Ella Taylor

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.