Ella Taylor

There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie, except that it's too nice for words.

Cast for fun, and the whimsy is enjoyable both for its parody of heavy-handed "relevant" updates of the play.

Audaciously conceived, yet at times curiously flat, at others incongruously prosaic in its emotional tone.

Ruiz is so intent on harnessing the painter to his own -- here, rather arid -- relativism that he never manages to convey the unfettered eros that brings crowds flocking to exhibitions of Klimt’s work, even as critics hold their noses.

Slight but immensely enjoyable charmer.

As their extraordinarily brave black female attorney points out, at stake are not merely the rights of this family or indeed of all white farmers, but the future of race relations and human rights in Africa.

Lohan is a warm and engaging presence, but she's completely outshone by the bad girls, and when they're offscreen, Mean Girls is an oddly restrained, barely plotted movie.

Almost nothing comes as a surprise in this stately old fogy of a movie. The pacing is glacial, the screenplay is stiff as a board, and things heat up only in the movie's final scenes.

Marvelously conciliatory film.

I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier's latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood.

The movie charts a journey from belief to despair with occasional touches of humor, but by the end I was so deadened by its minimalist style and method, I could barely summon the energy to ask why.

The result is another powerful children's story dulled into mediocrity by the worship of technology.

Sweet but slight pièce de fluff.

This brilliantly caustic movie -- easily the best in a burgeoning and fertile effort to come to grips with post-Soviet malaise in Central and Eastern Europe -- offers living proof that when it comes to politics, comedy is the sincerest form of dissidence.

One worries from scene to scene about whether the movie is a work of experimental art or just another ruthless intrusion into the life of a dying and, to some degree, broken woman. I'm willing to bet that Maximilian fretted over this too, for the film is as tense and fractured, as alienating -- and, finally, touching -- a work as it undoubtedly ought to be.

In the end, Sturminger's virginal insistence on draining the mother-son relationship of all eros also drains it of interest.

It's not a happy film, but there's much incidental, quotidian happiness in it. Like Lynne Ramsay's lovely "Ratcatcher," the movie is far from sentimental about children.

The two films bursting out of The English Patient (a chamber piece and a David Lean dune epic) require a juggling of tone, pace and scale that might easily defeat a director more seasoned than Minghella.

Gorgeously framed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the Turner-esque beauty of the landscape at harvest time only adds to the creepiness as the Girl makes do, makes friends, and then unravels in the most creative ways.

The Great Water hangs heavy with sepia photography and Christ-like symbolism -- I felt as though I were watching it from the inside of a dank Russian Orthodox church.

The supreme achievement of this lovely film — all three rhythmic, leisurely hours of it -- is that what borders on faintly fascistic body worship in the novel instead feels as perfectly natural to us as it does to the lovers. Lawrence would kvell.

Speaks so eloquently for itself, there's not much more for me to do than urge you to get over to the Nuart for the one week it's playing in Los Angeles.

So cleverly executed that one forgives -- just -- the frenetic pace and absence of down time.

The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.

Thunderbirds is devoted to the principle that character and story are but rude interruptions to the real order of business, an endless display of profound vehicle fetish.

Ingratiating trifle.

In My Country stands closest to "Hotel Rwanda," a similarly clumsy yet inescapably moving effort to confront the brutal consequences of colonial oppression.

The effects are terrific, from the two-and-a-half-minute opening sequence that tracks around the brilliantly lit liner from below, above and round about, to some amazing exterior shots of the groaning vessel rolling around in the churning sea like a giant, wounded whale.

Line for line, Knocked Up isn't quite as funny as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which got most of its laughs from the friction between prissy Carell and his sex-crazed stoner co-workers. But it is equally good as a nutty anthropology of marginal living and as an illustration of how much energy it takes to do nothing in a work-obsessed society.

The film's self-limiting pacifism precludes a closer look at the poetry of war, which is not synonymous with poetry against war.

Though far from expert filmmaking - visual clichés fly thick and fast - the movie has a swooning feel for the stark beauty of the African kingdom in which it was shot.

Charlotte Gray is not a subtle movie, but it is an honorable and surprisingly gripping one.

This sappy stuff gets better direction by Kidd (who made the far superior Roger Dodger) than it deserves, and Linney gives a wonderfully wistful portrayal of urban loneliness.

Jeff Daniels is a compelling-enough actor to lift almost any film out of mediocrity, but even he has his work cut out for him.

Boasts one of the most entertaining and bitterly astute screenplays I've had the pleasure of listening to in a while, with its lengthening spirals of deceit, mendacity and one-upmanship, and its elegant linguistic dances around difficult truths.

Doggedly refusing artifice as if cinematic beauty were a filthy capitalist plot, Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.

A waterlogged little jewel of a Chinese movie that you must rush out and see at once or else.

Bold in scope and aptly mimicking the loose structures of kinship, friendship and work most city dwellers make do with these days, Breaking and Entering nonetheless plays out too quiet and too loose for its own good.

Though Saved! is funny and irreverent, Dannelly isn't just taking potshots at fundamentalism. He creates a viable world, then riddles its surface piety with underground transgressions that call into question not Christian belief but slavish, intolerant religious practice.

Who could resist a movie in which a garden gnome holds the front line in high-tech home security?

Just about everyone worth knowing in All About My Mother is female in spirit, which is to say they're all sexy, impossible, powerfully durable souls, quarrelsome and loyal, inventive at navigating the tragedies.

A drama of uncommon beauty and emotional resonance.

Has a marvelous, pent-up passion.

Carrey is a genius at registering the rage behind television's sunny smile, while Laura Linney excels as his wife.

How fortunate that the J. Lo bod, majestic butt and all, finds itself in excellent working order in Gigli: There is precious little other consolation in this formless windbag of a romantic comedy.

As [Roberts'] gay best friend, Rupert Everett is the only one with any backbone, any sense of humor or any decent lines.

With acting as good as this, Wonderland gives you all the expected pleasures of eavesdropping on the intimate lives of others.

Munich is at best a muddled prayer for peace whose weakness stems not from its politics but from the misconception of its main character. Avner is not just a fictional character, but an absurdly improbable expression of Spielbergian schmaltz.

140 minutes of flat vignette, as dreary and uninvolving as the driving rain that never lets up on the benighted streets of Limerick.

Glazer shoots with the dreamy impressionism much favored in his principal line of work, all floaty slo-mos and in-your-face close-ups punctuated by a hard-driving rock score.

As dull to listen to as it is gorgeous to look at.

Improbably, Read My Lips escapes the cynicism of much contemporary neo-noir, if only by a hair, by ending as a love story of delightful crackpot idealism, in which Paul has made a crook and a hussy out of Carla, and she's made a gentleman out of him.

Drowns in baroque mise en scène camp, frenetic musical numbers and a precious dialogue conceit that wears out its welcome very fast.

A sophisticated and beautiful feature debut.

Like the decent B-movie director that he is, Hyams tosses in two gripping car chases and blows up a few more vehicles for good measure. But otherwise, there's little in this pointless rehash to distract audiences from the pleasure of watching Tamblyn.

Like "Heat," Collateral will doubtless go down in film history as the noir marvel it undoubtedly is, but I don't quite buy its characters, and I came out of the theater still wondering what it had to say. Me, I have a soft spot for that old ’60s radical.

Anatomy of Hell offers one of the most hateful and mechanical representations of sexuality I've ever seen.

Though the movie looks gorgeous, glittering with the monochromatic beauty of noir transposed into the key of yellow, it chugs along like an overly responsible documentary, more the working out of an idea about the gambler's true nature than a story.

I was with Roger Dodger all the way until its vile hero had an 11th-hour burst of insight that defied all belief. I didn't buy it, but I do want his therapist's phone number.

No new narrative ground is broken, but there's a lived-in, musical feel to this tale of a fiercely independent, thoroughly screwed-up building contractor (Ashley Judd, in a pleasing return to the directness of her first significant role, in Victor Nunez's "Ruby in Paradise").

The film is as lively as a cricket and often very funny, but it's not for the cyberpunk crowd.

Slovenly writing by Shondra Rimes doesn't help, and the movie bows out with an omigod-we-forgot-the-feminism twist — too little, too late to redeem this lumpish excuse for a contemporary fairy tale.

This gifted actress (Charlize Theron), who hasn't always chosen her roles well, treats this as her big chance to show what she can do, and she's convincing enough that you're not constantly looking for a Hollywood star of more than average pulchritude under all the cosmetic baggage.

Its suggestion that Israel, of all nations, should know better than to persecute minorities within and across its borders, give the film a thrilling universal appeal.

A warped, but beautiful and strangely hopeful, coming-of-age tale.