Carrie Rickey

Should you take the kids? Boys 8 to 11 are the target audience for this gross-out film. A better question might be, should they take the parents?

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

Apart from Williams' presence, director Christopher Erskin's feature debut isn't worth the price of submission. It's not a road trip; it's a road trap.

Despite Sigismondi's fresh eye, feminist perspective, and rapport with actors, The Runaways feels like a long-form music video, recycling every trope from the doomed-rocker handbook.

Where Finding Nemo suggested that under-the-waves adventure was limitless, Shark Tale suggests that this sea is over-fished. The krill is gone.

Bills itself as a comedy but unfolds as the drollest of dramas, an extended-family album for the age of abortion, adoption and donor sperm. It's a cheeky story about turning the other cheek.

Succeeds as a do-it-yourself handbook of guerrilla filmmaking

So profoundly does The Third Miracle live up to its title that Agnieszka Holland's exceptional meditation upon a priest's crisis of faith might win the endorsement of archdiocese and agnostic alike.

Scenery rushes by, noise blares, characters pop up wearing new costumes that they couldn't possibly have had time to change into as they eluded their adversaries.

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

An involving fantasy for beamish boys and girls - and their parents.

This film that imagines the end of the world not as a whimper but as an implosion is a preposterously diverting, instantly forgettable, big-screen video game.

He (Lee) combines the daredeviltry of Buster Keaton with the devil-may-care of Errol Flynn.

An unnerving and astonishing thriller.

English wrangles her talent like a virtuoso. Best is Murphy Brown herself, Candice Bergen.

This intelligent, postmodern biography from director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks uses Porter's songs, by turns haunting and hilarious, to decode and reconstruct a life hinted at in the familiar words and music.

An unsteady empowerment film for 'tweenage girls and their moms, Ice Princess boasts more spark than sparkle.

Two of its youthful actors, although adorable, are not skilled enogh to carry their parts.

An enjoyably sudsy romance starring a moody Keanu Reeves, a broody Sandra Bullock, and the titular structure - a jewel box of glass and steel perched on stilts over Lake Michigan.

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

The film underscores the power of reading, and applying what we read to problem-solving. The story suggests that we don't really see the natural world around us, and if we did our lives, like Jared's and his siblings', would be immeasurably richer.

Also quite fine is the film's musical score from David Byrne, as unsettling and edgy as the story.