Desson Thomson

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.