Carrie Rickey

Standouts are Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, Harry's sly father-surrogate, and Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge.

Freely mixing reality therapy, fairy tale and satire, Dobkin's film does not maintain a consistent tone. Is it a seriocomedy about brothers who need to work on unfinished business? Is it a holiday fable about a Scrooge who comes to surf the yuletide? Is it a satire in which an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) puts pressure on St. Nick to outsource gift allocation and distribution?

In its first half, Honeydripper trickles. In its second, it really flows.

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.

Here is a movie with everything going for it and nothing working.

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.

Most parents will find the movie has the familiar feeling of one of those kid birthday parties where the little ones are on chocolate highs and the adults run out of scheduled activities after 20 minutes.

It's indescribable fun.

Exhilarating, edgy and wryly comic.

Combines fingernails-on-blackboard audio agony with bamboo-under-fingernails physical torture.

It's hard to say with assurance whether the flaw is in Bloom's performance or in Monahan's politically correct conception of Balian, precociously secular for a Crusader.

It is an exploitation picture disguised as a hipster comedy.

Holds the audience captive and unusually vulnerable to psycho- and viscero-terror.

She's So Lovely means to be a parable of the inextricability of mad love and madness, a longtime obsession of the elder Cassavetes. Only in Penn's performance does it begin to grasp its elusive goal. [29 Aug 1997, p.03]

Encourages viewers to think outside the big box of super stores such as Wal-Mart.

Short, sweet-and-sour, and amusing rather than funny, Despicable Me can't help but be likable.

It's an action movie that's also an intellectual-action flick.

A light-as-powder family comedy.

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

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.

Funnier than his criticism of egos on the rampage is Guest's rare talent for double-edged satire that tweaks one convention by means of another.

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.

Its portrait of an artist hungry for experience is as timely today as when it was written.

Harvey's a gifted physical mimic who demonstrates the comic waddle of the church usher with fallen arches, as well as the poor parishioner etiquette of grabbing too many communion wafers.

The film is intermittently funny and strangely intermittent.

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.