Ella Taylor

Surprisingly wan film.

Precisely observed, charming and - for better and worse - light as air.

For all the vampires and blown-up cars, you'll see no sadism for the hell of it, only an oddly sweet-tempered mix of hyperbole, understatement and profoundly Slavic philosophizing about guilt, freedom and responsibility.

It ends up sagging into a pleasantly undistinguished pudding. The big news is that Matt Lauer, playing himself, can act. A little. Hardly at all, really. But he’s a jolly good sport, and quite handy with a fire extinguisher.

The movie is thrillingly subjective, teeming with the fullness of everyday proletarian life that one finds in the work of the directors who most influenced Marston in the making of this movie: Hector Babenco and the Brazilian realists, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

Lacking energy and pace and enslaved by a ghastly score, this tepid movie left me longing alternately for David Lean's thrillingly grim 1948 masterpiece, and Carol Reed's chipper 1968 sing-along, with pretty tunes by Lionel Bart.

I'd take almost any colorful-character shtick over the gloomy gravitas that settles over All the King's Men early on and never leaves.

A capable, soulful thriller with a love story as steamy as is possible when its lead characters are Orthodox Jews.

The only player in this tawdry round-robin game who moved or seduced me in any way was Andy’s poor, hapless Gina. Tomei’s an ordinary beauty... But she has real screen presence and range, and her neglected wife is an artful inversion of her Oscar-winning role as Danny DeVito’s pert squeeze in "My Cousin Vinny."

When it comes to family togetherness, love and quality time are thicker than blood, water or just about any other social glue you can think of. That's the admirable if hardly news-breaking message of Rodrigo Garcia's domestic drama Mother and Child, whose official thread is the impact of adoption on three different women.

What a letdown that Vincent Ward, who gave us a fabulous gift with Map of the Hu-man Heart, has made this big old tub of schmaltz.

You'd have to be either an avid New Ager or willing to see Nick Nolte in absolutely anything to get fully onboard for this visually overexcited tale of salvation-by-gas-station-guru.

Garner is no more than serviceable as the tightly wound Gray.

Our traumatized soldiers deserve better representation than this irretrievably ridiculous drama, which will do nothing to revive the flagging fortunes of the man whose career lay down and died after "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection."

Harris and Heche are simply electric together, and "Hill Street Blues'" Charles Haid is wonderfully brash as the venal bishop.

Against the odds of this wheezy material and Michael Browning's fitfully funny script, director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave), a master of timing, contrives to spin a likable romantic comedy.

Michael Schorr's delightfully deadpan comedy debut blew away the German box office, and once you let yourself sink into its gentle rhythms, as slow and deliberate as those of its protagonist and inflected with tiny but significant shifts of pace and tone, you'll see why.

The movie’s glib trafficking in illness, death and pinched little faces to jury-rig our emotional responses (Gibb was inspired by the equally likable, equally pandering Czech film "Kolya") lost me at hello.

Polanski, wisely, doesn't interpret or explain. He seems to have decided that in the face of such meticulously planned horror, the best one can do is get the details right.

To Be and To Have works in the grandest tradition of documentary filmmaking -- it keeps company with a small, specific place going about its business, and from it parses the whole world.

As a movie, it must stand or fall by intense chemistry between the lead characters. Sadly, as co-written by Campion and Moore, In the Cut suffers from a fatal emotional and erotic imbalance.

Excusez-moi, but I'd rather see Omar Sharif punching out croupiers in a casino than dispensing comfort and joy in this sugared-up tale.

Something there is about the '60s that undoes the most intelligent of filmmakers.

Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch.

Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.