Amy Taubin

The style of the filmmaking, the freewheeling handheld camera movement, the associative editing, and the buoyant Brazilian score convey Anderson's sense that chance plays a major role in our lives and that what's happening on the periphery is often more important than what's staring us in the face.

Antoine Fuqua's propulsive, elegantly written police thriller, offers the unsettling spectacle of Denzel Washington.

Despite Sunshine's historical scope and multiplicity of characters, it doesn't shed half as much light on its subject -- identity and anti-Semitism -- as does, for example, Agnieszka Holland's claustrophobic chamber piece "Angry Harvest."

It's the prettiest movie of the year, maybe of Allen's career.

The many eight-to-11-year-olds in the audience seemed completely enthralled.

The Cruise is being hailed as a harbinger of a future in which indie film will be liberated by low-cost technology. If this is where we're going, I want off the bus.

The show that Horrocks puts on when she finally takes to the stage is more than worth the wait.

Little more than a cartoon, and not a funny one at that.

We may not want another film about incest, but there's a necessity about this one that won't be denied.

The relationship between the hysterical Gerard and the careful, compulsive George is classic screwball material and more compelling than the relationship between George and Alicia.

Justman's A Trial in Prague acts as something of a corrective to the exuberant but oversimplified "Fighter."

What’s remarkable—and Kafkaesque—about La Sentinelle is how Desplechin grounds the phantasmagoric aspects of his tale in the details, routines, and conflicts of daily life.

His film is hardly memorable, but it's amusing enough for two hours, and it never panders or cloys.

Except for Polley and Rea, the performances are heavy-handed.

An understated gem.

Takes its shape from (Viard's) performance, which is as big as life.

Properly picturesque but lacks subtlety and substance in blending Chinese and Western history, ideas, and cinematic conventions.

Its awkward mix of polemic and melodramatics probably won't travel very well.

While the acting ensemble is crucial, it's not the only asset here.

The three-act structure is too predictable, and at 90 minutes, feels both draggy and hacked to the bone.

By turns hilarious and wounding.

Tender, poignant, and homoerotically charged, this complicated father-son relationship is brought to life by two brilliant actors and a director who's canny enough to give them all the room they need.

So low-key it could be mistaken for a throwaway. But Meadows's understanding of childhood fears and fantasies and the yearning, heartfelt performances he draws from his two young actors should not be underestimated.

A witty, trenchant script, lots of complicated characters, and a few actors who turn human frailty into something nearly sublime.

Not nearly the mindfuck it wants to be.

A sympathetic but conventional disease-of-the-week movie.

Thanks to some brilliant casting, Venus Beauty Institute provokes ideas about women, movies, sexuality, and age that extend beyond its frothy fiction.

Filled with people who cut Holmes more slack than he deserved.