Desson Thomson

Touching and funny eye-opener of a documentary.

Although it contains many visually compelling passages and some provocative moments, the movie is strangely banal and simplistic.

This story doesn't just belong to them anymore. This richly observed, sometimes heartbreaking movie has become ours, too.

It's not the enormous undertaking that impresses so much as the sheer ecstasy of flight and the ability of Perrin's team to catch it.

A movie for almost everyone, from boomer parents (who remember their teens and twenties) to their teenage kids (who can't wait to get started with same). And if there's anyone who can bring so many into the same mosh pit, it's Black, who so occupies the role you can't believe he's acting.

Franklin's picture is effortlessly wise beneath its entertaining surface.

Although we miss some of the finer details that made Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 book so meaningful, we're moved by the movie's themes of cultural displacement and the power of chance.

Thanks to Schlesinger's exacting direction and Malcolm Bradbury's witty, restrained script, these characters are kept more amusing than horribly pitiable.

Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

The movie is given unusually wide dimension by director Taylor Hackford, who creates a subtly scary drama that emphasizes character over caricature (in most cases) and plausibility over formulaic stupidity (again, in most cases).

A delirious mixture of spectacular gun battles, furious explosions and breathtaking stunt work, it's also one of the strangest stories to ever get the green light at a Hollywood studio. You have to take your hat off to Paramount Studios for allowing such inspired weirdness to see the light of day.

We are left with vivid images of Dominique, whose desire to change his country, despite formidable intimidation, is an inspiration to any supporter of democracy.

Remains highly watchable throughout, for its atmosphere and the actors.

This finale turns Assisted Living from fascinating experimental film into something finer.

Truth be told, none of it is actual living, and all of it is secondhand re-spinning of such better movies as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Welcome to Sarajevo." To use an antiquated newsman's cliche: Get me rewrite.

Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism -- to bring truth to power.

The chemistry between the actors, particularly between Anton and Kinnaman, is sometimes magical.

A canny (and profoundly sexy) movie.

Straightforward but nonetheless powerful documentary.

Richard Linklater's satirical take on high school life in the 1970s is not only funny and entertaining. It's practically a historic document of life during the smiley-face button era.

Enormously entertaining.

Its mixture of wisdom and whimsy -- exemplified by the movie's unnamed and occasionally cheeky narrator -- makes this Australian movie feel as timeless as it is timely. And instead of feeling dutifully cultural as we immerse ourselves in this story, we're genuinely intrigued, touched and even amused.

Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively.

An extraordinary piece of electronic history. And a riveting movie

The movie equivalent of a great read. It's a masterfully conducted concert of characters...already head and shoulders above most of the competition.

There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.

It's more than a detailed account of one man's petty vindictiveness in a bygone era. It's about how our hatred can consume us so deeply that we lose sight of everything.

In a harmonic convergence of narrative, cinematic expertise and performance, Nelson’s chilled expression—and this movie—will stay with you like a closely held, personal memory.

Although the movie adheres more closely to history than "Quills," it lacks dramatic punch and depth.

Quite unintentionally, Ildiko Enyedi's My Twentieth Century demonstrates the importance of a good story in a film. The movie doesn't really have one, but this shortcoming, which keeps the Hungarian film unmistakably shy of greatness, is its only fault.

Not only gives us a superb new cast of believable characters, it transcends its own genre. Only superficially a teen comedy, the movie redounds with postmodern -- but emotionally genuine -- gravitas.

In Get Shorty, director Barry Sonnenfeld's spirited adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel, Travolta's rebirth accelerates directly into adulthood.

Suffused with sunlit, sensual images, Chocolat feels rather than finds out, implies rather than blurts out. Like an odd collection of old-time photographs, it seems to hold enigmatic truths -- ones that can't be expressed but that you have an instinctive understanding for nonetheless.

Isn't just a fabulous seagoing spectacle. It's one for the ages.

Everyone in the cast is terrific, including Dermot Mulroney as Wolf, the beret-sporting cameraman who thinks he's a genius but can't seem to stop screwing up shots, and Wanda (Danielle Von Zerneck), a tough-talking assistant director who gets weak in the knees whenever Chad gets close. Best of all is Buscemi, a wonderfully offbeat, edgy performer who has appeared in such independent films as Mystery Train and Reservoir Dogs. He carries the emotional weight of the movie as his dream project faces impending doom, his red-rimmed, frog-like eyes threatening to burst with exasperation.

There's something impressive and yet lacking about everything.

It avoids the compulsively calibrated storytelling of big-studio moviemaking for a slower-moving but powerfully absorbing drama.

A movie that dares you to slow down and enjoy the subtleties of life.

It's been gunned before -- and so much better.

The haunting beauty of the music, and the people who produce it – that's the chapter and verse of this story.

This Australian film by New Zealand director Jane Campion comes at you, and keeps coming at you, in peculiar, oddly enchanting bursts of detail.

A little too shopworn and pokey to be more than a respectable European diversion.

Screenwriter Richad Curtis (writer of the English "Blackadder" series) and director Mike Newell (who made "Enchanted April") keep things lively and entertaining; each wedding is garnished with its own distinctive mood and dramatic significance.

The result is a time capsule par excellence...This is the best of times and the worst of times, African American style.

His spirited take on the Sicily-set comedy is enjoyable, primarily for its all-embracing attitude. It breathes modern life into old expressions like "fare thee well" and "by my troth," and it welcomes nontraditional New Worlders Denzel Washington, Robert Sean Leonard, Michael Keaton and Keanu Reeves into the traditionally British throng.

With the exception of the opening scene -- whose purpose is chiefly comic -- the movie is one, extended climax. Even with flashbacks and other time jumps, it never lets up. You have to go back to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1952 "The Wages of Fear" to recall suspense this relentless.

Scent is a captured memory, a living, breathing reverie rather than a narrative. It's also the birth of a great talent.

Probably the most engaging Potter film of the series thus far.

It's best appreciated by assuming something of a dream state ourselves and enjoying the giddy flow.

The screenplay (which is credited to a small crowd: director Michael Radford, Anna Pavignano, Furio Scarpelli, Giacomo Scarpelli and Troisi) is refreshingly witty and restrained.

Not since the 1972 'Cabaret' has there been a movie musical this stirring, intelligent and exciting.

A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. The movie is definitely Chinese in content, but it exudes American style and spirit.

The result is one of Almodovar's darkest films since the early days of "Law of Desire" and "Matador," and certainly one of his finest.

It's as much fun to anticipate what he's (Herzog) going to say as it is to appreciate the snowy landscapes, belching volcanoes and mustachioed seals before his lens. And what could have been a conventional travelogue becomes a sort of ruminative odyssey of the mind.

A compelling, compact story about a country that was left to destroy itself while one man presided futilely over the carnage.

Shows firsthand the appreciation and warmth from the musicians who worked with him.

With its deft intercutting of place and time, the film creates a powerful sense of mysticism and fate.

Feckless and crude without any particularly funny redeeming value. If there's anything more to this poor excuse of a movie than immediately meets the eye, I'll get back to you.

There's another satisfying benefit to Everlasting Moments. It's gloriously absent of the hyper-speed anxiety that passes for storytelling on our multiplex screens.

Mostly, the movie is riveting, well-done fare -- the stuff of Hollywood epic adventure.

This is a charmfest of a movie, for bird lovers and non-bird lovers alike.

A heartbreaker, plain and simple.

It'll keep you amused enough to sit still and even remember it fondly.

It's the moviegoing equivalent of great eating.

Just about everything you ever loved (or hated) about Italian films can be found.

JOHN SAYLES has a filmmaking style that's often closer to leaden than lyrical. But his plodding manner works somewhat to advantage in "The Secret of Roan Inish," a modern-mythic drama set in Ireland that explores the special relationship between Irish seaside dwellers and Selkies -- seal-like creatures said to be part human.

This is a fully realized movie, whose intelligence -- despite its grim findings -- dwarfs any Hollywood production.

Levinson was never one for narrative tightness. As with much of his previous work, Bugsy is a maze of episodes, a sprawling excuse for engaging human banter. Although the truth will inevitably catch up with Beatty -- especially concerning that expensive nightclub -- it's not entirely clear what the movie's about. But that's the kind of detail Beatty's Siegel wouldn't even worry about. Neither should you.

The great thing about Mystery Train is its open-endedness. It's a generously scripted ride that gives equal berth to all its characters, then cuts them loose with unfinished business, which also leaves them alive and drifting in your thoughts for a long time. That doesn't seem like a bad achievement at all.

Low-tech inventiveness at its best.

Evokes its spirituality with deft strokes and wonderful humor.

Spielberg takes assured control. In his hands, Minority Report is a classy, chilly quasi-Hitchcockian affair.

Director Pascale Ferran makes this a sort of opera of two bodies, as the characters discover not only each other but themselves. And the French filmmaker cannily turns their corporeal discoveries into a moral mission, two desperately lonely souls crying for spiritual freedom in a world of moral constriction.

An extremely affecting experience, down to the last agonizing moment.

Lorenzo's Oil, which stars Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte as the Odone parents, is not superbly made. But it's adequate enough to convey the story. No filmmaker (in this case, director George Miller) could stand in the way of this drama, though certainly others could have made it better.

The movie leaves us with greater things to contemplate than a mere tragedy of errors.

The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

Speaking of Jane, Minnie Driver gets the big banana for top off-screen performance. She brims over with prissiness and pep, tenderness and visionary appreciation.

The most brutal husband-wife encounter since axe-wielding Jack Nicholson yelled "Heeeeere's Johnny!" to Shelley Duvall in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining."

It matters because this boxer taps into something deeper in our collective souls than the desire for entertainment. It's the hope that one day we're going to win big, too, after everyone's given up on us. It's as hokey as it's true.

Compelling, if sometimes grittily depressing, viewing.

The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.

In the end, Stage Beauty is in over its mediocre head.

The movie’s main appeal—beyond stomach yearnings caused by its cuisine—comes from the actors, who infuse their archetypal roles with comedic appeal.

A disconcertingly assured tango between tenderness and brutality.

Whatever its ultimate position on the greatest hits list, Monsters, Inc. is supple and technologically sophisticated entertainment.

A delightful, wholesome experience for the family.

You realize this is a story about the life beyond this movie, about the great changes in life we never give ourselves time to consider. And for a moviegoing experience, that's a lot of bang for your buck.

The story, which deals straightforwardly with racism, miscegenation, adultery and consumerism, is a fascinating combination: a movie with an almost Capraesque heart and pristine, almost stagey lighting schemes, that addresses uncomfortable moral issues with today's perspectives.