in set and character design, providing a delightful cast of spirits, spectres, talking animals, and imaginative hybrids." - Tom Mes, Midnight Eye

评语："Cache casts a spell that grips you and won't let go. The film works as a provocation, on a personal and a political level. Daniel Auteuil is powerfully good as Georges, the host of a literary TV talk show in Paris, with Anne (a coolly imperious Juliette Binoche), just the right chic wife, and Pierott (Makedonsky), just the right preteen son, to go with their tres cher home. Crashing into their serenity comes a surveillance tape of their home, followed by drawings of violent images. Who's watching them? And what for?… By the final riveting and static images, fear and guilt have become almost palpable. You won't be able to look away." - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

评语："There is a sort of film - a rare sort - that has you leaving the cinema in a light-headed daze, pointing back at the exit and asking the person you're with: "What just happened in there?" Such a one is this beautiful and strange Thai movie from director Apichatpong Weerasethakul… Just thinking about it now makes me want to burst out laughing at its sheer audacity, its eccentricity, its unashamed aspiration to poetry and its nimble evasion of anything so commonplace as an explanation... It may turn out to be a masterpiece or simply a cult classic or just barking mad. Either way, it's sumptuous and scary, and a brilliant adventure in structure and style." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

评语："This electrifying picture is part tender coming-of-age film and part gang-warfare epic from the Brazilian slum, or favela, told from the viewpoint of the children who manage to be both its underclass and its criminal overlords. It's a movie with all the dials cranked up to 11, an overwhelming, intoxicating assault on the senses, and a thriller so tense that you might have the red seat plush in front of you - or even some unfortunate's hair - gripped in both fists... Meirelles's storytelling rushes forward at a full, breathless tilt, swerving, accelerating, doubling back on itself, amplifying the roles and experiences of incidental characters… It is a compelling piece of work." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

评语："A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance… Inspired by a number of trips that Coppola took to Japan in the '90s, Lost in Translation stars Bill Murray as Bob Harris, a middle-aged movie star who goes to Tokyo to earn a quick $2 million on a whiskey commercial… There he meets Charlotte (Johansson), the bored wife of a self- absorbed photographer (Ribisi), and finds a kindred soul and fellow insomniac… Coppola has a wonderful, precise sense of dramatic rhythms. The easy, smooth contours that she gives to Lost have the power to envelop and enchant us, to stir up thoughts and reflections that work in tandem with the film ." - Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle

评语："Brokeback Mountain is a gay Western with a shot to become much more than a niche movie… Modest in scale but with an epic feel, this 2¼ hour portrayal of star-crossed sheep tenders casts Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ill-educated drifters… There's nothing fussy or attention-getting about Lee's direction or Rodrigo Prieto's photography, but the selection of shots and the rhythm of their cutting seem unerringly right. And while many of today's movies don't really end, the capper here is a kick in the gut. It's an old-style virtue for a film that's old-style in the best way: unassuming but people-oriented and aiming to endure." - Mike Clark, USA Today

评语："Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate—and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth." - Robert Wilonsky, The Village Voice

评语："The director convened stars of three movie eras — pioneer kung-femme Cheng Pei-pei from the 1960s, Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh from Hong Kong’s glorious ’80s and bright new lights Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen — and set them to battling over a magical sword. When the actors aren’t flying across roofs and balancing on treetops, in fight scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping, they are navigating the murkier regions of personal responsibility and unspoken love. Crouching Tiger is a movie of gravity and buoyancy, of high art and higher spirits. It’s contemplative, and it kicks ass." - Richard Corliss, TIME

评语："Shot on a soundstage in Copenhagen with no sets, just chalk marks to indicate the houses in a Rocky Mountain town during the Depression, the film sounds like the circle of hell reserved for gluttons for pretentious punishment… But one fact is unassailable: Von Trier is a genuine talent. Despite the stagy set, his camera moves with a fluid elegance no computer could match… For all the plot detours and dead spots, this is strong, stinging filmmaking. Von Trier, light years from the formula doggerel at the multiplex, delivers something rare these days: a film of ideas." - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

评语："As Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark begins, its 21st century narrator, through whose eyes we see, wakes to find himself swept into the Hermitage amid a gaggle of 18th century ball guests. Russian Ark unfolds seamlessly from there as a single tracking shot, encompassing a dozen major scenes with hundreds of actors involved. Merely as a technical, logistical feat, Russian Ark marks a cinematic milestone… But the viewer nearly loses sight of Sokurov's technical mastery as the film turns a stroll through Russia's greatest museum into a meditation on time, history and the nature of cinema." - Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

评语："This powerful, complex Iranian drama centres on a conflict that cuts across boundaries of gender and class… An unhappily married couple break up in this complex, painful, fascinating Iranian drama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi, with explosive results that expose a network of personal and social faultlines. A Separation is a portrait of a fractured relationship and an examination of theocracy, domestic rule and the politics of sex and class – and it reveals a terrible, pervasive sadness that seems to well up through the asphalt and the brickwork." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

评语："Like all great doomed affairs, Talk to Her is full of lovely, sweet suffering. And when it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart. Pedro Almodóvar has created a tragic comedy about need, its liberating and shackling powers. Movies haven't been so rapturous about characters plummeting to an awful end at least since the last Almodóvar film, All About My Mother (1999). But he doesn't mine the comic strip soap opera mystique so extravagantly here; everything falls into place with an almost surreal delicacy." - Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

评语："The White Ribbon is a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours, this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety. It has chilling brilliance and icy exactitude, filmed in black and white with the lustre of liquid nitrogen, and its director, Michael Haneke, achieves a new refinement of mastery and audacity… This is a profoundly disquieting movie, superbly acted and directed. Its sinister riddle glitters more fiercely each time I watch it." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

评语："The grinding ordeal endured by the ailing title character of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a thorny masterpiece by Cristi Puiu, concludes well after 3 a.m. in a Bucharest hospital as he lies dying, unattended on a gurney… The two-and-a-half hour film views this late-night descent of the allegorically named Dante Remus Lazarescu through circles of medical hell observed with eyes that are dispassionate but far from cold. A sustained triumph of ensemble acting, the film seems so absolutely real it absorbs you into its world the same way a documentary like Frederick Wiseman's 1970 Hospital seeps into your consciousness." - Stephen Holden, The New York Times

评语："Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies is a totally sustained immersion in the magisterially bleak, voluptuously monochromatic, undeniably beautiful universe of muddy villages and cell-like rooms that the Hungarian filmmaker has created in collaboration with reclusive novelist László Krasznahorkai… Like Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies is a work of bravura filmmaking—mainly a series of extremely long, largely mobile takes, edited without the normal pattern of shot-countershot. Tarr's camera style has its equivalent in Krasznahorkai's lengthy, convoluted sentences, although the results are quite different. Werckmeister is largely taciturn and anything but literary." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

评语："What do you call Punch-Drunk Love? It's not a musical, because no one sings or dances. But it has the surreal delirium—and the MGM Technicolor hues, airy compositions, and stylized décor—of the great movie musicals… At its heart the story is boy-meets-girl simple, but the movie is so full of lurches and discordances and flabbergasting non sequiturs that at times it's like an avant-garde dance-theater piece with injections of Saturday Night Live. I imagine that many will find it arch, and, on a narrative level, as bumptiously withholding as its protagonist. I found it exquisite." - David Edelstein, Slate

评语："It’s barely a film; more a floating world. To watch it is to feel many things – balmed, seduced, amused, mystified. It’s to feel that one is encountering a distinctive metaphysics far removed from that on display in most contemporary cinema. Weerasethakul has not only drawn on the themes, landscapes and mood-states he tapped in Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady and Syndromes And A Century, films that extended the imaginative and emotional grammar of arthouse cinema over the last decade; he has refined them to create his most accessible and most enchanted film to date." - Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph

评语："There are no direct answers, and the mastery of The Turin Horse is that its meaning or meanings are there for the taking. Tarr works in mesmerising harmony with his cinematographer Fred Kelemen (shooting in long shots and velvety blacks) and composer Mihály Vig (adopting a hypnotic dirge that rises and falls with a sense of import). Together, they lead us magnetically through the routines of this austere pair – taking out the horse, fetching water, eating just one boiled potato each for dinner… It feels like the creation story in reverse – a terrible, unavoidable walk into the dark." - Dave Calhoun, Time Out

评语："The bleak and unforgiving borderlands of Texas by the Rio Grande are the setting for this triumphant new movie by Joel and Ethan Coen… The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American film-making looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work. The result is a dark, violent and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers. And all of it hard and sharp as a diamond." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian