Desson Thomson

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.