Emanuel Levy

Mounted as an art film and is likely to divide both critics and the helmer's fans.

The atmosphere is properly bizarre and in moments even scary, but there's no involving story or characters to sustain the feature-length narrative.

Achieves a poetic, quasi-religious tone.

Though there are a number of outdoor scenes and production values are handsome, ultimately it's the narrow focus and chamber nature of the material that lends the movie its resonance and emotional power.

This beautifully realized tale is always engaging and often quite touching.

A top-notch production, exuberant period music and Hanks the actor in an important role cunningly disguise a rather slight and inconsequential narrative.

Off-Broadway actor Tom Noonan, best known for his offbeat, crazy and villainous roles on stage and screen, emerges as a talented writer and director in What Happened Was, an intriguing, often mysterious drama about a date between two lonely misfits.

Intellectually demanding and non-commercial film should be embraced in the festival and arthouse circuits by film students and viewers interested in postmodern, deconstructionist cinema.

Stuart Baird's new thriller is inferior to the Andrew Davis movie in every respect: script, acting, rhythm and even tech credits.

Blends in a most satisfying manner the conventions of several genres, resulting in a coherent picture that is at once a poignant inner-city drama, a rousing sports movie, an emotional family yarn and, above all, a sweet romance.

Like Mamet, LaBute's approach is precise, stylized and detached, and he also follows Mamet the director in positioning his characters close to the camera, as if they were addressing the audience directly, without much depth of field -- or air to breathe.

Few actresses can convey the kind of honesty and humanity that Zellweger does here -- it's hard to imagine the film without her dominant, thoroughly credible performance.

Shrewdly made with an eye for the global market, where the Belgian star is more of a draw than he is Stateside, pic features visually exciting set pieces in alluring tourist sites, putting the audience in a pleasantly mindless state of disbelief.

Naturally charming without being beautiful, Driver brings extraordinary intensity and tenderness to a role that easily could have become sappy.

Followers of Alan Rudolph's career will rejoice at his latest effort, Afterglow, an incredibly and incurably romantic comedy-drama that most perceptively dissects the delicate imbalances of two very modern but very different marriages.

A notch or two above the level of a TV sitcom, Slums of Beverly Hills, Tamara Jenkins' semi-autobiographical feature directorial debut, is a bawdy, extremely broad comedy.

A solid and intelligent legal thriller that may be too complex in its issues, and too low-key and unexciting in its style, for today's market demands.

Despite the imaginative setup and the original sensibility, pic ultimately suffers from a slight, rather contrived narrative and a lack of secondary characters.

The whole film is laced with shards of humor and irony, which proves helpful, considering the basically downbeat nature of the material.

Sporadically entertaining, though it lacks the kind of political urgency and emotional resonance so crucial to many similarly themed '70s movies.

The material is slender, the characters not sufficiently engaging or eccentric for a feature-length movie.

The filmmakers give new saga a freer, looser form than is usual, allowing a superlative ensemble to develop rich characterizations.

The third American bigscreen rendition of Victor Hugo's classic novel, Bille August's Les Miserables is without a doubt the most emotionally powerful and handsomely mounted production of the story yet.

As writer and director, Schnabel should be commended for avoiding Hollywood's biopic cliches about artists, as Basquiat's meteoric rise to fame and tragic death at the age of 27 would have fit perfectly the timeworn formula.

A faithful adaptation that captures the haunting spirit and religious nature of the 1951 novel.

A pleasant but ephemeral spoof that may disappoint Waters' hard-core fans while not recruiting many new devotees.

Armstrong and Jones smoothly navigate the magical tale through numerous shocking twists and turns until they bring it to a most logical, emotionally satisfying conclusion.

A slender story that's not particularly suspenseful or involving, resulting in a movie that's a feast to the eye but not much for the intellect.