Carrie Rickey

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Its deceptive simplicity makes A Better Life so emotionally profound.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

It's a coming-of-age story - blunt, mythic, gut-wrenching.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

There's a word for women like Giselle: Supercalifragilistic. Ditto her film, Enchanted.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

The $200 million result is an irresistibly entertaining, if grandiose, saga of doomed love and directorial hubris.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.

It may be the first meditative action movie.

All in all, this phenomenal film illustrates Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that "The people get the government they deserve." In both meanings of the word, Il Divo is sensational.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.

The film gracefully telescopes a lot of information in its brief running time.

Floats before your eyes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The surprise is that, fitted together, these pieces make a completed picture.

Director Manoel de Oliveira's minimalist, incomparably moving I'm Going Home ranks with John Huston's "The Dead" as one of the great works by a director at his twilight.

The mosaic of cases and caseworkers is like a season of "The Wire" distilled into two hours.

Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.

Whatever number it is chronologically on the P&P parade, Wright's film ranks first in verve. Quite simply, it is the essential P&P.

Moviegoers of a certain age may feel as though they are watching a lost Bertolucci film.

Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling "The Da Vinci Code" and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.

Through Herzog's eyes it is a desolate, strangely beautiful frozen Edenish hell where the planet, having shaken out its pockets, lets the loners, fanatics and cosmologist-crackpots fall to bottom.

After Clooney, who gives a sterling performance as a tarnished figure, the standout performance belongs to Wilkinson, a geyser of manic eloquence. Also quite fine are Swinton and Sydney Pollack.

ILYM is the comedy that Rudd lovers have been waiting for since he first charmed us silly in "Clueless." It explores both the dweeby and heartthrobby sides of this guy whose crooked smile fails to mask his social anxiety.

Brevity is the soul of wit, lingerie and Ridicule, a keen and silky costume drama set circa 1783 in Versailles. [06 Dec 1996, p.03]

It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.

What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

Nim is as unforgettable as the treatment of him is unspeakable.

A triumph. Unapologetically old-school, in both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, Debaters overlays the story of social underdogs onto the familiar template of the stand-and-deliver saga, the staple of sports inspirationals like "Rocky," "Invincible" and "The Karate Kid."

The film is more than laborious eye-blinking - it's also dazzling visually, its potent imagery conjured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But finally, Diving Bell is about something imperceptible: consciousness.

The result is more exciting than the last four ST pictures put together, more fun than a barrel of Tribbles, and the most satisfying action-adventure since last year's "Iron Man."

In refusing to pigeonhole its characters, Nine Lives is less like those L.A. road-rage melodramas "Short Cuts" and "Crash" than those all-of-us-are-interconnected dramas "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."

Unlike most other teen cautionary tales, Thirteen does not accuse merely one villain for the corruption of a minor.

Midnight in Paris is not a perfect movie - as in "Julie & Julia" one senses its creator's impatience to leave the bleached-out present for the colorful past. But it is warm and effortless, qualities that make it embraceable.

According to this courageous, you-are-there documentary, the platoon took enemy fire almost every day, perhaps the longest exposure to combat the U.S. has engaged in since World War II.

A chick movie for guys that zings and pings like a game of supersonic pinball.

Bier primes us for a catfight, but she gives something tastier: a feast of reconciliation and love.

Finally, a real movie!

He had the fearlessness of a 104-story man and something more than a daredevil's brass.

Although not blessed with a cinematic eye, Yates, a sensitive director of actors, structures his movie like the final movement of a symphony. He reprises themes and characters from the previous films that swell in the epochal siege of Hogwarts and ends his films with an almost wordless coda that will wring tears even from Harry haters.

As Greene, Don Cheadle - explosive because you've never before seen this model of actorly restraint - is a one-man fireworks show in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' rollicking, resonant portrait of the real-life ex-con who improbably became a civic icon.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.

A disarming, funny and animated Al Gore, once a robot among presidential candidates, proves himself a rock star among environmental activists.

Though one gets a sense there is part of the story Marks isn't telling, we do pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Cats is many things: a film diary of an odd-couple relationship, a profile of a forgotten man who slowly reconstructs his past, and the transcendently moving account of a man on the margins who gets reintegrated into society.

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck.

"Shrek" is a scintilla funnier, "Toy Story 2" a hair's breadth more poignant, but "MI" is every bit as imaginative and lovable as these other contemporary animation classics.

Stop-Loss carries the emotional force and propulsive drama of the quintessential soldier's story.

A triumph for its director and its star.

While all three principals are perfection, the movie belongs to Cage's Charlie, whose sad beagle eyes dance merrily whenever he sees Yvonne. His is a measured, gravity-bound performance, one that anchors many of the helium-light shenanigans surrounding him and adds melancholy shadings to the brightness of the dialogue. [29 July 1994, p.03]

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.

While I liked the film's aesthetics and its futurist imaginings, its most important attraction is how it engages. Some movies massage you; others tickle you. This one jacks you into cyberspace, involving you psychically and physically.

It all comes down to affirmation vs. denial. Leigh chooses affirmation. And the result is life-affirming.

A cracking police procedural from Belgian director Erik van Looy, has a jaw-dropping premise so smartly executed that if this movie weren't in Flemish I'd swear that Michael Mann had directed it.

Chunhyang is a movie — and a heroine — for all times.

The movie trades in familiar virtual realities. Yet as realized by the gifted director Mamoru Oshii, who imagines cityscapes melting into circuit boards, Ghost in the Shell is where virtual reality meets superrealism. [9 May 1996, p.C4]

It is not a polemic but a plea.

The shaggy, whimsical characters have a primal familiarity, as though they were developed by a tag team of Maurice Sendak and Walt Disney.

Jonathan Demme's superb rule-bending, heartrending and family-mending drama - ends with a wedding, it resists conventions as brazenly as does the bride's sister.

The rhythms of Whale Rider are hypnotic as the ebb tide, haunting as the song of the humpback sea mammal, bracing as the ocean spray. It's a movie that rewards the patient viewer.

Brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

One might shudder at the occasional Yakin visual metaphor, as when Fresh and a friend enter their young hound in a dogfight. Yes, it's a dog-eat-dog world. But even more powerfully at work here is that Yakin, aided by the coolly honest performance of young Sean Nelson, makes us see that it's really a king-eats-kingpin world. [31 Aug 1994, p.F02]

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

A deceptively simple movie with a deeply felt message.

A riveting remake of a pretty terrific 1957 western about manhood, fatherhood and honor.

Davis does the most thorough job of capturing Basquiat, man, artist, and life force.

An exotic and erotic love story about an interracial couple whose cultures have more in common than they ever imagined. [12 Feb 1992, p.D]

A beguiling and subversively funny entertainment that considers art's worth from many angles, including that of guerrilla painters, gallerists, and seasoned collectors.

Nobody's Fool boasts the kind of low-key realism on which Newman made his reputation but that, in these days of high-decibel, high-concept fantasy, has become a lost art. [13 Jan 1995, p.3]

This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Bar-Lev tells Tillman's story "Rashomon"-style, incorporating multiple perspectives on Tillman's politics (left-liberal), religion (atheist), and personal relations (he married Marie, his first and only girlfriend). Still, it is a documentary with more details of how he died than how he lived.

The dialogue is tart, and likewise the bluesy score (a departure for Disney stalwart Alan Menken, working here with City of Angels lyricist David Zippel). And it's these elements that vault Hercules into the realm of hit and myth. [27 June 1997, p.3]

A feverish melodrama about an idealist who, in following his heart and his bishop's orders, leads himself into temptation and his parish into hypocrisy.

Burshtein keeps the camera tight on the faces of her actors in a way that succeeds at making visible the invisible heat between the characters. The film's chaste eroticism and the community's deep respect for Shira's emotional and spiritual growth keep the audience in thrall.

The film's recurring image is that of a butterfly fluttering around a flower, a lovely symbol of the reader drawn to a novel's nectar.

Lucid, concise and devastating account of what went wrong in Iraq, patiently counts those 500 ways.

A feverishly imaginative Freudian vampire film from Guy Maddin, is like a silent-movie serial by Louis Feuillade or an improbable collaboration between writer Oscar Wilde and photographer Man Ray.

Whatever our misfortune, The Kite Runner says, sometimes we are fortunate enough to get a second chance to make amends for a first mistake.

The result is a movie about the many forms of social and sexual abuse that does not make the abusee a victim but victor.

Even if you don't give a shiitake mushroom about food, there's much to savor in this lively comedy with dramatic aftertastes.

Exhilarating, exuberant and drolly funny.

L'Enfant begins with the birth of a child, but its real concern is the moral rebirth of a man.

Like its heroine, the film's glib - and sometimes sidesplittingly funny - patter at first diverts viewers from its poignant insights. Happily, as Juno grows in experience and maturity, so does the film.

It is social criticism written with tears. [15 Feb 1995, p.E01]

They are the only misstep in Penn's otherwise sure-footed journey to what he reveals as the heart of lightness.

The film has the dog-eared look of a homemade valentine and the improvised sound of '60s jazz, courtesy of a score by Mark Suozzo and a spirited soundtrack including Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar," which might be the film's anthem.

While it's too slight a movie for overpraise, there are such a serenity of vision and clarity of purpose to these characters that we easily are caught up in the boys' struggle to reunite mother and child.

In this, Alfred Hitchcock's centenary year, Felicia's Journey so startlingly channels the obsessions of the late director that it might be the greatest Hitchcock movie the master of suspense never made.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

Andre Techine creates living characters instead of sociopolitical symbols.

A macabre mystery for children and a cautionary tale for their folks, Coraline is a yarn - twisty, knotty, taut - about a perennially bored girl whose parents are too preoccupied with work to pay her much mind.

Vibrates with exuberance and erudition.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

It is the kind of film that enables adults to get in touch with their inner child - but more important, gets children in touch with their inner adult. [14 July 1995, p.03]