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Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine

1. You Kill Me 2007 For an hour and a half it exerts its own preposterous reality, making you believe it -- and like it. full review
2. The Wind That Shakes the Barley 2006 ... despite its length (over two hours) and some structural problems, it is an absorbing, worthwhile and often passionate movie. full review
3. Jarhead 2005 The best war movies -- and this one, despite its being overlong and repetitive, is among them -- hold that men fight (or in this case, are ready to fight) not for causes, but to survive and to help their comrades do the same. full review
4. Vanity Fair 2004 There is no depth beneath its bright surfaces, no potent emotional undercurrents. full review
5. The Hours 2002 This movie is in love with female victimization. full review
6. Nicholas Nickleby 2002 A beguiling evocation of the quality that keeps Dickens evergreen: the exuberant openness with which he expresses our most basic emotions. full review
7. The Pianist 2002 We admire this film for its harsh objectivity and refusal to seek our tears, our sympathies. full review
8. Windtalkers 2002 The energy and conviction of the action sequences don't quite compensate for Windtalkers' emotional cliches and historical heedlessness. full review
9. Malena 2000 Bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso. full review
10. Meet the Parents 2000 Alas, poor Focker. He can't help himself. And we can't help ourselves from falling about, equally helpless, at this superbly antic movie. full review
11. Memento 2000 Full of odd, hypnotic menace. full review
12. Traffic 2000 It leaves one feeling restless and dissatisfied. full review
13. Topsy-Turvy 1999 There is a sense of real, very Mike Leighish, life in this film that darkens and transforms it. And transfixes us.
14. Michael Collins 1996 There are pain and honor in [Neeson's] performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it. full review
15. Beautiful Girls 1996 Beautiful Girls is always in touch with reality but never drowned in it. full review
16. The Nutty Professor 1996 [Murphy] is able to invest his Professor Klump with an endearing dignity, give his lounge lizard alter ego, Buddy Love, an alligator's bite and then go on from there to play Klump's grandma. Also his mother, father and brother. full review
17. Braveheart 1995 Everybody knows that a non-blubbering clause is standard in all movie stars' contracts. Too bad there isn't one banning self-indulgence when they direct.
18. The Scout 1994 The Scout is the best comedy-fantasy about baseball ever made, which goes to show that if Hollywood keeps trying, eventually someone will get it right. full review
19. Addams Family Values 1993 Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point. full review
20. Barton Fink 1991 Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through. full review
21. The Doors 1991 The film really proves only that Jim was a bad drunk and a worse friend, and that in no way was his life exemplary. full review
22. Coming to America 1988 The director is ... rather distracted; John Landis seems to be browsing through the scenes rather than gobbling them down. full review
23. Eight Men Out 1988 Sayles often seems like a man who, trying to stretch a single, gets caught between bases and is desperately trying to evade the rundown. full review
24. A Fish Called Wanda 1988 Wanda defies gravity, in both senses of the word, and redefines a great comic tradition. full review
25. Rain Man 1988 Rain Man's restraint is, finally, rather like Raymond's gabble. It discourages connections, keeping you out instead of drawing you in. full review
26. Tucker: The Man and His Dream 1988 The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call pep. full review
27. Dirty Dancing 1987 If the ending of Eleanor Bergstein's script is too neat and inspirational, the rough energy of the film's song and dance does carry one along, past the whispered doubts of better judgment. full review
28. The Last Emperor 1987 It works astonishingly well. full review
29. No Way Out 1987 Viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock. full review
30. Planes, Trains and Automobiles 1987 It is, of course, always a pleasure to watch Martin's steam-gauge face register his rising internal pressures and to witness his exquisitely expressed blowoffs. But Candy offers even more insinuating delights. full review
31. Down and Out in Beverly Hills 1986 On the basically farcical level where it chooses to stay, it is a funny and likable movie. full review
32. Ferris Bueller's Day Off 1986 Here is a dream as old as adolescence, and it is fun to be reminded of its ageless potency, especially in a movie as good-hearted as this one. full review
33. Hoosiers 1986 Hackman is wonderful as an inarticulate man tense with the struggle to curb a flaring, mysterious anger. full review
34. Beverly Hills Cop 1984 Murphy exudes the kind of cheeky, cocky charm that has been missing from the screen since Cagney was a pup, snarling his way out of the ghetto. full review
35. The Karate Kid 1984 This film's art consists entirely of hiding the cynicism of its calculations under an agreeably modest and disarming manner. full review
36. Terms of Endearment 1983 Its quirky rhythms and veering emotional tones are very much its own, and they owe less to movie tradition than they do to a sense of how the law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective. full review
37. Trading Places 1983 Trading Places also makes Eddie Murphy a force to be reckoned with. full review
38. 48 HRS 1982 Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy. full review
39. Ordinary People 1980 An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. full review
40. Slap Shot 1980 Slap Shot may have done a lot of fast skating and some solid body checking, but in the last period it makes a final costly slip -- and misses its goal. full review
41. The Onion Field 1979 The Onion Field is a serious and most uncompromising movie. It lacks, however, the sort of disciplined craft that might have made it a powerful and affecting one. full review
42. Carrie 1976 An exercise in high style that even the most unredeemably rational among moviegoers should find enormously enjoyable. full review