Carrie Rickey

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.

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.

Holds the audience captive and unusually vulnerable to psycho- and viscero-terror.

With Insomnia, his third feature, Nolan, 32, has proven himself a precocious master of the thriller, unsettling the audience with a brief image of blood seeping through fabric.

You go to a Daniels movie not to be entertained, but edified. While not everyone goes to the movies for self-improvement, you will leave this one having witnessed phenomenal acting.

A movie as generous, stingy, and biting - and memorable - as its six main characters.

Finally, a real movie!

A witty, winning inversion of the famous Arthur Miller play.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

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

A disturbing and forceful drama.

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

It's a comedy that knows that no matter one's ethnicity, human foibles, follies and hopes are universal.

Salvadori's choppy film never establishes a comic rhythm.

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]

Lush. Debauched. Ravishing. And did I mention sexy?

Half enjoyable goof, half an uncomfortable panorama of urban terrorism that just doesn't sit well after Sept. 11.

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

Director Jean-Pierre Denis doesn't explore psychological motives, which are, finally, unknowable. What he accomplishes in his chilling, unnerving film is a double portrait of two young women whose lives were as claustrophic, suffocating and chilly as the attics to which they were inevitably consigned.

A superb film that begins with death, ends in renewal, and finds almost as much to laugh about as to cry for.

English wrangles her talent like a virtuoso. Best is Murphy Brown herself, Candice Bergen.

The upside: Chow has energy and invention to burn. The downside: He doesn't know when he blisters his audience.

Whatever romantic tension the film has is communicated in the coiled-spring performance by Crowe, one of the most remarkable actors working.

Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas. His most gorgeous, too, with the peaches'n'strawberries'n'cream palette of early Technicolor films.

Ramsay's child actors are nonprofessionals who can only express what they feel — which gives her film an unusual degree of emotional authenticity.

Like most great comedies, Hitch confects a sweetly appealing fantasy.

Featuring seasoned warriors reflecting on whether we can best fight violence with violence is enormously compelling.

It is a difficult and demanding movie, one that rewards the persevering moviegoer just as Pollock's difficult and demanding paintings ultimately reward the steadfast.

Heartbreaking? Sometimes. Involving? You bet.

Blessed are the Pythons for making holy wit of the Holy Writ.

Like a piece of music, Godard structures his film in three movements.

Their exhaustive tribute to hungry zombies, fast girls and faster cars is . . . exhausting, if intermittently entertaining.

Less like "The Waterboy" and more like "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," only funny.

Like many previous Carrey vehicles, the point of this one directed by Peyton Reed is that one should not live at the extremes, but should achieve a balance between low and high, no and yes.

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]

As irresistible as Chan is irrepressible. In a movie season in which, it seems, all the blockbusters boast wheels, it's a treat to see a movie that has legs.

A film that leaves cinephiles breathless and the mainstream movie maniacs scratching their heads.

Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society.

Throughout the film its makers pose the question of whether saving a work of art is as important as saving a human life. The question is not answered, and perhaps ultimately unanswerable. Yet Europa movingly shows how for many, art and artifacts are living things.

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.

A feast for the eyes and ears as its story is a banquet for the heart.

The Big Easy is an extremely enjoyable (and well-lubricated) vehicle for two actors who aren't quite yet stars, but should be.

A melodrama painted in the saffron-and-turmeric hues of a Bollywood musical, Broken Embraces is the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," that moody account of obsessional love and double lives.

Pazira, whose sapphire eyes blaze through the lattice of her slate-gray burqa, isn't much of an actress, as her singsong narration attests. But when not speaking, she has a commanding presence and is an effective witness to the ravages of war.

Do you need to have seen A Chorus Line to understand or enjoy Every Little Step? I think not. This companion piece to one of America's most beloved musicals is about human longings and shortfalls.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

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

A seven-word review: Very good performances. Much too much weather.

A mostly charmless affair.

For two hours I felt like a kitten chasing an elusive ball of catnip that remained just beyond my paw.

A small, quiet film that walks tall and resonates long after.

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

Exhilarating, breathless, must-see chronicle of the skateboarder revolution and evolution.

Not an easy movie to watch.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

Ain't no mountain high enough to keep the Funk Brothers from getting to you.

A story with a beginning and end but without a middle. Two slices of bread without the sandwich meat, I wrote in my notes.

Bravo to Brooks for conceiving Mother and for giving Reynolds a role that required her to do something more than merely effervesce. Here Reynolds bubbles, she boils, she exhibits a complex geology of human emotions. Her Mrs. Henderson is the mother of all mothers, and Mother is the mother lode of all comedies. [10 Jan 1997, p.05]

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]

Wrenching, poignant, and quietly healing.

It lacks momentum, and thus the propulsion required to rocket it into the movie mythosphere.

The film is cannily made.

The film's humor comes in part from the gap between what Oliver says and what the audience sees.

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

Rango is best enjoyed by those over 10 who have an idea of what "existential" means and can appreciate a surreal mashup of "Chinatown," "Gladiator," "High Noon," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

As a movie, Steal is as finely wrought as the decorative ironworks that hang on the walls of the Barnes between Picassos and Seurats. Yet as a narrative of the facts, it is as one-sided as a plaintiff's brief.

Its deceptive simplicity makes A Better Life so emotionally profound.

Much as I enjoyed this diversion, I couldn't help but think that The Princess and the Frog had better songs and (hand-painted) animation, and that Mulan was a ripping adventure that didn't need tweaking to qualify as an action flick.

A gorgeous, gory epic, is a blow-your-mind masterpiece about the emperor who ruled more than 2,000 years ago.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

One wishes that Chambers had more gracefully integrated the stories of the individual players into this celebration of Rush.

Like many Apatow films, Bridesmaids has a rambling, disjointed quality, crammed with sequences that elicit laughs without advancing plot.

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

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

She may not be the most cinematic of film artists, but Heckerling will make you smile.

A boisterous and improbably entertaining action comedy.

Shrek 2 is a dream, a sequel as exhilarating and riotously funny as 2001's top-grossing original.

If the heart of the film is Hartford, who late in his struggle with cancer conveys the luminous colors of a man at his twilight, its soul is Welch.

During its two hours-plus running time, Field's movie veers from dark comedy to melodrama, not always gracefully. But tonal inconsistencies don't blunt the keenness of its satire, so sharp that I walked out with emotional razor burn.

It's a joyride until you think about the film's biggest contradiction. How come this movie celebrating the superiority of human feelings over machine precision is most alive when thrilling in the mechanical perfection of the Terminator and T-1000? Inside Terminator 2 beats a human heart. But its soul is that of a killer machine.

DuVernay, a low-key director sparing in her use of emotion and music, has made an existential drama that is European in its feel.

Robert Evans has been variously described as the Hugh Hefner of Hollywood, a Tinseltown Gatsby, the Lancelot of the backlot.

This small story that tells the much bigger story of the New Economy's bubble and burst is less a documentary than it is breaking news.

I'm not sure that the endearing charms of the assorted fogeys and whelps add up to a movie. But I always enjoy how Altman weaves the warp of professional life with the weft of the personal.

A pleasant taste of Roman life.

House is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years. [17 Jun 2010, p.14]

Sobering and wildly entertaining.

It is a challenging film, if not always a narratively cohesive one.

Hugely entertaining catalog of MPAA follies.

Shelly left her daughter - and her audience - a wonderful gift, this movie about the transforming effects of motherhood. Waitress shows how, in giving birth, a woman gives birth to herself - as artist and mother.