Derek Elley

Marvelously involving family saga.

This is a thoroughly Euro bedmate to the 1997 "Bean," with the Gauls rather than the Yanks as the butt of Bean's bumblings.

Wears out its welcome at 100 minutes, but could find an audience in the West as a latenight attraction at gay fests.

An ersatz "Pride and Prejudice" in all but name, Becoming Jane is a finely tooled Brit-lit costumer that, like Anne Hathaway's flawless accent as the young Austen, lacks only that final convincing 5%.

There's not much magic left in Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute. Relocating the 1791 opera to WWI and adopting a hard-edged approach that worked for "Hamlet," Branagh has wrought a "Flute" for high-end aficionados only. Lavishly mounted and well sung, but thin on charm and spontaneity, pic is likely to hit a bum note at general wickets.

Despite some magnificent widescreen lensing, faultless ethnographic detail and a timely sympathy for the plight of the Tibetan people, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's true-life tale about a self-obsessed Austrian mountaineer who learns selflessness in the Himalayas too rarely delivers at a simple emotional level.

Opening half-hour has some of the best stuff in the movie, walking a precarious line between black irony and showing the war from a totally German viewpoint, without tipping over into gallows humor or parody.

The supporting perfs provide the real drama, especially Hinds' excellent turn as the outwardly macho but inwardly broken Traynor, and McSorley's simmering portrayal of the psychotic Gilligan

Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.

Basic joke wears off after five minutes, and many bystanders will start to head out of town. But genre/Asian buffs prepared to ride shotgun for two hours will be rewarded with some classy action sequences and densely accoutred widescreen lensing.

Austen nuts may rend their frocks, and Bollywood buffs may split their cholis, but there's an immensely likable, almost goofily playful charm to Bride & Prejudice that finally wins the day.

Chockfull of ideas and with an irreverence that irresistibly recalls late '60s American cinema, thesp John Turturro's third outing in the helmer's chair, Romance & Cigarettes, alternately shines and sputters.

Another slam-dunk from vet producer Yash Johar.

A superbly written loony-tunes satire, played by a tony cast at the top of its game.

An often grippingly staged mountain movie that's good but not great.

A good-looking but slim confection that's short on the multi-characterisation and sense of entwined destinies that mark the great Lelouch sagas.

Boosted by a delish performance from Carrie-Anne Moss as a local vamp who helps unthaw the Englishman, but holed beneath the waterline by a gratingly miscast Sigourney Weaver as the persnickety autistic.

Combines scares and chuckles with good production values.

High-octane plunge into pop gangster psychology.

Surprisingly conventional Olde London Towne gaslight mystery, gussied up with some doctored visuals, and an eccentric performance by Johnny Depp.

A handsome although dramatically muddled Noodle Western.

Stays resolutely grounded thanks to miscasting of Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno as the leads and a script that contrarily breaks every rule of the genre.

Well cast, engagingly played and directed with a stylistic pedal to the metal, Human Traffic is a lot of energy adding up to very little.

A slickly mounted slice of can-do nonsense.

Rather dark, decidedly English and exceedingly well played, Keeping Mum is a neatly crafted black comedy with more than a nod in tone toward the Ealing classic "The Ladykillers."

Some fine individual perfs by the tony cast, plus fine period detail and costumes, make the time pass fairly agreeably, but Tea With Mussolini suffers from a fatal lack of focus and emotional center, reducing potentially involving material to a succession of individual scenes.

Pic's busy direction and bright performances partly compensate for a script that goes in too many directions at the same time.

Shows a consistent inability to generate any kind of drama when characters open their mouths.