Desson Thomson

Dogme 95 at its best: open-ended and exciting, with a grand sense of experimentation.

This is about the rise of a pop star, plain and simple. The real deal –- and the movie's greatest fun –- is in the rap contests.

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.

Notre Musique is really a poetic essay, masterfully intermixing the director's mournful-toned, philosophical narration with documentary and staged moments.

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

The most cinematic of the three films. It tells its story in stark, often wordless scenes.

This is definitely for people who 1) love the video game, 2) think Slater and Dorff are eminently watchable, no matter what bad flick they're in and 3) are wearing industrial-strength ear plugs.

Devil leads us into that dark, uncharted valley where evil, genius, divine inspiration, insanity -- and other unfathomable mysteries -- commingle. It also examines the hyperbolic industry of instant celebrity and ultimately shows us the complex algebraic equation that is Daniel Johnston's life.

The film becomes a modest delight.

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

Want to see something strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre? Sure you do.

It's a warm bath experience, soap-sudsed with sentimentality, improbability and other storytelling misdemeanors.

The story behind Hercules, Walt Disney’s insipid, lifeless, animated feature, is hardly the stuff of children’s entertainment.

Works best when it concentrates on O'Grady and the ever-rippling effect of his transgressions. Viewers may not remember the victims whose stories practically pierce the heart, but they're unlikely to forget O'Grady's deceptively innocent face.

Childishly simple, but extremely funny.

Robbins, who scripted and directed, creates more than enough on his own. Bob's un-hackneyed character is the prime case in point.

Realized beautifully by director Bille August, Intentions is a moving, profound requiem to all human relationships.

Fascinating facts and testimony.

As they stumble, bumble and fumble their way to love, they get more charming by the minute. Which makes them more interesting than Hollywood-style characters, anyway.

It's difficult to concentrate on the story. Not that there's much to concentrate on anyway.

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.

You're invited to fish for the comedy within the movie, within Harry's world, which happens to be falling apart around the hapless schlemiel's ears.

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

Though it might lack in Hollywood production values, it overflows with moral impact.

Within its narrow, unambitious, commercial boundaries, the movie is highly watchable. Lowther is appealing, and Costner is a likable rebel.

It will often tear at the heart too -- at least, when it doesn't feel like the rap equivalent of a classroom lecture.

It is horrible. Time curls up and dies while this Hilary Duff vehicle wheels its weary, conventional way along.

The movie's wonderfully original, fast-moving and funny.

What's so powerful about the film is the rich stories it tells and how it leads them like so many human tributaries to one black, bubbling source.

It's an updated Capra fantasy that goes for the sweet rather than the tart.

Vibrant and engaging documentary.

May just be the best in its genre… Entertainment and radical street preaching, all rolled into one. If it tells black kids not to try this at home, it also revels cinematically in blam-blam-you're-dead. This is what makes the movie maddening -- and what gives it strength.

Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.

As with his other works, [Mann] binds sound, music and pictures into one hypnotic triaxial cable and plugs it right into your brain. He makes this almost-three-hour experience practically glide by.

Love is supple entertainment -- thanks to on-the-money performances by Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as Ike.

There's such a sense of overall intensity, you know you have been though something powerful.

About as funny as malaria.

And what makes this autopsy of a love affair funny is Tom's ironic, morose commentary as he revisits what happened.

Hums with compassion for its outlandish, lonely but always sweet characters.

Roundly entertaining.

Passionate, literally shimmering movie.

More juvenile than a Mel Brooks movie, wittier than "Get Smart," almost as low as "Animal House" and close to the laugh count of "Airplane!", "Gun" is a loving parody of every cop show that ever syndicated its way to your living room. [2 Dec 1988]

All in all, this is a celebration of Australian exuberance, a national ethic of adventurousness and enormous charisma.

It's a thrill to listen to the seasoned survivors offering witty, evocative anecdotes about themselves and others.

A saga of unbearable sadness and romantic beauty.

Finally, we have found ourselves in a movie where the characters are free to blunder, even if it means turning their backs on us. There's powerful liberation in that, all around.

There's more bathroom and slapstick humor than a sixth-grader could stand, and a veritable flood of drool, blood and less mentionable effluvia, most of it courtesy of Mr. Wayans as he tries to be – you know – funny.

The movie is bracing, bleak and funny, assuming you can appreciate the comedy in a story full of lowlifes, lushes and losers.

Nothing more than an over-designed lobster pot. After following the beckoning twists and turns, you're left trapped and more than a little disappointed for getting in so deep.

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.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

A Chinese film whose simple surface belies greater mysteries.

A stylish hoot: entertainingly edgy and ludicrous all at once.

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

Relentlessly funny satire.

The problem is, Europa is episodic rather than cumulative. Europa is about the highlights in Solly's wartime life. But it's not about Solly.

Piquant, thoroughly engaging character drama.

If you don't operate on the premise that soccer is the most important thing in the universe, you might not go along with everything in Fever Pitch.

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

Climb into this rig and you'll be sweating bullets.

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

Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.

Sweet Land is as empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

A smoothly executed jab in your solar plexus, a lean, smart film noir that pokes at you with quintessentially English disdain and sarcasm.

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

Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.

Surprisingly absorbing film.

In a movie in which time travel is used to rectify the past, it's too bad scriptwriters David and Janet Peoples didn't go through the time/space tunnel to work on that first draft again.

It's an intriguing experience.

A second-rate romantic comedy.

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.

Feels so slight and pointless.

Beneath the sylvan trappings is a whodunit as riveting as any.

The animation, rendered in good old-fashioned watercolors, is appealing. It's easy, rather than flashy, on the eyes. But the best thing about the movie is the humor.

But don't let a little gore, misogyny, factbusting, counterfeit hipness and screenwriter David ("Streamers") Rabe's public disassociation from the project get in your way. Enjoy Penn's actor imitations. Or Fox's raspy earnestness. Or scorer Ennio Morricone's sentimental mortars. Or a bafflingly anticlimactic final sequence in which veteran Fox appears to come to terms with himself with the help of an Asian woman and a dropped scarf. Is that what you call a wrap?

This movie should have blown us out of the water. Instead we catch ourselves occasionally thinking the unpardonable thought: "OK, sink already."

The movie's not heavyhanded about this coming of moral age; the revelations unfurl in subtle ways. What Bernal and this well-wrought movie convey so well is the charisma that would soon become a part of human history.

A hugely absorbing social drama that is, by turns, excruciating, sad and sardonic.

Where the movie succeeds-and succeeds wonderfully-is when it stays a heartbeat away from politics. For two-thirds of the movie, it's an involving, boxing saga and romance.

Cronenberg's deeper purpose is to pull audiences into an affecting, powerful story about right and wrong.

Has to be one of the must-see films for any student of Hollywood fame and infamy.

Beaufoy and Cattaneo handle this potentially racy material with an engaging balance of good taste and outright slapstick.

Kidd, a first-time writer and director, has created a sophisticated but intriguingly toxic comedy of manners.

Demonstrates what writer-director Levinson does best: evoke the sights, smells and atmosphere of his youth with intelligence, humor and a keen sense of social perspective.

Settle into your seat for an enjoyable movie.

A Prairie Home Companion tries to embrace the spirit of that longtime radio series but suffocates the very qualities that make the original show so special in the first place.

A psychic journey deep into the very fabric of Iranian (and by extension, all) life.

Hilarious, touching and wonderfully dyspeptic.

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

Guerrilla' is an engaging film, but it's a documentary and nothing more.

Chabrol arranges his story with a subtle, almost clinical accumulation. And it takes close attention to the movie's seemingly innocuous details to understand his deeper purposes.

Theron has rendered herself 100 percent unrecognizable. Not since Robert De Niro morphed into hulk dimensions to play heavyweight boxer Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull" has there been a transformation this powerful and effective.

The effect, in this French period drama, is something like a moving pop-up book, in which characters seem to be two-dimensional cardboard cutouts come to life.

A one-of-a-kind experience, a Molotov cocktail of a seriocomedy.

You're drawn in, like it or not. You can't get away from the immediacy. Or the feeling that you're getting sucked in, too.

Mostly a string of talking-head interviews, but those talking heads -- more than 16 men and women -- are compelling.

Nelson certainly passes muster for sincerity but, unfortunately, his movie doesn't have the same clear-cut quality.

A movie that grows better by the minute.