Ella Taylor

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

Slow and stately.

Superbly adapted by Fred Schepisi from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders pays quietly passionate tribute to the unsung working-class generation that fought World War II and survived to take up apparently humdrum lives.

Goes the distance to avoid banalizing the dilemma of a reasonable couple unhinged by unreasonable events.

This fluidly paced film, with its keen observation of the confused longing for love, family and stability in an inherently unstable world, nonetheless keeps faith with the Czech genius for holding the tonal line between tragedy and the absurd.

So oppressive is Peggy's world -- Year of the Dog is the best evocation I've seen of how much worse it is to be depressed in a sunny climate -- that when she finally loses control, it feels more like catharsis than madness.

Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie -- handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani.

Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.

Duck Season is not (yet) the work of a great filmmaker, but it's the kind of movie in which a fledgling director traps his talent in a bottle and saves it for next time.

Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.

The famously lovely mug of Tilda Swinton (cast as Kurtz’s wife) merely distracts, and I couldn’t help feeling that this potent story would have been far better served by a straight-ahead documentary.

Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.

Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.

Jindabyne wears its class politics lightly, weaving them into a ghost story about the intimate connection between how we treat our living and our dead that will hover around your shoulders long after you leave the theater.

Replete with false dilemmas, assisted by a dreadfully stagy screenplay and directed with all the animation of a tableau vivant, Metroland is such a draggy bore.

The most indelible moment I took away from Sunshine, in which a tiny figure in a golden space suit floats away from the ship into the gravitational pull of the sun, is one of ecstatic, appalling loneliness.

While Grizzly Man is never less than a fascinating portrait of a troubled Peter Pan who couldn't function in human society and tried to remake the animal kingdom into his own private Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it fails to establish Treadwell as much more than a serious headcase, let alone a titanic figure.

Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.

Too long, too slow, too self-consciously chatty and too much at the mercy of a slim premise that doesn't wear well under endless repetition.

Unlike the object of its scathing attention, Kirby Dick's documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board is merry and bright and loads of fun.

A thrilling example of the cunning political allegory woven into vivid concretism that invigorates contemporary Iranian cinema, Mohammad Rasoulof's Iron Island takes as its monumental central image a sinking ship, symbol of decaying autocracy and the faint hope of liberation.

The movie is loaded with good intentions, but in his zeal to squeeze the action and our emotions into the all-too-familiar dramatic arc of the Holocaust escape story, Minac drains his movie of all individuality.

Going down with the Titanic was a picnic compared to what Leonardo DiCaprio has to weather (an Alice in Wonderland hairdo, for starters) as Louis XIV in this unwittingly nutso adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 1850 novel.

A warm, conciliatory entertainment.

Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it’s not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.

As reasoning, this is manipulative -- as filmmaking, it’s dull.

One of those passionately atmospheric movies, like Jane Campion's "The Piano," that sounds idiotic on paper, but whose ambiance, charged with eros, rage, regret and optimism, is strangely moving.

Directed by Agnès Jaoui, who made the equally delightful "The Taste of Others," this comedy of manners with a serious purpose centers on a group of loosely connected neurotics, all working in the rarefied worlds of amateur chorales.