Carrie Rickey

If we approach the unfamiliar with fear and apprehension, we will be met with fear and apprehension. But if we approach with sympathy and curiosity, we will be rewarded with same. And our souls, not to mention our bicycles, will soar to the heavens. [2002 re-release]

Not only is it the best documentary in a vintage season for nonfiction films (see "American Splendor," "Capturing the Friedmans," and "Spellbound"), it's also one of the best films of the year. It's as lyrical about the particulars of Kahn as it is about the universals of fathers and sons.

It is with gravity and levity and incomparable grace that Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- by light years the best movie of 2000.

Spoofy and sweet... endearingly old-fashioned.

Exhilarating, edgy and wryly comic.

The most moving aspect of this indelible documentary is that it chronicles its subjects' growth from instinctively going for the goal to deciding which goals are worth shooting for.

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.

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.

Most of all, it is the improbably entertaining story of how new media are altering the very nature of courtship and friendship.

Werner Herzog's magnificent tragedy, Grizzly Man, a Shakespearean character study that packs the sheer terror of "The Blair Witch Project."

Ryan may not be admirable, but Clooney makes him relatable. It's his deepest and nakedest performance.

Brilliant, blistering account of the many ways fame deforms a star, his family and his fans.

This psycho-thriller, a Golden Globe winner and presumptive favorite for the foreign-film Oscar, itself is revelatory.

A movie with the sweet soul of "Toy Story" and the boisterous spirit of "Spy Kids."

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.

Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society.

As lovingly written as it is beautifully rendered.

Washington blows you away. To say he gives the performance of his career is an understatement.

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

A small, quiet film that walks tall and resonates long after.

The marvel of Brando's and Leigh's performances is that he is steely solidity and she airy evanescence, something frequently misinterpreted as his modern, realistic acting style and her quaint kind of theatrics. [Director's Cut; 18 March 1994, p.10]

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

As irresistible as Chan is irrepressible. In a movie season in which, it seems, all the blockbusters boast wheels, it's a treat to see a movie that has legs.

Throughout the film its makers pose the question of whether saving a work of art is as important as saving a human life. The question is not answered, and perhaps ultimately unanswerable. Yet Europa movingly shows how for many, art and artifacts are living things.

Intimate as a whisper, immediate as a blush, and universal as first love, the PG-rated film positively palpitates with the sensual and spiritual.

Courageous, shattering and exceptional documentary.

That rare thing, a Hollywood teen flick transfigured into something like pubescent scripture: In the beginning, there was lust; in the end, there is knowledge.

A captivating cine-memoir, impressionistic and surrealistic, surveying Varda's formidable career as a still photographer, filmmaker, documentarian, and life force.

Under Hooper's deft direction, it packs the suspense of a thriller.

Persepolis, the superb film based on Satrapi's graphic memoirs of the same name, is a riveting odyssey in pictures and words. It's unlike any journal you've read or any animated movie you've seen.

This year's must-see film.

It is the most influential movie you've never seen, deeply affecting many artists and experimental directors who saw it on the museum circuit in 1977 and 1978.

Piercingly funny and unexpectedly moving account of that odd couple, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and HRH Elizabeth II (majestic Helen Mirren) and their back-channels affair.

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

For two hours I felt like a kitten chasing an elusive ball of catnip that remained just beyond my paw.

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

Sunnier and sillier than most of Allen's recent work, makes its belly laughs heartwarming. It's a most winning movie about losers.

A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.

An elusive and profoundly moving essay about the stages of amour and of age. Like the best of Godard's movies -- and I haven't been sucked into one since "Passion" (1982) -- it is visually ravishing, penetrating, impenetrable.

There is nothing sentimental or picturesque about the performances or imagery. The word that best describes both is elemental.

It is as breathtaking a moral thriller today as it was in 1949. [16 July 1999, p.10]

Because the filmmakers have framed this fame game so much like a conventional love story, the audience, like Goodwin, is seduced by Van Doren's pretty face. This is precisely what the film warns us to guard against, so the experience of watching Quiz Show is supercharged. As the wedge is driven in between what we think (lying is bad) and what we feel (that nice Van Doren boy can't have lied) - Redford and Attanasio make us aware of how readily we accept style divorced from substance. [16 Sept 1994, p.03]

This is the breakthrough work of one of world cinema's most visionary artists.

Isn't like the classic Japanese drama "Rashomon," which suggested that one person's perspective of an event gave him a different truth from the person standing elsewhere.

While its careful pace and seemingly opaque story may not satisfy every moviegoer's appetite, the film's final scene is soaringly, transparently moving.

Apart from its intriguing religious implications, the film is also a compelling look at the family, community and congregational pillars that support Lior.

A rocking, rollicking crowd-pleaser.

A human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace.

While Gyllenhaal has playful puppy eyes and energy, his performance as Jack is a blur of mustaches, sideburns and spurs that never achieves the weight of Ledger's.

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.

Shrek 2 is a dream, a sequel as exhilarating and riotously funny as 2001's top-grossing original.

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.

A boisterous and improbably entertaining action comedy.

A heartbreaking elegy to mature love that honors the lovers and the long, neurodegenerative tango that is their last.

Forget its dubious ancestry as a popular TV show of the '50s. The combined charms of Maverick's genial cast, its sly script and its punchy direction make it the legitimate heir to escapist crowd-pleasers such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. [20 May 1994, p.03]

Acting-wise, the showstopper is Jason Bateman, with a diabolically entertaining turn as a smarmy PR man remarkably free with confidential information.

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

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

An unnerving and astonishing thriller.

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

Heartbreaking? Sometimes. Involving? You bet.

Boasts rich texture, sly vision and rueful humor.

The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

Where Denys Arcand's delightful 1986 comedy "The Decline of the American Empire" celebrated the good life, his profoundly funny sequel The Barbarian Invasions heartily toasts the good death.

The result is a film that deeply engages us on multiple levels. Not only do we wonder what Maisie knows and how she knows it, we want to get this seedling to a place where she won't have to be transplanted every day.

Featuring seasoned warriors reflecting on whether we can best fight violence with violence is enormously compelling.

Not only is Bossa Nova a lovely romance, but one can say, as one can about few films, that it is restorative as a vacation.

It's hard to know whether this is a function of the sympathetic screenplay or of Krieger's sympathetic direction - or both - but Celeste and Jesse are endearing even when they do unsympathetic things.

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

DuVernay, a low-key director sparing in her use of emotion and music, has made an existential drama that is European in its feel.

It's a testament to Cage's canny performance and Jonze's seamless use of special effects that you believe Charlie and Donald are two entirely different people.

Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

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

A far more trenchant - and funnier - satire of the fame-afflicted than Woody Allen's "Celebrity."

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.

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

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.

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

Corinne's journey begins with an act of blind faith. The movie ends, but you have a palpable sense that the journey does not.

Next to the cheerleader grunts and aerobic struts that pass for dance numbers on most music videos, the sequences in the compilation film That's Entertainment! III are like treasures from a highly evolved ancient civilization. [06 Jul 1994, p.E01]

A dynamic portrait of an artist by an artist, one as wry, audacious and erotically charged as its flamboyant subject.

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.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

French movies are not so neatly resolved. In fact, the point of many French movies, such as this provocative one from director Laurent Cantet, is that some problems don't have satisfying solutions - or resolutions.

Until a final conflict that more resembles a monster-truck jam than a superhero showdown, Iron Man is solid gold.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

It is not to everyone's taste. But if you like the lush film operas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, or Luchino Visconti, this one's for you.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

Cholodenko takes us inside a bohemian hive where everyone buzzes around the Queen Bee. McDormand is superb. Likewise Bale and Nivola.

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

Bravo to Brooks for conceiving Mother and for giving Reynolds a role that required her to do something more than merely effervesce. Here Reynolds bubbles, she boils, she exhibits a complex geology of human emotions. Her Mrs. Henderson is the mother of all mothers, and Mother is the mother lode of all comedies. [10 Jan 1997, p.05]

This is more than a movie: It's Almodovar's design for living.

A gut-punch of a drama.

Pure, undiluted joy.

Urgent and stunning movie.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Its deceptive simplicity makes A Better Life so emotionally profound.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

It's a coming-of-age story - blunt, mythic, gut-wrenching.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

There's a word for women like Giselle: Supercalifragilistic. Ditto her film, Enchanted.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

The $200 million result is an irresistibly entertaining, if grandiose, saga of doomed love and directorial hubris.

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

It may be the first meditative action movie.

All in all, this phenomenal film illustrates Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that "The people get the government they deserve." In both meanings of the word, Il Divo is sensational.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

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.

The film gracefully telescopes a lot of information in its brief running time.

Floats before your eyes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The surprise is that, fitted together, these pieces make a completed picture.

Director Manoel de Oliveira's minimalist, incomparably moving I'm Going Home ranks with John Huston's "The Dead" as one of the great works by a director at his twilight.

The mosaic of cases and caseworkers is like a season of "The Wire" distilled into two hours.

Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.

Whatever number it is chronologically on the P&P parade, Wright's film ranks first in verve. Quite simply, it is the essential P&P.

Moviegoers of a certain age may feel as though they are watching a lost Bertolucci film.

Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling "The Da Vinci Code" and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.

Through Herzog's eyes it is a desolate, strangely beautiful frozen Edenish hell where the planet, having shaken out its pockets, lets the loners, fanatics and cosmologist-crackpots fall to bottom.

After Clooney, who gives a sterling performance as a tarnished figure, the standout performance belongs to Wilkinson, a geyser of manic eloquence. Also quite fine are Swinton and Sydney Pollack.

ILYM is the comedy that Rudd lovers have been waiting for since he first charmed us silly in "Clueless." It explores both the dweeby and heartthrobby sides of this guy whose crooked smile fails to mask his social anxiety.

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]

It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.

What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

Nim is as unforgettable as the treatment of him is unspeakable.

A triumph. Unapologetically old-school, in both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, Debaters overlays the story of social underdogs onto the familiar template of the stand-and-deliver saga, the staple of sports inspirationals like "Rocky," "Invincible" and "The Karate Kid."

The film is more than laborious eye-blinking - it's also dazzling visually, its potent imagery conjured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But finally, Diving Bell is about something imperceptible: consciousness.

The result is more exciting than the last four ST pictures put together, more fun than a barrel of Tribbles, and the most satisfying action-adventure since last year's "Iron Man."

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."

Unlike most other teen cautionary tales, Thirteen does not accuse merely one villain for the corruption of a minor.

Midnight in Paris is not a perfect movie - as in "Julie & Julia" one senses its creator's impatience to leave the bleached-out present for the colorful past. But it is warm and effortless, qualities that make it embraceable.

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.

A chick movie for guys that zings and pings like a game of supersonic pinball.

Bier primes us for a catfight, but she gives something tastier: a feast of reconciliation and love.

Finally, a real movie!

He had the fearlessness of a 104-story man and something more than a daredevil's brass.

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.

As Greene, Don Cheadle - explosive because you've never before seen this model of actorly restraint - is a one-man fireworks show in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' rollicking, resonant portrait of the real-life ex-con who improbably became a civic icon.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.

A disarming, funny and animated Al Gore, once a robot among presidential candidates, proves himself a rock star among environmental activists.

Though one gets a sense there is part of the story Marks isn't telling, we do pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Cats is many things: a film diary of an odd-couple relationship, a profile of a forgotten man who slowly reconstructs his past, and the transcendently moving account of a man on the margins who gets reintegrated into society.

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

"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.

Stop-Loss carries the emotional force and propulsive drama of the quintessential soldier's story.

A triumph for its director and its star.

While all three principals are perfection, the movie belongs to Cage's Charlie, whose sad beagle eyes dance merrily whenever he sees Yvonne. His is a measured, gravity-bound performance, one that anchors many of the helium-light shenanigans surrounding him and adds melancholy shadings to the brightness of the dialogue. [29 July 1994, p.03]

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.

While I liked the film's aesthetics and its futurist imaginings, its most important attraction is how it engages. Some movies massage you; others tickle you. This one jacks you into cyberspace, involving you psychically and physically.

It all comes down to affirmation vs. denial. Leigh chooses affirmation. And the result is life-affirming.

A cracking police procedural from Belgian director Erik van Looy, has a jaw-dropping premise so smartly executed that if this movie weren't in Flemish I'd swear that Michael Mann had directed it.

Chunhyang is a movie — and a heroine — for all times.

The movie trades in familiar virtual realities. Yet as realized by the gifted director Mamoru Oshii, who imagines cityscapes melting into circuit boards, Ghost in the Shell is where virtual reality meets superrealism. [9 May 1996, p.C4]

It is not a polemic but a plea.

The shaggy, whimsical characters have a primal familiarity, as though they were developed by a tag team of Maurice Sendak and Walt Disney.

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.

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.

Brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

One might shudder at the occasional Yakin visual metaphor, as when Fresh and a friend enter their young hound in a dogfight. Yes, it's a dog-eat-dog world. But even more powerfully at work here is that Yakin, aided by the coolly honest performance of young Sean Nelson, makes us see that it's really a king-eats-kingpin world. [31 Aug 1994, p.F02]

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

A deceptively simple movie with a deeply felt message.

A riveting remake of a pretty terrific 1957 western about manhood, fatherhood and honor.

Davis does the most thorough job of capturing Basquiat, man, artist, and life force.

An exotic and erotic love story about an interracial couple whose cultures have more in common than they ever imagined. [12 Feb 1992, p.D]

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

Nobody's Fool boasts the kind of low-key realism on which Newman made his reputation but that, in these days of high-decibel, high-concept fantasy, has become a lost art. [13 Jan 1995, p.3]

This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Bar-Lev tells Tillman's story "Rashomon"-style, incorporating multiple perspectives on Tillman's politics (left-liberal), religion (atheist), and personal relations (he married Marie, his first and only girlfriend). Still, it is a documentary with more details of how he died than how he lived.

The dialogue is tart, and likewise the bluesy score (a departure for Disney stalwart Alan Menken, working here with City of Angels lyricist David Zippel). And it's these elements that vault Hercules into the realm of hit and myth. [27 June 1997, p.3]

A feverish melodrama about an idealist who, in following his heart and his bishop's orders, leads himself into temptation and his parish into hypocrisy.

Burshtein keeps the camera tight on the faces of her actors in a way that succeeds at making visible the invisible heat between the characters. The film's chaste eroticism and the community's deep respect for Shira's emotional and spiritual growth keep the audience in thrall.

The film's recurring image is that of a butterfly fluttering around a flower, a lovely symbol of the reader drawn to a novel's nectar.

Lucid, concise and devastating account of what went wrong in Iraq, patiently counts those 500 ways.

A feverishly imaginative Freudian vampire film from Guy Maddin, is like a silent-movie serial by Louis Feuillade or an improbable collaboration between writer Oscar Wilde and photographer Man Ray.

Whatever our misfortune, The Kite Runner says, sometimes we are fortunate enough to get a second chance to make amends for a first mistake.

The result is a movie about the many forms of social and sexual abuse that does not make the abusee a victim but victor.

Even if you don't give a shiitake mushroom about food, there's much to savor in this lively comedy with dramatic aftertastes.

Exhilarating, exuberant and drolly funny.

L'Enfant begins with the birth of a child, but its real concern is the moral rebirth of a man.

Like its heroine, the film's glib - and sometimes sidesplittingly funny - patter at first diverts viewers from its poignant insights. Happily, as Juno grows in experience and maturity, so does the film.

It is social criticism written with tears. [15 Feb 1995, p.E01]

They are the only misstep in Penn's otherwise sure-footed journey to what he reveals as the heart of lightness.

The film has the dog-eared look of a homemade valentine and the improvised sound of '60s jazz, courtesy of a score by Mark Suozzo and a spirited soundtrack including Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar," which might be the film's anthem.

While it's too slight a movie for overpraise, there are such a serenity of vision and clarity of purpose to these characters that we easily are caught up in the boys' struggle to reunite mother and child.

In this, Alfred Hitchcock's centenary year, Felicia's Journey so startlingly channels the obsessions of the late director that it might be the greatest Hitchcock movie the master of suspense never made.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

Andre Techine creates living characters instead of sociopolitical symbols.

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.

Vibrates with exuberance and erudition.

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

It is the kind of film that enables adults to get in touch with their inner child - but more important, gets children in touch with their inner adult. [14 July 1995, p.03]

A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit, Spanglish is about how people, like cultures, are more alike than not.

An intimate epic of infinite grace.

This small story that tells the much bigger story of the New Economy's bubble and burst is less a documentary than it is breaking news.

Here are five gifted actors at the top of their games as five characters in search of what makes a family.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

The most challenging obstacle encountered by reformers like Canada and Michelle Rhee, the embattled chancellor of education for Washington, D.C., are the unions extending tenure protection to teachers who underperform.

Enchanted and thrilling film.

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

It is a damning indictment of the individuals and institutions who made money while customers lost their shirts.

If there's a more passionate love story out there, then I haven't had the privilege of seeing it.

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

Although rough, it's a gem.

This sparrow's flight lifts the heart.

A seven-word review: Very good performances. Much too much weather.

While this charmer about a canine James Bond does not pack the emotional punch of "WALL-E," it's frisky fun to see the white shepherd get a new leash on life.

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

This is a quiet, meticulously plotted chamber piece, not the booming, lightning-paced orchestral affair we know as the contemporary action film in the Age of Ludlum.

Swing Vote is messy and its targets are relatively safe. But its aim is true. And Costner's performance hits the bull's-eye.

For the first 100 minutes of his 117-minute film Spielberg holds the audience in a grip of fear. When Ray and Rachel take refuge in the storm cellar of a survivalist (a miscast Tim Robbins), the director's grip relaxes only a bit, but the film never recovers from this excursion into the Gothic.

Callan McAuliffe, a handsome Australian youth, looks right as the perma-press Bryce.

Stronger on character than on story, the film version of Janet Fitch's best-seller is shaped and propelled by the astonishing performance of Alison Lohman.

A scabrously funny look at the cutthroat game of statecraft.

Develops microclimates of mood without fully developing the same shadings of character.

Unlike Gondry's previous features, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine, Science lacks the sturdy armature of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay to support its eccentricities. The flood of delight in the film's first 90 minutes slowed to a trickle and, finally, a drip.

Haggis' earnest and eloquent film about the impact of the war in Iraq on U.S. soldiers, and by extension, their nation, is human-scaled. And as deep and harrowed as Jones' crevassed face.

Parental Guidance is an engaging comedy that bridges multiple generation gaps, making it that rare movie that grandparents, their kids, and their kids can enjoy.

Between the earnest boy, his playful mammal, the film from actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith is a winning family entertainment.

On a Paris rooftop about an hour into this 2-hour film, the tone shifts and the atmosphere lightens into giddy farce.

For a film about suicides, Wristcutters: A Love Story is strangely life-affirming. This film about slackers stuck in limbo between life and death is upbeat in an offbeat way.

Cluttered as it is colorful, Robots is a visual delight.

While at times the improvisational dialogue sounds like audio filler, the three leads are poignant and perceptive.

A story with a beginning and end but without a middle. Two slices of bread without the sandwich meat, I wrote in my notes.

Overall, Matchstick Men, which is based on the novel by Eric Garcia, is more memorable for Lohman's naturalistic acting and Scott's mannerist direction than it is for its O. Henry surprise.

Steamy and sexy with a smack of sadism, the movie is a throwback to old-school Hollywood action/romance.

The film is suffused with the generous, nonjudgmental spirit of Uncle Tomas, whose live-and-let-live attitude warms like the sun and who helps Magdalena and Carlos make the safe passage from adolescence to maturity.

Though African Cats is G-rated, scenes of animals chowing down on other animals are not for the faint of heart or delicate of stomach. I don't think it's suitable for those under 6, and they should be prepared for real animal behavior. But it's deeply involving and primally moving.

Paradoxically, the closer Mendes gets to his characters, the more remote Perdition becomes. One wishes that his film had as much heart as it does art.

A ridiculously entertaining romp based on the graphic novels of Bryan Lee O'Malley and directed, with mash-up mastery, by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead).

For the most part, the film's musical numbers are dynamic, propelling the story forward. The same cannot be said about Peter Barsocchini's colorless screenplay.

Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.

The kung fu sequences, although enjoyable, probably would not make the Jackie Chan Top 10. However, Chan's acting is his most affecting since the 1993 policer "Crime Story."

Apatow's film succeeds in having its virginity and losing it, too. Like "Wedding Crashers," it purges its cynicism with romanticism.

Eloquently adapted from the collection of A.M. Homes stories of the same title, Troche's film derives its voltage from the way it burrows to find that the connections within -- and among -- families are very much alive.

Actresses such as Maglietta are why movies were invented: You never get tired of her mercurial personality or of her infinitely compelling face.

Exceptionally funny, unexpectedly tender, and lewder than a teenage boy's dreams.

Stunning, beautifully observed character study.

Miracle really isn't about the game. It's about the game as metaphor for united we stand.

This unsettling, shaggy, surrealistic pillow of a movie - a mixed bag more funny-strange than ha-ha.

Once you get past that golden swag and curtain of hair, Paltrow's performance is devastating, cutting to the pith and marrow of parent-child relations. The other actors in this stagebound movie fare less well.

Told in a leisurely though concise 92 minutes, Shower is a purifying and refreshing spray of hope that family and lifestyle differences can be reconciled. Lovely.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

While most of the talking heads, including the funny and articulate Barbara Ehrenreich (herself a breast cancer survivor), are not likely to join runs and walks for the cure, Pool shows how such events create community and sisterhood.

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 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.

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.

Sobering and wildly entertaining.

This delicious adventure of crude betrayal and elegant revenge is yummy even when reheated by director Kevin Reynolds.

While the impulse for his concert may have been confession and atonement, the cumulative effect is one of a guy struggling mightily to reconcile his divided self.

As efficient and zippy as its subject.

It's half hilarious, half serious; all poignant.

First and last, Appaloosa is the slow-but-sure story of the friendship between Virgil and Everett, one a man of action surprised by emotion, the other a man of emotion surprised by action.

Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree is a lively deadpan comedy which, like his prior film "The Syrian Bride," satirizes Israel's bureaucrats while remaining sympathetic to citizens who live within and adjacent to Israel's disputed borders.