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]

With mixed results, Moore singles out those who profit from the misery of American workers.

Startlingly original comedy-drama.

It's wholesome as a glass of milk, and as refreshing.

A double shot of Saturday-night lowdown chased by a cheery chug of Sunday-morning uplift.

Subversively funny, Stick It sees gymnastics as a microcosm of teen life.

The treasure of the film is the unearthing of the family bond, magically played by Douglas and Wood.

The unforced performances of Courtney and Fanning are remarkable.

The movie about literature's luckiest orphan may teem with children, but it is not for them.

The trippy creation of onetime marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob is a cockeyed optimist toiling at the bottom of the fast-food chain.

DuVernay has confidence in her actors that is reciprocated in kind. Richardson-Whitfield gives a remarkably empathetic performance.

A disturbing and forceful drama.

Fraser and Elfman are goofily endearing even if they seem more sincere acting opposite the rabbit and the duck than they do each other.

So what if the movie isn't finger-lickin' good like the original? The performances by Hanks as a crook and Irma P. Hall as his honorable landlady are mighty tasty.

Fugard’s classic minimalist drama comes eloquently to film.

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.

Fan's fly-on-the-wall perspective enables the viewer to empathize with all the players in the family drama, unlikely to have a happy ending.

When the film focuses on the Trojans, it's splendid. But when Troy attempts to sort out the competing agendas of the Greeks, it drags.

Vintage Terry Gilliam, a pour not to all tastes but one certain to please lovers of "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

Sisterhood is Stand by Me for girls, as sullen, plucky, melodramatic, exuberant, athletic, graceless, crafty, artistic, arrogant, modest, helpless and resourceful as its teenage heroines.

The performances in Girl, Interrupted resonate, but the movie does not.

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."

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.

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]

Shamelessly entertaining.

Plays like an exalted episode of "Miami Vice" or a stealth version of "Shane."

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.

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.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

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]

McQueen finds the exquisite tension between the brother wanting to disconnect and the sister longing for connection. To paraphrase a line of Sissy's, it's a good movie that comes from a bad place.

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.

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

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.

In describing the conflict of a woman who has it all without enjoying it all, Pearson's book had teeth. McKenna's screenplay has only a smile. But is it ever good to laugh.

Wrenching, poignant, and quietly healing.

Raunchy, raucous and riotously funny.

Jon Amiel's moody, and strangely moving, vignette of the naturalist is something else entirely. It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist.

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.

Worthy of mention is Carolina Herrera's design for Bella's wedding dress, sophisticated and demure in the front and Pippa Middleton sexy, and proper, in the back.

Involving study of sibling and interpersonal relationships.

To the extent that this mostly sunny excursion succeeds, it's due to the irrepressible Hawkins.

Some call Margot a comedy. For me, it is a tragedy impaled by comic moments.

For those who gripe that America doesn't make cars or movies like it used to, Clint Eastwood has two words for you: Gran Torino.

Whatever you say about Sex and Lucía, you have to admit that it takes place at a hormonal high tide that never ebbs.

While 13 Going on 30 is too formulaic to sustain the delicacy of emotion that gave "Big" its appeal, it has tour-de-farce moments that made screenwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa's "What Women Want" such a monster hit.

At first glance Walter isn't a guy you want to spend two hours with. But by the end of the film, you don't want to see him go. Jenkins is like that: He sneaks up on you and steals your heart with light-fingered skill.

Hugely entertaining catalog of MPAA follies.

A challenging film populated with characters who are depressed, on antidepressants, or strung out on mood-altering drugs, The Dead Girl is a downer with resonance.

Buoyed by the appealing Hart and Grenier.

Silva expertly maintains the tension, asking the audience to interpret Raquel's bizarro behavior. His diagnosis is a pleasant surprise.

Hate, love, bigotry, empathy and chance are the uninvited guests at Monster's Ball.

A perfectly lovely, if uninspired, movie that suffers from following on the trotters of "Babe," the one about the piglet advocate of barnyard brotherhood.

By turns rowdy and rueful, The Switch is a comedy with serious ramifications, not least of which is the question, what makes a family?

I was with the movie until its head-scratcher of an ending, too oblique for its own good.

All of the elements that made The Matrix a mass-cult phenom -- breathtaking physical gymnastics wedded to the brain-cramping mental and spiritual kind -- resurface in Reloaded.

At its best, Nanny McPhee Returns has the playful surrealism of "Babe," if "Babe" had been directed by Terry Gilliam.

The story hooks us because stars Helen Mirren and Julie Walters look as fetching in woolens and Wellingtons as they do in the altogether. But it reels us in because it is about people who for so long have paid lip service to making a difference that they are profoundly altered when they actually do.

All Muppet capers, whether they involve low comedy or high seas, require the romantic conflict of Kermit and Piggy. Fortunately, the frog and the pig are worth waiting for. And like all great thespians, they leave you wanting more. [16 Feb 1996, p.3]

Beautifully photographed by Crystel Fournier, Sciamma's film has a floaty weightlessness (as opposed to the heavyosity of "Boys Don't Cry") that neither judges nor pathologizes Laure.

A gut-punch of a movie, a potent, mesmerizing drama.

A jubilee for McDormand and jolly good fun for most everyone else.

The film is plush and passionate and graced with elegant performances. Best is that of Emma Thompson as Brideshead's matriarch, Lady Marchmain, who resembles a cross between Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict.

This furry family comedy about a boy and his border terrier is irresistible, if not exactly in the league of "Babe."

Despite its title, The Exploding Girl is an oddly tranquil experience.

Ranging in age from 30 to 96, the Berlevag men clearly enjoy being on camera and are unusually candid about their various pasts as Casanovas and hashish addicts.

At its best it is one of the most dynamic movies from a most dynamic filmmaker, now 76.

Maybe it's just the subtitles, but it would seem that Fontaine has a keener eye for the elements that made Chanel's style than she has an ear for dialogue. But she gets a splendid performance from Tautou.

A pink-collar "Sex and the City" made urgent by the performance of Nathalie Baye.

Irreverent, provocative and provoking.

This unassuming and unexpectedly moving picture set in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood is a sugarplum-and-sofrito affair centering on the Rodriguez household.

Handles the strained daddy/daughter bond with sufficient lightness and laughs so that fathers won't mind accompanying their spawn.

Compulsively entertaining documentary.

Graced with unusually expressive and seamless voice work by Drew Barrymore and George Lopez, the best of its kind since "Babe."

As directed by the stupendously talented and aggressively eccentric George Miller (creator of Mad Max and producer of the first Babe), Pig in the City is far busier and faster than the original, which was directed by Chris Noonan. This has some benefits. [25 Nov 1998, p.D1]

While I much liked The Duchess, this portrait feels unfinished.

A triumph for Cheadle and Sandler, whose performances strew the seeds of regeneration.

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 one-of-a-kind experience that boasts a twice-in-a-lifetime performance from Nicolas Cage. The actor has not gone this deep into the abyss since "Vampire's Kiss" (1989).

Throughout, Bergsholm's poker-faced performance creates the effect that we are watching the misadventures of an actual teenager. It may be a slight comedy but Turn Me On, Dammit! is enormously entertaining.

Great as Whitaker is in this juicy slab of Oscar bait, Macdonald's movie doesn't have much to offer beyond a pair of stunning performances, propulsive editing, fantastic scenery and the heartbeat rhythms of African music.

A spare document featuring one talking head. But what a talking head and what a story!

Though I liked Love's unhurried pace and oddball digressions, its obligatory romantic-comedy resolution seemed too schematic for what had preceded it.

It's got one of the best kisses in movie history: Spidey, hanging upside down, delivers an open-mouth smooch to Mary Jane, a lip-lock for the ages.

Her (Chadha) film tastily demonstrates that variety is the spice of not only American life, but of American cuisine.

As a director, Cassavetes is a keen observer of character and social interaction but not yet much of a visual stylist (which might also describe the improvisational dramas made by her actor/director father, John).

The result is visually inventive, narratively edgy, and unlike anything else.

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.

Striking a balance between Howard's harum-scarum comedies such as Night Shift and Splash and his fuzzy family "dramedies" such as Cocoon and Parenthood, The Paper delivers the goods - and also babies and the news. [25 March 1994, p.03]

A pleasant taste of Roman life.

Few American directors drive this wedge between mind and gut as masterfully as Michael Mann.

A stylish thriller so highly strung it zings, gives us Hopkins, an actor at the top of his game, in material that's only middling.

A gentle fable about how the young boy from Zurich struggles to fit in rather than stand out, Vitus is both a cautionary tale for pushy parents and an endearing, if eccentric, empowerment fantasy for precocious children.

Franklin has enormous fun using these varied technologies to ramp up the suspense in a movie that is the most purely entertaining thriller since "No Way Out."

A jazzy, immensely absorbing thriller.

The film is an omnibus ride through Brighton Beach, Central Park, the West Village, and Tribeca.

Yelchin and Jones are up to the challenge of suggesting much by doing little.

While it lacks the heart and hipness of the similar-themed Pixar odysseys, The Meltdown has the physical humor of slapstick comedy.

Best when skewering New Age entrepreneurs for what might be called Compassionate Capitalism. Steve Martin is sublime as Kate's boss, Barry, purveyor of organic food and Zen koans.

This provocative account of a war-weary administration that denied Surratt her right to a fair trial starts slow but builds momentum in the scenes with Wright and Evan Rachel Wood as Surratt's flinty daughter, Anna.

It is also to Khouri's credit that she has written a movie that begins with the men on Mars and women on Venus and ends with their being able to share a planet. [4 Aug 1995, p.03]

Give Saldanha's film an A-plus for visuals and a B-minus for story.

Gives audiences something more than just a heart-stopping beauty to contemplate.

Rodanthe is a reliably steamy stormy sultry story.

An improbably entertaining, if overlong, adventure that brings new meaning to the term "summer camp." Doubloons! Ripped bodices! Unbuckled swash! Rum galore!

Guggenheim doesn't bring much visual style to the game. But he brings heart (and some Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack) to the story of a lost Jersey girl redeemed by sport. Yeah, I cried. And cheered. You will too.

The film is enjoyable as a performance piece, an eminently watchable contest between two actors at the top of their games.

Heavyhearted without being heavy-handed, Corbijn's lyrical movie is about a man who has built his own cell and become his own jailer.

The unassuming performances by Krasinski and Rudolph help make this the first Mendes movie that feels lived-in rather than staged.

Jon Favreau, the actor-director who made the delightful family film "Elf," has a firm grip and a light touch with this material about bickering brothers who find a board game that zaps the family home into hyperspace.

In her byplay with Clooney, Roberts only occasionally strikes a spark. Clooney, on the other hand, generates heat.

Searing and hypnotic docudrama.

Lovely performances from McDormand, Downey and Richard Knox, who looks uncommonly like Little Richard, as a bar owner named Vernon Hardapple.

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

A clever feature-length cartoon just as entertaining as the hit Nickelodeon series on which it is based.

Mendes nonetheless works this screenplay like a jazz virtuoso plays with a familiar theme such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Would Backbeat be as compelling a story if it were about, say, Freddie and the Dreamers? Probably not. But despite mostly undistinguished acting and some directorial gracelessness, Backbeat is potent because it tells this emotionally complex and musically exuberant story from every angle conceivable. [22 Apr 1994, p.03]

Though not as great as "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc.," Pixar movies that are the gold standard for family movies, Finding Nemo is visually entrancing.

Smart, curious and brave.

Happy Accidents is romantic perversity in reverse.

In this it succeeds. Like the Bard said, better witty foolishness than foolish wit.

It is earsplitting, crowd-pleasing, and, no doubt, 'bot-pleasing, too. If you told me I would get emotionally and viscerally involved in two machines punching the hard drives out of each other, I would tell you you were crazy. I would be wrong.

An altogether enjoyable ride.

Witcher makes a remarkably confident filmmaking debut, eliciting excellent performances from his leads and underscoring their romance with a sound track that flavors, rather than overwhelms, the story. [14 Mar 1997, p.03]

Besides Paquin, who delivers a once-in-a-lifetime performance as the maddeningly inconsistent Lisa, also wrenchingly fine are Jeannie Berlin as the best friend of the deceased and J. Smith-Cameron as Lisa's actress mother.

Like many graduate students, Love and Other Catastrophes is smart, droll and doesn't always know when to stop talking. [11 Apr 1997, p.03]

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.

By turns wry, rueful and explosively funny.

Burton's film is an American version of the Odyssey.

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

A film of haunting eloquence and justifiable fury.

The three (human) leads are perfection. Bridges' Howard is as breezily garrulous and glad-handing as Cooper's Smith is laconic and withdrawn. Maguire's Pollard has haunted eyes and orangey hair that makes him look like a human jack-o'-lantern, and establishes his own unique rhythm and less-is-more style.

Fresh, funny and perceptive.

The delightful G-rated film has a story line simple enough for pre-schoolers to follow and comic sensibility complex enough for adults to savor, with an emphasis on howlingly bad (by which I mean good) puns.

The fascinating aspect of the rambling and involving film is how Ralph and this no-nonsense dame who married Dad become confederates.

Given this swoon-inducer, Summit Entertainment would be well-advised to set up fainting couches in the multiplex lobby and provide smelling salts to those who need them.

With the exception of one sequence, this PG-13 movie is so youth-friendly that I thought I might take my 10-year-old. But that sequence, upsetting for those of any age, makes the movie better suited for mature 12-year-olds and older.

Mostly this elegant little film is a case study in the inconsistency of thoughts and feelings. Here, moralists break commandments, intellectuals act emotionally, and cynics have moments of idealism.

This seriously funny group portrait of third-generation clam diggers (and their wives and sisters) is fresh as today's catch and about as tasty. Its '70s soundtrack positively swaggers.

At times Let It Rain recalls one of those Katharine Hepburn comedies where the New Woman gets cut down to size so as not to intimidate the Old-School Men. Yet the film so likably deflates the pompous and pumps up the humble that it's hard not to like.

It's a heavy-metal opera with humor.

The plot is canny, but it would be little more than an ingenious springloaded device were it not for the performances by Howard and Iures.

Few movies are as eloquent in their performances and their art direction.

Man, oh, man, much of the dialogue is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that you can see fine actors such as Derek Luke and Michael Ealy buckle under the weight. Clearly, Lee fell in love with McBride's words and couldn't bear to cut them, even when the visuals made those words redundant.

It's an involving journey, remarkably free of sentimentality, deepened by the performances.

Seething, searing tragedy of unmannerliness.

A coming-of-age film that has the jaunty mood and egg-cream flavor of a Philip Roth memoir.

Adoration, Egoyan's most affecting film since "The Sweet Hereafter."

A throwback to the days when gangs met in clubhouses instead of crack houses, raced go-carts instead of stolen cars and brandished slingshots instead of semiautomatics, The Little Rascals is the best 1936 movie made in 1994. [05 Aug 1994, p.03]

While Smith gets into Ali's head and under his skin, the movie around him has more footwork than punch.

Solitary Man is a wafer-thin film with a river-deep, mountain-high performance from Douglas.

What's admirable about Save Me is that it grounds its religious and cultural debate not in vilifying one side but in sympathizing with both.

I enjoyed the spectacle of middle-aged people making spectacles of themselves.

Heigl, a double-dip of praline with caramel, is so beautiful that initially you don't notice her comic chops.

Paradise Now plays like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," but with explosives.

Silly, but irresistible.

As adorable and predictable a film as the Helen Fielding best-seller that inspired it.

In her clear and compelling film, Sanders lets the innocents do the talking.

Because the confrontations between power and powerlessness are so dramatic and because Hirschbiegel's editing is so emphatic, Das Experiment is practically over before you realize that you don't know what its point is, exactly.

Kudos to Clifton Collins Jr., who appears as a dispenser of cleaning products and common sense.

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

Evocatively shot by cinematographer Lance Gewer in warm browns and reds that make Tsotsi seem all the more chilling, the film records his gradual metamorphosis from id-driven brute into empathic, if crude, care-giver.

Peter Glenville's staging of the material is the opposite of cinematic, but the pleasure of these two extravagantly gifted actors at the top of their game - their diction! their conviction! their beauty! - is enormous.

Not an easy movie to watch.

A third-generation performer, this daughter of actor-director Ron Howard makes a stunning feature debut.

It succeeds as a vivid video album of the metropolis at the millennium, a lilting musical album of the varied carols Americans play and an all-too-rare depiction of what the pursuit of happiness actually looks like.

Like its music, the film's emotions proceed from lament to screaming screed to chorus of hope.

This eccentric fairy tale with the feel of "Our Town" has a number of remarkable performances.

Making a remarkable feature debut, Hamilton distinguishes herself more as a filmmaker than as a screenwriter. While she elicits smoldering performances from Mackie and Washington, the movie around them is rather diffuse.

Swank is no mere impersonator. Her Amelia, like Maggie in "Million Dollar Baby," is unwavering in her gaze, ambition, and drive... In Nair's evocatively art-directed (and sensationally costumed) film, Earhart comes alive.

It's a film about dumbing down that has the effect of wising up its audience.

If Batman did nothing else but restore pulp-art shadow to the icon sanitized in his pop-art TV reincarnation, it would be an achievement. Tim Burton's Batman, starring a subdued Michael Keaton as you-know-who and a supercharged Jack Nicholson as the Joker, handily accomplishes that mission.

Though not blessed with a cinematic eye, Wells is a gifted storyteller who gets nuanced performances from most of his actors.

Each actor is unusually watchful and wily, and their actorly competition underscores the one-upmanship of their characters.

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

It's also a case of art imitates life imitates art. If that makes it a tribute to a tribute to a classic, then it is no less enjoyable for that.

Kutcher and Portman have terrific screen physics, using their 12-inch height difference to considerable slapstick effect.

Although respectful of its central subject, Comedian is not worshipful. Rather, it is curious about what in Seinfeld's hard-wiring allows him to maintain his equilibrium.

Whether it is truth, fiction or, most likely, a little of each, the story Weir tells is a powerful parable of man's charge for freedom and his humbling by nature.

The takeaways of the film are horror and hope: horror that institutionalized homophobia was so pervasive, hope that that intolerance is a thing of the past.

Though not as lyrical as "The Road," which benefits from both its visual artistry and its humanist perspective, The Book of Eli employs the genre conventions of the western to make mythic its principal character.

Spider is a difficult film, but an inspired one, the movie equivalent of eating a meal of artfully prepared eel or sea urchin. It's for those with adventurous tastes and no fear of squishy textures.

Not only are LaBeouf and Bridges terrific, but Jon Heder is hilarious as surfing fowl Chicken Joe. And Zooey Deschanel is saucy fun as penguin lifeguard Lani.

In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, The Machinist would have felt like a stunt. But Anderson, with a terrific assist from Bale, makes his character's plight achingly physical.

Some movies skate by fast on slick action. Others snap with crisp dialogue. Nick and Norah springs high on the bounce of its hugely likable leads, Michael Cera and Kat Dennings.

Fry's film has the frantic energy and kaleidoscopic style of Waugh's feverish prose.

Like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," Sarah Marshall has all the ingredients of the Apatow brand. Alas, it's beginning to feel generic.

Deadpan, dead-on parody of a schlockmeister at work and play.

I don't think that a woman behind the camera necessarily affects the tenor of what is on screen, but never before have I seen a men-of-war film more notable for its psychology than its spectacle.

Half a century after its release, Godzilla couldn't be more current.

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.

If Coixet's film is substantially more restrained than its explicit source material (Nicholas Meyer, himself a fine novelist and director of the second and best Star Trek film, adapted), it is no less provocative as a poetic meditation on love, sex and death.

With varying degrees of success, the filmmaker gets each musician to talk about the personal and musical roots that blossomed into his technique.

This simple story of a Guy and a Girl and their music is very appealing.

As a character assassin, Moore fails, because you can't kill anyone with contempt and sarcasm. And as an independent counsel prosecuting Bush for bamboozling America, Moore likewise misses his mark because many of the exhibits he offers as evidence are emotional rather than factual.

In part, the documentary answers the question of why some couples flourish and others flounder.

It is a keenly observed movie about loss of identity and finding love, in which Brooks serves up funny-ouch humor with slapstick heartbreak.

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

A rollicking, mascara-smearing, intergenerational coed crowd-pleaser. Imagine "Sex and the City" negotiating "Terms of Endearment" with "The Golden Girls."

Shelton and her cast are so skillful that before long it seems we are not moviegoers watching a screen but flies on a wall witnessing real encounters and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

When the tobacco is extinguished what comes between April and Frank Wheeler is bigger, colder and more formidable than the iceberg that sundered Kate and Leo in "Titanic": shattered hope.

Cinematic dynamite.

Yummy and weightless.

At its best, it's shaggily enjoyable and enjoyably shaggy. It's like steroids on steroids with Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, disarming arms industrialist, tossing off one-liners like comic grenades.

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

Like its characters, it has its faults. But overall, it is a movie of imaginative sympathy that gets into the skin of its characters, into their hearts, and, ultimately, into ours.

It is almost inevitable that Miyazaki, often compared to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, should have found in Diana Wynne Jones a kindred spirit.

Flavorful and fun. "Muy sabroso y divertido," as Martin might say.

It is painful, it is funny, and it marks the remarkable debut of Wysocki.

Movie and book both are delightful, but very, very different.

Much as I was moved by the film, I have one reservation and one warning. The framing device of the older Pi recounting his story to the author (which worked so well in Martel's novel) is intrusive and significantly detracts from the story.

On stage variously with Boyz II Men, Jaden Smith, Miley Cyrus, and Ludacris, Bieber carries himself like a squeaky-clean homeboy with an angelic voice. On him, swagger looks sweet.

In its final act, Akeelah is as exciting as any Final Four matchup. What it may lack in cinematic art it compensates for in abecedarian adrenaline guaranteed to pump the pulse and the spirits of viewers from 10 to 90.

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

The heroine of this story is the eloquent Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett's mother, who recalls her fight to have an open-casket funeral for her son.

Stanford and Neuwirth are performers of such nuance that a mere glimpse of his body language and her bawdy language speak volumes about the difference between love and sex, the ideal and the real.

Spiced with melancholy and magic, Micmacs is an imaginative live-action film with the playfulness of an animation like "Ratatouille." Similarly, it is a fable of subterraneans who change how life is lived above ground in a Paris that is both retro and modern.

Any resemblance between this film and "Casablanca" is purely deliberate.

For lovers of classical French cinema, and I am one, this earthy throwback is a whiff of lavender borne by the bracing winds of the mistral.

A haunting neo-noir about a man told by a palmist that his karma is about to run over his dogma.

The parade of senators parroting the rationale for invasion - what we now know was misinformation - does not undermine Young's story. Given the private's eloquence, the flashbacks to 2002 are superfluous.

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

Cage and Leoni make it offbeat.

A tiny jewel of a film.

Bakula is the ideal surrogate for a perplexed audience. Similarly, Whitacre's exasperated wife, played by Melanie Lynskey, is drily funny.

Whatever you call 21 Jump Street, this potty-mouthed and drug-laced reimagining of the 1980s TV show has one of the highest laughs-per-minute ratios since the "Naked Gun" films.

Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.

Though it might be Moliere for Dummies, it's infinitely more fun than French director Ariane Mnouchkine's tedious 1978 film portrait, a Moliere for Smarties that ran four hours plus and, like Tirard's movie, explored the comedy of tragedy.