Carrie Rickey

Brevity is the soul of wit, lingerie and Ridicule, a keen and silky costume drama set circa 1783 in Versailles. [06 Dec 1996, p.03]

Though Daldry elicits brilliant performances, particularly from Meryl Streep and Claire Danes, on balance The Hours is more pretentious than penetrating about existential despair.

Brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait.

A movie like Everlasting Moments comes along maybe once in a decade.

As lovingly written as it is beautifully rendered.

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.

The film's climax involves a father and son reunion that is tense, tragic and, finally, as transcendent as Mohammad himself.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

Hilarious fun.

Like Connery - but in different proportions - Craig is earthy and erotic, holding himself like a smoking gun.

In refusing to pigeonhole its characters, Nine Lives is less like those L.A. road-rage melodramas "Short Cuts" and "Crash" than those all-of-us-are-interconnected dramas "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck.

The rhythms of Whale Rider are hypnotic as the ebb tide, haunting as the song of the humpback sea mammal, bracing as the ocean spray. It's a movie that rewards the patient viewer.

For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.

First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent.

An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.

Urgent and stunning movie.

A macabre mystery for children and a cautionary tale for their folks, Coraline is a yarn - twisty, knotty, taut - about a perennially bored girl whose parents are too preoccupied with work to pay her much mind.

Although Angelopoulos' film is not for all viewers, it rewards the patient moviegoer with an incomparable emotional journey. [09 Jul 1999, p.04]

Family. Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em. Little Miss Sunshine, a stormy quasi-comedy destined to polarize audiences, is a perfect specimen of this unsentimental attitude.

In the end, Bellocchio suggests in this spiritual thriller that perhaps faith is the dream from which we do not awaken.

What's touching about Rocky Balboa, the sixth chapter in the saga of Philadelphia's lord of the ring, is the small-scale stuff. Not the spectacle of the has-been, now 60, connecting with a punch. But the sight of an actor connecting with a character.

Over-orchestrated and underdeveloped interpretation of Jeffrey Hatcher's play.

"Shrek" is a scintilla funnier, "Toy Story 2" a hair's breadth more poignant, but "MI" is every bit as imaginative and lovable as these other contemporary animation classics.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

Rees tells Alike's story in vignettes that are sometimes slapstick, sometimes heartbreaking, always tender.

A gut-punch of a drama.

Stern and Sundberg, best known for their Darfur documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback," did not shrink from the atrocities in Sudan; nor do they shrink from the fame-hungry excesses here.