Ella Taylor

Sarandon's motherly sexiness is appealing, but it's Hawn, in a warm and deep performance as the hapless but free-spirited Suzette, who walks away with the movie.

An entertaining tour of this endearing, infuriating absolutist's life and legacy, guided by talking heads more pro than con, prominent among them the former Nader's Raiders who split over their leader's disastrous insistence that there was no difference worth talking about between Democrats and Republicans, yet retain enormous affection for his wit, integrity and incorruptible sense of mission.

It's not easy to spend the better part of two hours with your heart parked in your mouth, but this roaring battle epic is worth the risk of your palpitations.

The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.

A very good new Dogme by Danish director Susanne Bier, begins with several lives in excellent working order, and proceeds by way of domestic tragedy to a full-court emotional train wreck.

Yet the pride and sympathy McNally brings to his characters reminds us how far gay film has progressed from the long, self-lacerating whine of "The Boys in the Band".

Handsomely and vividly mounted, in a palette of period chocolates and golds, Get Low opens with an image of a burning man running from a house on fire -- an enticing promise of Southern Gothic that the movie never quite fulfills.

Certainly the movie is one of Schrader's most accomplished, and most entertaining, but there's something cold and unforgiving about his vision, delivered with a severity that only a bred-in-the-bone Calvinist could muster.

Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.

Born Into Brothels will break your heart, then warm it up and leave you with that 7-Up longing to know what happens next to Zana's kids.

This impressive - and utterly depressing - feature debut is another in the current rush of testaments to the power of the new corporation to suck the goodness from its employees and all who have the misfortune to enter its orbit.

I'm pretty sure that the terrific British actress Janet McTeer never meant to act Close out of every frame they share, but she surely does as Hubert, a cheerful bruiser who brings his own secrets to the party, as well as a monumentally fake broken nose, a kind heart and a practical gift for converting adversity to advantage.

Seldom have form, content and cultural sensibility been so excitably aligned as in this fascinating, exasperating film about the unholy marriage of power politics and global business.

Like almost everything in this clever, brutal and strangely soulful movie, the time and place are accomplished by suggestion.

Despite his (Jeremy Irons) showboating turn and Dench's lascivious energy, it's Annette Crosbie, in her quiet way, who gives the most commanding performance, as the sister who sees all too clearly what's coming.

The first half of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a brilliant blend of the best of Burton and Dahl, with some unexpected input from Charles Dickens. In the second half, the contraptions take over, drowning whatever story remains...But it falls frustratingly short of the masterpiece it might have been.

Designed neither to warm your heart nor shelter you in the comfort of liberal guilt, the movie does what so many style-conscious, "subjective" documentaries have long forgotten how to do. It shows you a world, and stays the hell out of it.

As Dardenne films go, with their slow, minutely observed journeys from despair to faint hope, L'Enfant is a horror movie of sorts, and for a few minutes at least, a kind of thriller.

Kurt Russell is adorably self-mocking as the cluelessly enthusiastic dad in his dorky superhero uniform, and even the spiffy effects lack self-importance. "The Incredibles" it ain't, but Sky High will do nicely.

A marvelous tribute to a heady age.

A beautiful and exhilaratingly clear-eyed new film by the equally celebrated South Korean director Im Kwon-Taek.

Levin crawls into America's woodwork to ferret out anti-Semites of all stripes, then rushes at them with Socratic reasoning -- a futile and often hilarious project, since they prove immune to thought reform, however rational.

The protracted final sequence, which involves balletic swordplay worthy of the famous scene in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," will take your breath away.

Every car chase, every plane crash, every potential drop off a cliff is a masterpiece of grace and surprise.

Quiet and meditative, Dinklage neatly sidesteps the trope of the angry dwarf, and Clarkson, even in pain and rage, is characteristically warm and sexy -- she's our very own Helen Mirren.

Real kudos goes to Molly Parker, searing as a heroin-addicted mother immobilized by the death of her husband, and to a poised little boy named Harry Eden, who's astonishingly good as the 10-year-old son desperately trying to hold her to the straight and narrow.

Unlike most documentaries about arty types, John Walter's wonderfully capricious, wittily edited film about Johnson seeks to make precise all the different ways in which the artist managed to remain opaque.

Some psychobabble ("We're all trying to be who we are") is inevitable, but somehow or other the thing works, largely because the acting, though primarily reactive, invests the movie with enough immediacy and specificity to turn the most excruciating banality into an original thought.