Deborah Young

Pic's rediscovery in the capitalist U.S., and its reappraisal as a masterpiece of visual pyrotechnics, gives Brazilian documaker Vicente Ferraz's tale an upbeat final twist -- after some mid-film doldrums.

The film has a winning combo of excitement and topicality.

Takes the viewer on a mysterious and sporadically fascinating trip into the darkness of the human heart and Thai legend.

Though the storyline is dirt simple and not particularly meaningful or involving, the action in this character-driven film is scintillatingly sexy.

The tense triangle among the girl and her two moms unfolds against an interesting backdrop: a stark setting in rural Sardinia, where tall cliffs and dirt roads criss-cross a shrub-infested desert. Its general wildness is underlined in the first scene at a local bronco-busting rodeo.

Though it’s a rare Italian film told from a female p.o.v., “Melissa P.” is pseudo-feminist at best.

Not a cheerful watch: It's a shocking portrayal of rampant racism.

Pic stays on the surface, without attempting any exploration of painful depths. Result is at best amusing; at worst, uninvolving, often confusing, and sometimes a little boring.

The flurry of characters takes a long time to get straight, and identification is made even harder by the nervous handheld camerawork and rapid-fire editing that makes no concessions. But no matter: the film comes into its element in the imaginative action scenes.

It's the kind of cartoonish film where, no matter what the odds and how many bullets are flying at our heroes, they never get seriously injured.

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.