Ella Taylor

The predicaments of this whiny, unprepossessing crew inspire about as much sympathy as a celebrity divorce.

The Host is a miracle of breathless play with form and tone that also seethes with attitude and ideas, from pure movie love to pointed sociopolitical commentary to a bleak existentialism about the inherent cruelty of our world.

The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries.

Enjoyably shameless confection.

The movie is casually, glamorously multiracial, and Washington is great fun, but the final glory belongs to actor John Billingsley, who plays one of those rumpled minor characters plugged into thrillers to keep you guessing whether they're light relief or something more sinister, and who, in a few memorably funny scenes, shuffles away with the movie.

A pretty decent action picture.

Raymond De Felitta's directing is straightforward, tactful, lyrical where necessary and never mawkish, and though Reiser's script offers no grand insights, it's full of sharply observed and funny detail.

Some amusing new characters are added (love the Russian doorman), and the 2-D animation, simple and serviceable after a tortured production history, is fine. But the jewel in the movie’s crown is its gorgeous pastel palette, alternating with warm earth tones.

Undisciplined and overstuffed with enough surplus plot twists to make your neck ache, The Mexican affects the tousled look of a self-conscious indie.

If Steven Spielberg's emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his honorably flawed new film might qualify for one of the greatest-ever American WWII movies.

You can see what's coming five minutes into the movie, but capable acting lends it a certain superficial charm.

An uproarious and appalling piece of consciousness-raising.

By turns merry, tough-minded and sweetly nostalgic.

"Nothing happening" is everything happening between the lines, in the gap created between what is unstated onscreen and what we bring to the story ourselves.

Imamura has said that Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is a poem to the enduring strengths of women. It may also be the best sex comedy about environmental pollution ever made.

If Zhou Yu’s Train is finally no more than whimsy, it’s classy, delicate whimsy, a testament to the way romantic love, however unsatisfied, continues to drive itself.

A schizoid monster slapped together by uneasy bedfellows.

Tuck Everlasting is a wise and beautiful poem to the idea that the fundamental human tragedy is not death, but the unlived life.

Under the Skin is distinguished, like so much contemporary Iranian cinema, by the way its striking visuals and strategic use of sound tell the underlying story.

Jaoui's insights into the human struggle to find meaningful ways to live may not be especially profound, but she brings a warm particularity and a tough but tender compassion to her studies of congenital human discontent and the crazy, often self-defeating ways in which we strive to complete ourselves. If that's bourgeois, we might all plead guilty.

Confidence grooves on the giddy joy of storytelling -- on the digressive whimsy of good dialogue, on playful editing, on the ways in which con men -- and filmmakers -- psych out their victims.

The filmmakers are pretty nimble at filling the screen with snappy graphics and canny editing to keep you alert and amused.

Yet for all its willful blurring of the lines between documentary and fiction, Assisted Living is the least self-conscious of movies.

Martel's off-the-cuff candor and intelligent eye for the quietly telling detail charts the progressive rot not only of a family, but of an entire social class.

There's some funny erotic business with gas masks, but neither that nor the unfolding love story is quite as engrossing as the raucous bunch of former Soviet citizens.

An amiable and colorful, if dewy-eyed, documentary.

An engaging biopic that would totally lack surprise were it not for Reese Witherspoon, and a healthy touch of ambivalence about the populist myth that bound The Man in Black to his adoring public.

A haunting tale of the physical survival and emotional confusion of children who were simultaneously required to build a new life and hold fast to the memory of an old one, in the hope of resuming it after the war.