Deborah Young

This enjoyable French pic welds together drama, melodrama and comedy.

Pleasantly watchable.

Using a simple storytelling style that grows stronger with each passing scene, Dry Season draws the viewer into its small two-character drama set in post-war Chad, while it offers a deep reflection on injustice and frustrated revenge.

Guillermo Nieto's hand-held camerawork mimics Julia's nervous energy and keeps the audience locked up along with her, working in symbiosis with Federico Esquerro's forcefully realistic sound design.

A tightly plotted and paced thriller whose not-so-hidden agenda is to expose the bad conscience of the world's haves toward its have-nots, "Hidden" is one of Austrian helmer Michael Haneke's most watchable and pungent works.

Constructed like an eerie, metaphorical thriller, this tense, riveting character study offers viewers nearly two hours of emotions with a stunning pay-off no one will be expecting.

Like an Iraq-war mirror image of "Life Is Beautiful," actor-director Roberto Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow re-runs the successful structure and comic persona of the 1998 Oscar-winning film in a trippy fantasia about a poet who follows his love to hell and, in this happier ending, back.

A sober, thought-provoking response to a tragedy of worldwide import and a much better film than one might expect from the pre-release publicity.

Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.

Has the comically grotesque appeal of a Fellini film and could reach out to auds in specialized release. It lacks the originality and invention to go much beyond that.

If telenovelas were convincingly real, they would no doubt look like the tumultuous world of domestic strife and libido deftly limned in Alice's House. Documaker Chico Teixeira gives a light, natural feel to his small but fetching first feature.

A film whose lightness of touch rides a wave of family conflict to perfectly balance smiles and tears.

Emilio Estevez's Bobby is a passionate outcry for peace and justice in America that becomes deeply involving by the final climactic scene.

Mary Shelley is a luscious-looking spectacle, drenched in the colors and visceral sensations of nature, the sensuality of young lovers, the passionate disappointment of loss and betrayal. But above all it is a film about ideas that breaks out of the well-worn mold of period drama (partly, anyway) by reaching deeply into the mind of the extraordinary woman who wrote the Gothic evergreen Frankenstein.

A mystifying film that holds the audience in suspense over where it's going and what it might mean for almost its entire running time.

A fine cast brings the believable, sometimes humorous characters to life and gradually draws the viewer into a well-crafted, well-paced story.

An acid portrait of contemporary Austria (and by extension, the whole middle class) as unspeakably dull, violent and stupid. The film itself, miraculously, is just the opposite: vibrantly inventive, aesthetically rigorous, sardonic and occasionally quite brilliant.

Gripping drama.

In his second outing as a director, top thesp Sergio Castellitto (also playing the surgeon) takes the viewer on an emotion-filled ride and brings a violently masculine perspective to the story. However, it is Penelope Cruz who gives the film's knockout performance.

A visually exalting, emotionally horrifying view of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime.

Along with the continual build-up of tension and threatened (more than shown) violence, pic is notable for its brutal depiction of the sex industry.

An unsettling piece of filmmaking whose grimly vivid images are guaranteed to give impressionable viewers nightmares.

Charming, smart and funny.

Fresh and offbeat tale of vendetta.

Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta topped the Italian box office charts for weeks, thanks to its skill in capturing the country's current political climate in an entertaining action film format. (Review of Original Release)

A somber, beautifully acted reflection on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man.

Majidi is surprisingly comfortable with the Indian setting and with his characters, for whom he exudes empathy. But the screenplay, written by the director with Mehran Kashani, has its ups and downs and longeurs.

A tense documentary with multiple layers of meaning.

Scorsese's heartfelt love letter to Italian movies up to 1961.

Argento fans lusting for a classy slasher movie of the "Suspiria"/"Opera" variety are headed for a disappointing rendezvous with an old-fashioned police thriller, upgraded by serious actors in the main roles.

Main body of the movie is weighed down by flat, expository dialogue and a lot of pedestrian filming. However, Zeffirelli's shooting of the "Carmen" sequences, which make up a sizable chunk of the film and are far and away the pic's most exhilarating sections, are graceful and fluid.

Likeable if unexciting little tale.

A remarkable first feature from director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The Town is a strikingly original, vibrantly sensitive look at an extended family living in a remote Turkish village.

Director Hrvoje Hribar gives a lively professional look to this good-humored film.

A savvy, fast-paced political thriller dealing with the meteoric rise and fall of a new Russian businessman.

In his most accessible and spontaneous picture, ranking Iranian helmer Jafar Panahi reveals unsuspected comic gifts barely visible in his dramatic festival winners "The White Balloon," "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold."

Offering intimate self-exposure, Moretti solders his bond with fortysomethings who have lived through years of political disenchantment.

Madeline’s Madeline is both heady and head-scratching. Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs.

Irritatingly devoid of irony, the film has an unintentional but unmistakable homoerotic subtext.

This film of delicate emotional nuance recounts an enchanting but sad love story.

Though shot from the Palestinian P.O.V., the Dutch/Palestinian Film Foundation co-production is remarkably balanced, offering a convinced message of hope for the future.

Though weak in the drama department, the story of a brother and sister who love each other but have different political ideas and personal agendas effectively captures the tension of the time.

Takes the viewer deep into the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the powerful immediacy of raw images, some of them very hard to look at.

Audiences hooked on Persian mainstream will devour this irreverent romantic comedy, spiced with saucy dialogue that spoofs traditional gender roles through gritted teeth.

At 74, Chabrol is in full possession of his talent for elegant, understated filmmaking, though he's far from his disturbing films of the '50s and '60s.

Intermittently amusing.

A rare example of indie filmmaking produced outside the Thai studio system, Blissfully Yours takes the good-humored nonsense of director Apichatpong Weeasethakul's first feature, "Mysterious Object at Noon," several steps further into the realm of non-communicative minimalism.

Has a perverse fascination, despite some technical clumsiness and stiff thesping.

A limp-to-wilted film version of Duras' 16-year-long love affair with a young man who became her secretary and literary executor.

Kim’s Areum is edgy, multi-layered and far from docile.

Rather miraculously, picture succeeds in painlessly educating its viewers about global politics and economics while it describes contemporary Africa with freshness and clarity.

Playing dual roles as a rich Irish businessman riding the economic boom and his down-and-out twin, Gleeson animates Boorman's amusing Prince and the Pauper screenplay, which sports a dark social underbelly that puts Ireland's rich-poor divide centerstage

An appealing film thanks to its irresistible teenage heroine, I, Taraneh, Am Fifteen delivers the message that there's a new generation of strong-minded femmes out there who aren't afraid of bucking social norms.

Sensitive, delicate and involving.

Only partially succeeds in interweaving questions of family loyalty with historical memory and the fate of Italian Jews in WW2.

A film destined to divide Manoel de Oliveira's fans but also to win him new ones, A Talking Picture is his simplest, most linear story in memory.

More than in her previous tales of dysfunctional families like "Marriages," she (Comencini) lightens the weight of angst with well-designed subplots, secondary characters and moments of tender humor.

Though it sounds like an offbeat idea even for horror fans, the tech work is so well done that it could disarm unwary buffs attracted by the campy title.

Silly, childish fun and as relaxing to watch as good American TV fiction -- and with a very similar world view.

Though the bold treatment of homoerotic love in Mexican helmer Julian Hernandez's feature bow Broken Sky is sure to grab attention, it doesn't take long before the picture's torturously slow pace turns an earnest effort into a tedious aesthetic exercise.

Splashy, noisy and downright fun.

Slipping from fantasy to soap opera without any authorial control, pic's best hope is to be recognized as some kind of cult movie of badness.

Both intensely exciting for its cinematic inventions and terribly uninvolving on emotional and dramatic levels.

The film has humanity to burn, but its loose structure makes it hard to connect with the multiple characters.