Desson Thomson

The movie's devil-may-care freneticism is edgily amusing, almost liberating.

Straightforward but nonetheless powerful documentary.

This French film has a breezy, documentary air that belies the important issues is raises.

In terms of sheer belly-laugh count, this one's in the same plentiful company as "There's Something About Mary" and "Road Trip."

To watch this movie is to not only appreciate the majesty of Shakespeare's poetics but to engage in a profound, subtextual dialogue with bigotry.

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

In many ways, watching the movie is BETTER than concertgoing. We can enjoy that buzzy feeling of community without the fist-pumping biker obscuring our view.

When I say this movie's a charm, I'm really talking about Irwin.

Like rubbernecking motorists, we can't help but watch with lurid fascination.

Nadja has some delicious qualities. Most delectable of all is Elina Lowensohn as Nadja, the brooding daughter of Count Dracula, an otherworldly being with ebony lipstick, lusciously dark eyebrows, a dark hood and a great accent to match.

It's a movie of deft impressions and telling human moments. Whether or not those impressions and moments add up to anything is almost beside the point.

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

Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.

Penn's performance is the movie's ultimate grace note. As funny and ingenious as Allen's films can get, they are rarely known for depth of character.

Almost every scene has something to chuckle over.

Peppy, funny and sensual. If you have to see any romantic comedy that's not directed by Billy Wilder, or written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, this wouldn't be a bad choice.

Director Fernando Eimbcke, in an extraordinary debut, never expresses contempt for his characters. By examining their inner lives with compassion and respect, he inspires us to do the same.

This Is England, set in the social dystopia of Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain, gives us something far more humane and complex than a culturally specific memoir about Doc Martens shoes, reggae music and mindless aggression.

Watching Kidman, Leigh and -- in his nutty, damn-the-torpedoes way -- Black as they torment, confound and torture one another amounts to a vicarious thrill ride in human behavior.

Testament to the emergence of a visually masterful filmmaker, capable of ingenious, low-tech special effects.

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

Apocalypse Now Redux, which contains about 50 minutes of extra footage, is Coppola's final artistic assault. This is the one where he honors his vision -- or clears his name, whichever way you look at it. Does he do it? Perhaps the first thing to get out of your mind when watching this "Apocalypse," or the 1979 version, is worrying about whether the film's a success or failure. It's both. The more you see of "Apocalypse," the more obvious its triumphs and mistakes.

Robocop is one weird and entertaining hybrid of camp and sci-fi shoot-'em-up.

It's definitely NOT a conventional biopic about Kurt Cobain. (Nor, as its title oddly suggests, is it about the demise of writer-director Van Sant.) It's a tone poem, an elliptical, fictionalized meditation about the ill-fated rock 'n' roll superstar.

If you do not bring pride, good taste or sense to this third American Pie installment, you'll have a good time.

Warmhearted and slightly edgy seriocomedy, these sisters experience some pretty entertaining ups and downs. Entertaining, that is, for people who appreciate irony.

As we vicariously participate in their daily rituals, we find ourselves at the ground level of spiritual worship. It's hard to recall a similar documentary that brings viewers so palpably close to that sacred experience.

A percolating comedy. The laughs may not tear your belly up, but they're constant and they dovetail with the story.

Wonderful images, hues, sensations and faces.

Although the movie is slow-going at first, it gradually awakens, like Lilia. And then it dances.

Beam yourselves aboard Sunshine, set 50 years in the future. The voyage works, beautifully.

I was hooked from beginning to end.

It's formulaic, yet edgy. It's predictable, yet full of surprises. How far you get through this tall tale of a thriller before you give up and howl is a matter of personal taste.

A movie of biting social observation. And it masterfully avoids Manichaean simplicity.

This is cinema as oral tradition. And one heck of a cheap-seat deal.

There's no denying its surreal, hypnotic effect.

Based on a true story, the movie takes us through some harrowing times.

You don't have any idea what's going to happen next. You're not caught in a movie, so much as a narrative stratagem.

I think you can say that almost everyone watching this will be spellbound, whether they're stupefied by its insanity, more conventionally compelled by the various horrors in store or a combination of both.

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.

Even though it's weak in the final stages, Rock Star has more than enough sparkle to last you. That's chiefly thanks to Wahlberg, the main firework of this movie.

Director Demme is smart and sensitive enough to sit back and listen to the music without attention-getting intrusions. The tunes are subtly compelling.

To come out of the summer haze and enter the dark (and cool) wonder of Batman Returns is a pleasure not to be denied. Even more than before, this cartoon opera about cloistered personalities bathes exultantly in moody blues, gothic music swirls and a symphony of character tragedy.

It sweeps over you with blunt, unequivocal conviction.

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

The performers bring freshness to what could have been cliched roles.

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

There's a great sense of fun in the cultural collision between Indian and British lifestyles -- often within the same person.

James Woods, a bushy-tailed attorney, goes the distance with the powers that be and makes "True Believer" a legal blast.

If the movie is straightforward and predictable in its attitude, it also exudes a sort of documentary lyricism.

You probably never dreamed a charming romantic movie could be staged against a backdrop of Scud attacks from Saddam Hussein.

This is a superb theatrical situation, and you have two great performers doing the emoting.

This is a Reagan youth's wet dream of underwater ballistics and East-West conflict.

Witty, sweet and charming but never sappy, the movie joins the heady company of such extraordinary child-centered movies as "The 400 Blows," "My Life as a Dog" and "Au Revoir Les Enfants."

And thanks to great existential one-liners from scriptwriter Robert Harling (with appropriate plaudits to novelist Olivia Goldsmith, of course), gender warfare is made amusing for almost everyone.

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

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

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.

Touching and funny eye-opener of a documentary.

You can expect to fall about, snort and hoot, at times hard enough to hurt inner body parts that only doctors can identify.

An enormously enjoyable gothic yarn from Mexico, transfuses the genre with wry grotesquerie, but retains respect for the old, classic films.

A bleakly comic, palm-sweaty hoot.

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

It's a movie full of quietly assured flourishes: elegant camera compositions, wonderful uses of silence and an entertainingly eclectic cast, including Peggy Lipton as a sensitive bartender.

Luminously understated.

A full-throttle fantasy, about as heady a movie experience as it gets.

It's not every day that movies present a Teutonic character in SS uniform as an unambiguously moral hero, so enjoy this rarity. And the film.

With disarmingly entertaining movies like this, dare I say, who needs big bad superhero movies?

Exudes that seriousness about life and openness about style. It's about nothing and yet everything.

Turns potentially forgettable formula into something strangely diverting.

Macabre, yes, but the movie's also inventive and funny. You get a lot of smart bang-bang for your buck.

Has an intoxicating, old-fashioned feel about it. We are instantly lost in the period, thanks to cinematographer Dion Beebe's almost haloed images and Joseph Bennett's authentic, restrained production design.

There's a documentary-like realism to the movie, thanks to its authentic Maori cast and Tamahori's semi-improvisational approach to direction. Tamahori also gives everyone a sympathetic, realistic dimension.

A Chinese film whose simple surface belies greater mysteries.

There is a clear festive buzz, as attendees laugh, bob and listen to Chappelle's impish, inventive comedy, and some of the best music hip-hop has to offer.

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

To the patient viewer, the rewards are many, especially Bardem's performance.

The result isn't a fragmentary experience so much as an evocative collage.

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.

Possibly the most suspense-charged mountain-climbing movie ever made.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar ... has found the perfect balance of old-fashioned charm and postmodern touches -- but not too many to overshadow the show's precious texture.

It's not art, this movie. But it's much more amusing than you'd expect.

This is a one-riff movie and instant cult classic.

You may leave this movie exhilarated by its no-holds-barred boldness or annoyed and bewildered at the unpredictable course it takes.

It's a joy to see nice warm performances by real people of different shapes, sizes and ages, who are seldom to be found in any glamour catalogues. And it's even more rewarding to watch Ferrera's many-sided performance.

Even though the story ultimately doesn't match the intensity with which it began, the movie's extraordinary for its two main performances.

Big muscular guys pruning roses IS funny and charming.

A Molotov cocktail of a movie, an engaging conflagration of British B-flick, cockney wit and gallows humor. There's even a delicate little love story in there.

A historical drama about a black regiment that proves its mettle during the Civil War, may not hold up to intense scrutiny but it marches to the glorious beat that fired up the Massachusetts 54th. And it's hard not to get carried along.

Filmmaker Gray, only 25 when he made this, expertly delineates the restive characters in this Jewish emigre community, and the existential voids among them all. He's helped by assured, subtle performances all around

A politically incorrect but often hilarious jam session, in which men and women trade insults like musical licks.

First Contact, written by Ric Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, pulsates with great imagination, amusing characters and the fundamental optimism handed down by "Star Trek" founder Gene Roddenberry.

Vibrant and engaging documentary.

In this movie, only one thing is certain: No one remains the same.

If Collateral is all formula, it's polished to a fine sheen.

It's a stylish and classic gangster saga about the clashing of rival empires.

Only one filmmaking team should be allowed to make sequels: The Naked Gun people. In Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, they reach maximum velocity immediately. Naked 3 sets such a great pace at the beginning, it can't possibly keep up. Inevitably, the movie has its slower sections, coming almost to a halt in a slapstick finale at the Oscars. But wherever you are in the story, there's always something funny coming at you.

Aside from the plot -- and if you can figure out the plot, the CIA's special projects unit wants to talk to you -- Cop II is a rarity: a sequel that's as good as the original, if not better.