David Stratton

Technically, this is Jackson's best to date, with state of the art creature and gore effects by Richard Taylor and prosthetics design by Bob McCarron. There's any amount of dismemberment, disembowelling, beheading, and the like, all of it handled with bloody conviction.

Evil is not, as the title would suggest, a horror film, at least not a conventional one. Based on the autobiographical novel by Jan Guillou and set in the mid-1950s, the film relates the experiences of a troubled young man who's enrolled into a hidebound private school.

Despite fine performances and the care lavished on the production, Amen. is never as emotionally powerful as it should be.

Visually the film impresses, with Eduardo Serra's widescreen camerawork evocatively capturing the streets and interiors of London and a rain-swept Venice. Pacing is crisp, with little time wasted on inessentials. Dialogue is often caustically witty, and the relations clearly delineated.

The pic is made up of small events and incidents, well observed and naturalistically performed.

Not exactly a police corruption thriller, the film is more a study of innocence betrayed, though its insights into Argentine law enforcement are pretty scary.

Although writer-director Khientse Norbu breaks no ground in unfolding two parallel stories about young men seeking fresh horizons, he creates believable characters -- and has the great benefit of living in a country that provides seldom-seen locations at the top of the world.

Haroun's film is both touching and, ultimately, almost perversely optimistic.

With a glowing performance by Sarah Polley as the doomed woman, this Spanish-Canadian co-prod, filmed in English, is surprisingly adept at avoiding the worst cliches and most manipulative elements inherent in such a story.

Music has always played a vital role in the films of Tony Gatlif, and in Vengo it finally threatens to take over, submerging the frail, familiar vendetta plotline.

The briefest of the three pics, it's also the least successful, suggesting that this kind of character-driven comedy isn't the genre with which Belvaux is most comfortable. Still, there are delightful sequences and ideas and the film carries a great deal more substance and resonance when placed alongside the other two in the series.

Full of charm, entertaining enough as it unfolds, good looking, but not especially memorable in retrospect.

Though it moves more slowly than the tortoise prominently featured in one sequence, Clouds of May is the kind of film that creeps up on the patient viewer.

Overall the charm of the film works its spell, and director Kennedy shows confidence in juggling understated comedy and gently sentimental drama.

The film belongs to Eden, who creates a winning personality out of a combination of vulnerability, resourcefulness, toughness and fragility. It's an outstanding juvenile performance.

Distinguished by some unusually fine performances, but the lack of a satisfactory third act diminishes overall result.

The punishment seems out of all proportion to the "crimes" committed, so that the film becomes no simplistic pro-feminist tract but is, on the contrary, more complex and disturbing.

A sober, unsensationalized enactment of a Holocaust incident. Von Trotta keeps sentimentality at bay and, as a result, the film isn't as emotionally wrenching as it might have been.

Though long-winded and discursive, the professionally assembled material is of immense interest and importance in reminding the viewer of the threat to world peace posed by the continuing posturing on the subcontinent.

Distinguished by generally good performances and smart camerawork.

Filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky needs nothing more than the cold facts surrounding this awesome weapon to get across a message about the importance of peace.

Precociously inventive horror pic that combines brain-eating zombies with outer space aliens.

A film with a terrifically engaging concept that overstays its welcome by quite a stretch.

Thanks to amiable lead performances from Miranda Otto and Rhys Ifans, this not very original Aussie comedy about a man making a fresh start in life is a pleasant enough time-waster.

Atkinson, who is in almost every scene, boasts a full-on comic personality that on the cinema screen is a bit daunting at times, and it's an open question as to whether the Carrey crowd will go for this seriously eccentric Brit.

It's too arty to cut it as a violent action pic and too gore-spattered to appeal to the arthouse crowd.

An intriguing but only partly successful co-mingling of film noir and sci-fi.

A mellow, stately, contemplative study of a stoic, brave man, but it doesn't deliver in the action department.