Desson Thomson

As Juliet, Winslet is a bright-eyed ball of fire, lighting up every scene she’s in. She’s offset perfectly by Lynskey, whose quietly smoldering Pauline completes the delicate, dangerous partnership.

A thoroughly gratifying prestige thriller, thanks to riveting suspense and two brilliant stars.

Has a refreshingly keen ability to see everything from multiple angles.

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.

Makes compelling, provocative and prescient viewing. You can draw your own conclusions.

Although fictionalized, it feels depressingly real. It's a 90-minute newsreel with a broken heart.

Frances McDormand enjoys the comedic role of her career.

The movie's intense watchability can be traced directly to superb performances by Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley.

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

Unabashed, streamlined entertainment, and you won't hate yourself in the morning for liking it.

The movie, when it finally gets going, is funny. At times it's hysterical. The great discovery about Noises Off is how tried and tested Frayn's basic formula is. The physical, verbal and situation comedy is universal, no matter who the performers. What counts in this ensemble production is the collective choreography, the great farce machine. In the movie, everyone, Reeve included, more than plays his part.

I don't pretend to understand a darned thing about Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love...But it's undeniably powerful and, if you're up for the experience, exhilarating.

Nair is not making a caricature out of Lalit or anyone else. She's inviting us into the inner recesses of her culture. And it's both pleasure and privilege to be one of her guests.

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.

Fabulous mental escape. It's fun and playful, rather than dark and foreboding. And there doesn't seem to be an original cyber-bone in the movie's body. But it's put together in a fabulous package.

Observed mostly from Remy's rat's-eye view, Gusteau's kitchen is a memorable world-in-miniature with its vivid old-fashioned stoves, bright, brassy pots and general air of frenzied industry; never did sliced red onions or simmering soup look so fresh and real.

So full of creativity, so subversive, so alive.

Martin Scorsese brings honor back to the remake. He shines up this reprise of the original with original brilliance

It's tremendous fun. The movie -- directed by Rob Cohen -- switches pleasingly from exciting fights to moments of magic playfulness. It's doubly touching to experience Bruce Lee's fleeting life and, in the brief depictions of little son Brandon, to fatefully anticipate the tragedy to come.

Makes for fascinating cinema.

Wins you over with its devastating simplicity.

[Zaillian] employs every trick and convention in the Hollywood book, but with such expertise, it feels original. Never were the emotions this roundly affected -- around a simple board game.

Hilarious, touching and wonderfully dyspeptic.

An absorbing, intelligent and suspense-filled film... It's streamlined and rich at the same time -- like the best of the James Bond films, but serious.

Until its final stumble, this intelligence thriller, starring Val Kilmer, is charged with brilliance.

The scenes unfold with such unhurried delicacy, and the characters are so intriguing, you can ignore the editorial bluntness and savor the smaller, sweeter details.

So elegantly layered and emotionally restrained, it makes the horror at its center all the more disturbing.

Exults in the hard-riding romanticism of classic Westerns, but it takes revisionist stock too. It dismounts at places usually left in the dust -- the oppressed lot of women, the loneliness of untended children, adult illiteracy and the horrible last moments of the dying.

An extraordinary piece of electronic history. And a riveting movie

A saga of unbearable sadness and romantic beauty.

A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience.

Brings kinetic, stylistic and even sexy dimension to the Bram Stoker legend.

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.

In keeping with the Smith rules, the movie is irreverent, self-referential, twisted, cheap and tasteless. And, of course, I mean that as the highest compliment.

What's truly surprising about Happy Feet is not its giddily brilliant entertainment, its intimate knowledge of the culture or its toe-tapping music. It's how commonplace these qualities have become in computer-animated movies… Happy Feet may be just one of the crowd, but what a great crowd it is.

The real importance of "Earnest" is the thrill of brilliant repartee. And as we laugh, an amazing thing happens: Oscar Wilde comes alive.

If he had to die so soon, this movie is the best and most appropriate sendoff Lee could have hoped for.

Commitments, adapted by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais from the Roddy Doyle book, exults in its own world. The characters, with their foibles and verbal joustings, are everything. There's something poetically sardonic in every sentence they utter.

There's a good chance you're going to enjoy Aladdin more than the children.

Add uniformly good acting to Sayles' script of dark coal pits, West Virginia spirit and cowboyish melodrama and you have stirring cinema.

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.

Appealingly, the movie has a certain lightness -- like the aforementioned butterfly -- which makes its foreboding qualities surprisingly user-friendly.

A gee-wonderful virtual visit to the arid orb, which uses ingenious technical sleight of hand to -- let's face it -- fake it beautifully.

Treat this project as you would a safari: It has its slow parts but the wildlife makes it worthwhile.

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.

Wonderfully silly all the time.

No matter what is going on in the story, these star-crossed lovers are always fascinating to watch.

There are extremely touching moments between Jesse and mystical Randolph, who seems to understand just about everything; and, more tellingly, between Jesse and mechanic Jim.

A museum piece, something to be enjoyed for its historical value. [2000 re-release]

Extraordinarily poetic, suspenseful film.

Elle fans will likely ignore the narrative shortcomings in favor of a well-loved character.

The Batblast of the summer.

A film that's tender and disarming for its intimate honesty. It's also deeply refreshing to see a movie that dares to explore sexuality among mature characters.

The cast, all classically trained on the stage, is simply commanding.

This fictional documentary's films-in-miniature -- subdued, engaging grace notes that run from 45 seconds to several minutes -- create a subtle, appropriately unconventional portrait of this eccentric man.

Corbijn makes us achingly aware of the singer's talent, the haunting poetry of his songs and how, living in the gloomy culture he did, his passing was virtually inevitable.

A sort of romance noir -- spruced up in pressed white linens -- this British-made film is elegant, uncompromising and oh-so- veddy nasty.

Although the movie -- falls occasional prey to pretension, it's a classic guilty pleasure.

Kitano the filmmaker makes sure that everything is beautiful, from the wonderful colors and passing tableaux to the intricate fighting choreography. This blind swordsman, you realize, has vision to spare.

This is the kind of sophisticated and pleasurable movie you dream of seeing from France.

Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.

It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.

A firepowered, blood-drenched action picture that doesn't let up.

Terrifically funny romantic comedy, is a slam-dunk for Julia Roberts, the Michael Jordan of cuteness.

What keeps the film (adapted from the late John O'Brien's harrowing semi-autobiographical book) from being completely unbearable are the extraordinary performances.

It's a pleasant experience. But that's what it is: a sequel that replays every aspect of the original movie.

An entertainment to be seen and appreciated in momentum. As such, it is constantly gripping

The movie's entertaining for some wickedly funny situations and witticisms.

Cheerful, energetic and on the money.

A bare-bones outline ignores the performances, the stirring music, the close-in camerawork and the direction of Steve Anderson. The emotional punch and atmosphere of the movie soar through any hokiness. Plummer's search for the son he never saw grow up becomes a powerful odyssey.

It's more a collection of episodes that build to a complex, richly layered picture of these girls' lives. And the more time we spend with them, the more endearing they become.

It's full of good heart, and you can't help but like its unequivocal sentimentality.

Parents is an impressive debut, and certainly the most provocative new release around town. You may leave this movie realizing how dark your childhood actually was. You may also leave a vegetarian.

Start lining up now, bring a bullwhip -- and maybe some d-Con. Indiana will do the rest.

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.

There may not be a bigger-hearted performance this year than Jamie Foxx's in Ray.

August, who also made "Pelle the Conqueror" and "House of the Spirits," steers this story to its stirring conclusion with firm lack of sentimentality.

Manages to be innocent, physically passionate, earnestly romantic and self-deprecatingly funny, all at once.

It's a B+, not an A. This would be enough for most filmmakers. But Anderson must contend with a higher standard. It's his fault for being original.

Admirable in its refusal to be politically correct.

The most enjoyable John Sayles movie in recent memory.

A deft, entertaining story that mixes menace with charm and satire with seriousness.

It's an intriguing experience.

So disarming, it's hard to say anything but good things about it. So get in line. The doctor is in.

Cruise is at the top of his form, and Gooding makes a brilliant opponent.

One extended guilty pleasure.

Tarkovsky pulls you into a dark, foreboding nightmare and Nykvist gives that nightmare an explosive awakening.

Hoffman's touchingly fractured performance gives the picture a warm dimension.

It is a movie about the real challenge of heroism.

Gibson may get top billing, but it's Sam Elliott who steals all the scenes. As Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, a man who fires with his own .45 revolver rather than the standard M-16 rifles, he's full of hilariously colorful comments.

There's a refreshingly unusual spirit at work.

A movie that grows better by the minute.

Not only visually brilliant, it's funny, too.

Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg and director David Yates have transformed J.K. Rowling's garrulous storytelling into something leaner, moodier and more compelling, that ticks with metronomic purpose as the story flits between psychological darkness and cartoonish slapstick.

Bening makes the movie into something finer still.

Con Air, a summer blast of a movie, teaches us many things: Producer Jerry Bruckheimer never met an explosion, a car crash or 20 tough guys talking trash he didn't like. Nicolas Cage is one of our most enjoyable screen heroes. As long as you're funny, you can literally get away with murder in a movie.

Has the glorious, gaudy benefit of much stock footage of Those Days, featuring all manner of drag queen, bearded lady and lactating hippie.

The movie, which Carion wrote with Eric Assous, has a calming quality. The story moves slowly but, given the milieu and pace of life, this seems perfectly appropriate.