Chris Kaltenbach

It's a top-notch action film, albeit on the bloody side, complete with decisive action, mysterious characters and a nobility and sense of purpose that allows its excesses to be forgiven.

A celebration of movie-studio ohana that should warm the hearts of moviegoers everywhere.

Lovely, heartfelt and unforced.

Black and white has never looked more stark.

Baadasssss is about feeling pain and frustration, about having a sense of purpose that overwhelms everything else, about great cost and great risk, the pain of isolation and the intoxicating effect of fighting against the odds.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated performs a great service, though not especially well.

Unsparing and uplifting - a wickedly difficult combination to pull off, but one that gives the film an emotional weight that's impossible to dismiss.

The best sections of Flushed Away, those featuring a nefarious French operative known as Le Frog (a hilarious Jean Reno), are also the most peculiarly British; no one lampoons the French with a better mixture of hard-earned loathing and grudging respect than the Brits.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

Avoids pretension by never trying to be more than it is -- an acknowledgment that things frequently are not as bad as they seem. That's a concept that deserves a little spreading.

Serenity may be short on exposition, but it's smart and fun.

It's a startling physical transformation, as Noland goes from flabby desk jockey to lean, mean fishing machine. But even more remarkable is the mental transformation Hanks effects.

As they've proven before and doubtless will prove again, Soderbergh and his cast are capable of better, weightier, more substantial stuff. But for now, slumming has rarely seemed more appealing.

Unwisely bills itself as a comedy.

There's a persistent innocence to this movie that will work wonders on all but the most churlish.

It was a time in history eminently worth celebrating on film.

This is not a great film by any means, too filled with stock characters in stock situations for such praise. But if offers screen time for some fine young actresses, and addresses its story to an audience of teen girls who deserve something to identify with.

There's a dollop of charm and a deluge of formula in Sleepover.

Vanya's journey to find his mom is not easy or picturesque or heartwarming. But it's also never without hope.

A film that immerses its audience in the Indian culture while telling a universally appealing story of grace under pressure.

It's a zombie flick that moves -- no stumbling, staggering living dead here -- in an atmosphere that feels like a Gothic docudrama, and it's freaky beyond all reason.

Only David Lynch could make the incomprehensible so compelling.

Madagascar doesn't do much, except make you laugh. All hail such a minimalist approach.

By turns grisly and hallucinatory, The Proposition is one of those grand, mythic Westerns, full of wide-open spaces and dank little hellholes, detestable bad guys and virginal women, laconic lawmen and wary natives.

Greengrass has a fine sense of pacing, keeping events moving. It's rarely hard to guess what's going to happen next, but events unfold with such gusto that there's barely time to notice that.

The perfect film for anyone who finds the Keystone Cops a little too understated and I mean that as a compliment.

De Niro and Stiller combine to bring on laughs you don't have to feel guilty about.

I'm Not Scared presents an interesting picture of youthful innocence challenged, but not a truthful one

One of the year's most unsettling -- and perhaps most illuminating -- films.

It's a shame his (Foxx) performance isn't surrounded by a better film.

Probably the most sweet-spirited sex comedy ever made. It's pretty funny, too.

Quinceanera may be the year's most nonjudgmental film, and therein lies both its greatest strength and most naggingly troublesome weakness.

Those not familiar with Proust will doubtless feel lost. Unlike the printed word, film does not offer the chance to pause and reflect, or go back and re-read a passage.

Clearly a spiritual descendant of the old Looney Toons cartoons; it's not hard to imagine Daffy, Bugs, Porky and their pals in the starring roles here. And that's a cinematic pedigree worth cherishing.

There's no denying the raw emotional power of this heart-rending story.

Whereas the TV series rarely flinched when it came to showing the animal world as it is, Earth always pulls back at the last second. It shows a cheetah pulling down a gazelle, but not the feast that follows.

If the movie were as funny as it is well-meaning, this would be one for the ages.

Partially financed by the liberal Move On.org, speaks most eloquently when it lets Fox News do the talking.

Thank goodness for Davy Crockett; without him, the Alamo could have proven the blandest heroic siege in movie history.

Hellboy is, to borrow a phrase, one helluva good time.

This is a marvelous film, a look at the strange, exasperatingly labyrinthine process of adolescence and the diverse ways people find to deal with it.

Bening's performance makes up for a lot of deficiencies.

Sure, this movie is proudly profane, but it's also funny.

A movie like this could easy slide into Shirley Temple territory, showcasing a child actor so full of sweetness and light and good, old-fashioned spunk that audiences wince. But Palmer, whose enthusiasm and energy never seem forced, avoids all those traps; her Akeelah is never less than believable.

The heartbreak comes not from watching her fail, but from realizing how easy it would be for her to succeed. If only she knew better how to try.

Swimming is perceptive and, ultimately, embraceable. Like the adolescent it so lovingly depicts, this is a movie you want only the best for.

While the film is obviously meant as a call to arms, the very single-mindedness of the approach could work against it.

The movie's not nearly as cool as the setup.

In some ways, Thank You for Smoking does not bemoan smoking as much as it bemoans people's willingness to be duped by smooth-tongued orators.

The year's most unsettling movie experience - and in this case, that's a very good thing.

The American writer and poet Charles Bukowski is certainly an acquired taste, and Factotum may be just the film for determining whether one wants to acquire it.

It's a deft sleight-of-story Aniston, White and Arteta pull off, giving us a character who seems more than she is, but is really less than she appears.

Craven's films aren't showy, but that should never be held against them. In their streamlined construction and rock-solid simplicity lay their brilliance.

Playing a perpetual victim like Victor (Walken) might be easy, but making audiences want to watch him for 97 minutes isn't.

Nicholson is terrific here, in a role that demands he act, rather than just be Jack.

Passionately acted and grittily convincing.

It's the rare film that trusts both its audience's intelligence and its emotions.

A thoughtful, engaging film.

An unrelentingly dark vision that's as hard to watch as it is impossible to walk away from.

If only all this wonderful talent wasn't in service to a story that pushes credulity beyond the breaking point, perilously close to the realm of farce. Too many coincidences, too much convenient timing, too little honest plot development.

In less accomplished hands, Black Book could have been a hopeless mishmash. But Verhoeven proves a sure-handed storyteller, which might come as a surprise, as well as a terrific visual stylist, which shouldn't.

The most exhilaratingly horrifying movie to come out in years.

The cast of Rain is first-rate, especially Wierzbicki and Peirse, whose tense relationship is as loving as it is competitive.

White throws in a dog-in-peril shot to ensure the audience's sympathies. The ploy works, perhaps too well, turning Year of the Dog less into the askew character study it wants to be than a showcase of lovable-dog shots.

A welcome anomaly - a shallow hero you root for.

Akin to being force-fed sugary confections from a bottomless bowl. At first the idea seems just grand, but after a while, all you want to do is scream, "Enough!"

Jew or Gentile, a good story well told is a thing to be cherished.

Some might find the whole thing exhilarating, but exhausting is more the word that comes to this man's mind.

It's a tough slog, but worth seeing once. [08 Nov 2008, p.4C]

This may be the quietest addict ever to hit movie screens, as well the most disturbing.

A wonderfully understated work offering insights to a world where no emotion is simple.

Nobody does this stuff better than Disney, and there's plenty here to like.

Offers plenty of honest, good-natured laughs in the process. That's something young and old can appreciate equally.

The images here are graphic and disturbing. But Miike somehow manages to stop just short of disgusting.

This is a movie that's really about how much fun Glenn Milstead had being Divine, and how he — perhaps unexpectedly — found so many fans willing to go along for the ride. That's an American success story worth celebrating.

Much of the film's virtue lies in its straight-ahead narrative and uncomplicated morality. That and the undeniable charisma and virtuosity of its star.

Comes across as more willfully clever than profound, leaving us to applaud the message while pondering why the messenger had to strain so hard to get it across.

The film's action doesn't disappoint; if anything, it ups the adrenaline ante considerably.

The movie annoyingly waits until the end to reveal the names of those experts who have been doing all the talking; it would have been nice to know these folks' qualifications first.

The sad truth is that the film squanders almost all of its inspiration in the first 20 minutes or so.

A movie of unforced nobility and quiet pleasures, Butterfly works on all sorts of levels.

The film has a lot of right in it, including an ending that's suitably uncertain, but fraught with possibilities.

Instead of a sweeping epic, this adaptation of a novel by Elizabeth Bowen is much quieter, a work perhaps too understated and stereotypical for its own good.

While it displays its share of quirky charm, off-kilter characters and outlandish situations, this is really the first film where you can feel the Coens straining to keep up with themselves.

Wedding Crashers is unashamedly profane and, for its first two acts, very funny, a classic guilty pleasure that revels in its basest elements.

"His eye is incredibly sharp and amazing, in regard to visceral cinema," says Uma Thurman, who has worked with Tarantino on both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. "He's a great storyteller. He's very seductive as a filmmaker."

There's plenty to like about Adrenaline Drive, including the appealing, sympathetic performances of its two young stars and the tongue-in-cheek humor that pervades the film.

Monsieur Ibrahim is about people interacting as people, not symbols (one reason, Sharif has said, he took the role was to help his grandchildren's generation understand that idea).

An opportunity to enjoy the pure adrenaline rush that has always been the hallmark of martial-arts cinema.

Doesn't display a single deep thought, or even a middlingly profound one.

There's an awful lot of kinetic energy to Chopper, and the violence is portrayed as graphically as imaginable.

Surprisingly funny, a deep-down-good-hearted take on that oldest of comedy conventions, the ill-prepared rube caught up in a situation that somehow never gets the best of him.

Graeme Obree was a champion bicycler who, by all accounts, rarely took the easy way out. Too bad this movie version of his life doesn't follow suit.

Benefits from an amiable chemistry between Harrelson and Banderas, and Davidovich always makes a good tough-as-nails dame with more smarts than any man will give her credit for.

Characters are manipulated and lives made whole in ways both satisfying and unexpected.

Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.

The people are just a little too calculatedly quirky in Off the Map, an otherwise engaging comedy.

There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.