Desson Thomson

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.

It's the atmospheric sideshow that earns the highest marks.

For the right audience, this movie is the butt-kicking, dirt-talking, blood-spurting equivalent of beautiful music.

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

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.

No matter what's coming their way, post-apocalyptic doom or gloom, this James Gang of the galaxy is just plain fun to watch.

If there's anyone who can make this ordeal -- and when you're plumb out of characters, it can be an ordeal -- tolerable, and even entertaining, it's Hanks.

The movie does what any great musician should: It lifts an idea to the heights of ecstasy; it sells its song.

Lures us in with extraordinary subtlety. Keeping sound effects and incidental music to a relative minimum, it builds its suspense almost subliminally. So when something scary or shocking does occur -- deprived of those Hollywood-style cues -- we are truly startled.

A helter-skelter ride of the soul, an unblinking, white-knuckle crash landing into the mushy mysteries of the subconscious.

May not be the ultimate word on the Tibetan situation, or even the Dalai Lama, but its heart seems to be in the right place; and it's entertaining enough to give audiences an emotional sense of the story. [16 January 1998, p.N32]