Carina Chocano

Alice Wu's debut film is so deft, natural and exquisitely specific, it feels fresh.

In the end, his (Patrick) disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

Polanski's version, though handsomely realized, is a fairly conventional rendering of the novel that probably won't be counted among his best films.

Marie Antoinette gives a wide berth to the conventions of period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to being transcendent.

For a film that unfolds mostly in a single location, Interview manages not to feel like a stage piece. But the premise, which may have worked in Holland, gets a little lost in the American translation.

In the grand scheme of things, the Dolphin Hotel is no Overlook, but it's no cheesy slaughter motel either.

By turns funny and sobering, sweeping and intimate, the consistently entertaining Inside Deep Throat plays like a giddy prance through the minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics.

There are some blunders on The Road to Guantanamo. The movie front-loads its first-person accounts with a short list of facts to keep in mind as we watch, creating an imbalance that serves only to undercut the movie's overall credibility.

The animated tale has flashes of brilliance but seems assembled from cultural flotsam.

If Linklater regards the fake culture that has replaced real places with horror, he has nothing but respect and affection for his characters, and the movie is rescued from nihilism by his humanistic view.

Breillat's first foray into comedy is playful, whip-smart and far breezier in both tone and look than the stylized gender polemics she's known for.

Sarah Silverman has a bright, toothy smile; a sweet, innocent demeanor; and the most outrageously impious sense of humor of any comedian working today. And I don't just mean she's dirty. (She's filthy.) She makes fun of things other comedians wouldn't acknowledge, let alone mock.

Dear Frankie's surprises are few and low-key, but the story wraps up nicely.

It's a deeply affecting performance, and it drives this quietly powerful, unrelenting film.

The strange, funny and sad story of a bipolar jazz musician and his long-suffering teenage daughter, reunited after his two-year stay in a mental institution.

Bharat Nalluri directs with a light touch and a great eye for costumes and sets, which are gorgeous enough to make up for any contrivances in the plot. It's pure romantic fantasy, and you won't believe it for a minute. But it's fun to watch Miss Pettigrew and Miss Lafosse live for a couple of hours.

There's something to be said for cinema this perversely naturalistic.

A squarely suburban movie with a distinctly bourgeois-shaped window on the world, but it's genuine and exceptionally well observed.

A surprisingly wry, contemplative movie.

The movie is at once a flagrant piece of kitsch and an unexpectedly affecting story about an individual overcoming personal tragedy and brutally restrictive circumstances by talent and force of will.

Despite its refreshingly straightforward style and compelling performers, the movie feels encased in an invisible, filmy membrane of its own. Soderbergh keeps his characters on one side of the wall and his audience on the other. As to which is living in the real world, I guess that's open to discussion.

By the time you've gotten through it, you feel spent, loaded down and more than a little disoriented. Part of the problem is that the movie's big concepts - violence begets violence, absolute power corrupts absolutely, everything is connected, my terrorist is your freedom fighter, etc. - are pithy, brief and irrefutable enough to embroider on throw pillows.

Suffers slightly from that not-so-fresh feeling.

It's smart, spare, elegant and understated.

Turns out to be as simple, friendly, kid-appropriate and nontoxic as any major motion picmerchtainment franchise could ever hope to be.

An intimate movie in every sense, Conversations With Other Women sets out to explore well-trammeled yet at the same time uncharted territory without grinding any axes. What it offers is a modest fantasy that will be familiar to contemporaries of Bonham Carter and Eckhart especially. It's sad and funny, satisfying and frustrating, totally familiar.

Sweet-natured, if somewhat familiar, On a Clear Day features fine performances by Mullan, Blethyn and Sives. Dellal and cinematographer David Johnson paint an inviting picture of Glasgow.

What the movie lacks, alarmingly, is a shriveled black heart, or a big, red tell-tale one pulsing beneath the floorboards -- anything, really, that might infuse it with the sense of true dread that keeps kids coming back for second, third and 11th helpings of the willies.