Carrie Rickey

You watch a Miyazaki film with the pie-eyed, gape-mouthed awe of a child being read the most fantastic story and suddenly transported to places previously beyond the limits of imagination. It's quite a trip.

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.

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.

To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

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

Makes for the most thrilling action movie of the year.

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

Exhilarating, exuberant and drolly funny.

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

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

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

At the film's intimate best, it gives a guitar's perspective of the troubadour. He plucks his instrument as he plays our heartstrings. It's movie and music bliss.

Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.

In the end, Atonement sorts truth from fiction as it delivers a shattering kick to the solar plexus.

Like Johnny's rants, Naked is a revelation, a parable of spiritual homelessness and the terror it engenders.

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.

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.

An unforgettable and profoundly inspiring film. [05 Mar 1999, p.04]

The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.

One of the rare rock films that produces the effect of a live concert: After each number, the audience erupts into applause.

It's never entirely clear whether Borchardt is also an object of ridicule for documentarian Chris Smith.

Trueba's movie is nearly undone by its shapelessness. Because the filmmaker imposes little in the way of form (or drama) on his subject, his film is a good listen without being a particularly good watch.

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

Like this diabolically designed weapon of war, Tanovic's film is coil-sprung to explode on the unsuspecting.

It is an exploitation picture disguised as a hipster comedy.

Insightful and involving.

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.