Desson Thomson

It's not the deepest thematic concern you ever saw on screen. But it's watchable, great fun.

Takes unabashed delight in itself and its own culture.

Even if you tap only a little of the magic of "Peter Pan," you'll come away with some pixie dust.

The movie's intense watchability can be traced directly to superb performances by Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley.

There are two distinctive features to the movie: the mind-numbingly banal plot as one chases another who chases another, and all the offensive material.

The Return is a pleasant if superfluous invasion of your local theaters. Everyone in front of the Cocoon Uno camera is back, including Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Brian Dennehy, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Steve Guttenberg and nine others. It's nice to see the old codgers still alive, kicking and making whoopee. But don't look for more than extra-terrestrial homecoming.

The Secret Garden unearths a few inventions of its own, it bears its own, quiet charms.

Amusing and inventive.

A blithely unfunny, low-budget comedy from director Barry Levinson.

It's a guaranteed must-see for its generation. Sin City has a long, long shelf life ahead.

So unambiguously good-natured it feels like something fresh.

The movie attempts to paint too large a canvas.

There's a refreshingly unusual spirit at work.

Documentary about rock history's biggest heavy metal band is -- variously -- serious, funny, frustrating and touching.

The result is a movie of deceptive lightness and powerful sweep. And what makes it truly work is the presence of Kervel, a first-time actor whose Anna is disarmingly self-assured and sweet. Without her, nothing else matters.

The writing (by Bill and Cherie Steinkellner) has a non-sentimental appeal for that young preteen (and early teen) crowd that fancies itself too cool for kiddie stuff.

Thanks to strong performances from all, particularly Mount and Nicholson, we're with this story all the way.

It's a grab bag of small delights -- and that includes a workmanlike performance by Toni Collette -- but it never quite amounts to a full load.

Martin Scorsese brings honor back to the remake. He shines up this reprise of the original with original brilliance

Creepy and truly suspenseful in some places, unintentionally comic or plain awful in others.

Add uniformly good acting to Sayles' script of dark coal pits, West Virginia spirit and cowboyish melodrama and you have stirring cinema.

A frustrating update. Take away the comedy and you're left with a pallid version -- a sort of Reader's Digest condensation -- of the original.

Its story -- and eerie allure -- comes from our evolving perception of Jackie (Kate Dickie), a surveillance operator in Glasgow, Scotland, who spends long days and nights monitoring the screens.

Lee's finest, most unabashed labor of love.

Instead of "Masterpiece Theatre"-style fawning, [Scorsese] fills this movie with visual flow, masterful cinematography and assured direction. There's an alert, thinking presence behind the camera.

Without its animation, A Scanner Darkly would have made a fine cautionary tale about drug addiction, paranoia and institutional treachery in a police state. But with a technique that turns the existing live action into a two-dimensional cartoon, the movie goes one -- maybe even 10 -- better. It becomes its own living, breathing metaphor.

(Stamp and Fonda's) polar-opposition in acting styles and temperament, their cultural differences and their pop-cultural synergy come together with almost delicious cacophony.

How great can an epic be, when it takes 30 years, including a whole sequence devoted to World War I, for Jean to realize he could be a little nicer to his wife? This is for diehard Francophiles and literate-movie fans only.