Carrie Rickey

Quickly devolves into a violent thriller that resolves itself in sadomasochistic romance.

Franco, the hollow-cheeked, pouty-lipped actor best known as Spider-Man's nemesis Harry Osborn, plays Tristan like a biker boy with a broadsword.

Richard Wenk's script, taut and enjoyable, pays homage to those police procedurals, with a nod to the Brazilian hostages-on-mass-transit documentary, "Bus 174."

Lives is a best-foreign-film nominee competing in a year that at least three movies in this category are stronger than Oscar's best-picture contenders.

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.

For those who have seen Tarkovsky's moody original, let me say that Soderbergh skims the fat from the 1972 film. What's left is a rich stew of longing.

The sequences with the melancholy Faunia are monochromatic and those with Lester perfunctory. Benton too neatly -- and too hastily -- wraps up a story that would surely exert more power if it were messy and unrushed.

An appealing, low-budget musical.

However improbable this sounds, The Brady Bunch Movie is to the original television show what real grass is to Astroturf. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

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

The film's atmosphere is incendiary. It has style to burn. But for the most part, the performances are all wet.

In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Kempner gives us a balance of artist and alter ego, introducing us to a woman we'd like to know even better.

Somebody should tell Ward that winning isn't everything. Character is. And this is what his movie lacks.

If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."

Roos introduces the possibility that perhaps two partials add up to the whole truth, and in so doing creates a provocative love story that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

The exhilarating film pays tribute to Buster Keaton's "The Balloonatic" by way of its slapstick, and to Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" by way of its watercolor palette and traveling domicile.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

It is not unforgettable, like the original Love Affair. It is not An Affair to Remember, like the remake. It is not laden with ironic humor, like Sleepless in Seattle. This Love Affair is . . . fair. [21 Oct 1994, p.03]

Ford plays Linus as a consummate actor so good at feigning emotions that he fools even himself. It is a nuanced performance, astonishing in an otherwise innocuous film. Though Ormond's Sabrina doesn't exactly generate the heat to melt Ford's glacial CEO, his transformation from polar ice cap to volcano is heartstopping. Who'da thunk we were watching Cinderfella? [15 Dec 1995, p.03]

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

Taylor-Wood stresses the universals rather than the specifics of John's youth. So don't go expecting a Fab Four origin story. The word Beatles is never uttered. But do go.

If there were a truth-in-titling law, the movie would be called "3000 Bullets to Brain Death."

Goblet of Fire, fourth in the fantasy franchise, is the most fun and the most fraught with conflict.

Macdonald's film brilliantly telescopes the '70s, an era when every physical action had its equal and opposite political reaction.

This bracing adaptation of the Nurse Matilda books by Christianna Brand is the acidic antidote to Mary Poppins sweetness.

Core, a cinematographer who helms both camera and directorial duties here, creates a vivid sense of time and place without letting the period music, clothes or art direction intrude. The performances are likewise understated and unpretentious, especially those of Wahlberg and Kinnear.