Carrie Rickey

Shulman photographed buildings as if they were movie stars: He found their best angles and immortalized them.

As always, Freeman is a one-man charm offensive.

A naughtily funny, skin-deep satire.

Here, love and violence are random, everyone's a fool for love, and tomfoolery often has a shocking twist. And every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The resulting drama is more deeply felt than it is deep. But I can't think of another film so frankly dealing with what we expect from friendship, so tenderly showing how friends can fail in one area, yet be there in another.

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

The overall tone of the film is sunny, with Ramona and Beezus resiliently turning life's lemons into lemonade.

For a movie loaded with ear-scorching profanity, oceans of booze, and illegal drugs enough to keep all of Cedar Rapids in high spirits for a month, there is something fundamentally decent about the film.

In its first half, Honeydripper trickles. In its second, it really flows.

While the film grows increasingly preposterous in its final act, the enigmatic performances of Youn and Jeon carry the day.

Like the Jerry Seinfeld documentary "Comedian," Conan offers a glimpse of the host's restlessness and creative process.

A gripping French-Algerian coproduction that makes Algeria's epic struggle for independence from France look like a gangster movie.

Startlingly original film.

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 indescribable fun.

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

Encourages viewers to think outside the big box of super stores such as Wal-Mart.

It's an action movie that's also an intellectual-action flick.

Sparkle is a solid entertainment with a winning debut by Jordin Sparks in the title role.

What's frustrating for the viewer who wants to support the Jamaican economy is that "Life and Debt" does not suggest how Jamaica-lovers can help the island's citizens.

Its portrait of an artist hungry for experience is as timely today as when it was written.

The scenery is majestic, the goats adorable, the characters alternately gruff and tender. Like the best storytellers, Carion delays vital information about his characters that makes their dynamic increasingly interesting.

The three parallel love stories of daughter and dad, girlfriend and boyfriend, sister and brother, are nicely handled. Robinson is a sympathetic director of actors, allowing almost everyone their dignity. For the most part, she keeps this emotionally charged story in the schmaltz-free zone.

While on its face, Mother and Child is about the impact of adoption, in its heart Garcia's movie reckons how consequential motherhood is in the calculus of womanhood. The fine actors show how we bond to those not related to us by blood - and also how we love. Bring Kleenex.

If Martin Scorsese updated "The Roaring Twenties," the classic Jimmy Cagney movie about World War I vets who come home and find that the only jobs available are with gang lords and bootleggers, it would look a lot like Sean Kirkpatrick's rookie feature, Cost of a Soul.

Its surgical candor makes Forks Over Knives a little bit like a food horror movie.

Among the leads, Radcliffe alternates between playing the wet blanket and the dry wit, and Grint strikes a few sparks as his ambivalent protector. It is Watson who catches fire as the strategist and soldier of this penultimate Potter quest. Watson's so good that one wishes Rowling had built her septology around Hermione Potter.

What threatens to be 80 minutes of hypochondria turns into an inspired travelogue of nontraditional remedies. [13 June 1997, p.03]