F. X. Feeney

Of the many excellent animated features Disney has produced over the past decade, this is the one that feels the freest, and sweetest.

Cox's own directorial style is innocent, in the sense of being original without ever straining for effect.

Mystery Men gives proof that satire isn't dead.

Christine Lahti, making her directorial debut, wrings good laughs and strong emotion throughout, largely through the performances.

It's a cheerfully deranged stunt, executed in a spirit of infectious lunacy that powers the resulting film to its strongest laughs, and weirdest depths.

This gets my vote as director Franco Zeffirelli’s finest film. Certainly, it’s his most personal.

Writer-director Gianni Amelio masterfully chronicles the ways two people can betray each other, and especially themselves, in the name of love.

This is such a dazzlingly self-assured directorial debut that it's hard to know what to praise first.

There isn't a moment in the film that isn't overhyped.

The fun is in getting there, and in the mechanics, charted by writer-director Francis Veber.

I've not stopped thinking about it -- weighing might-have-beens and alternative courses of action, as though remembering an actual event rather than a nimble, superbly-realized fantasy. That's a first-rate achievement.

The picture's deepest strength, however, is the fire Fernán-Gómez conjures from deep within himself, as if "honor" were an extinct volcano he could will into exploding, given enough anger and time.

Part poem, part jungle blossom, all brilliance.

Alas, for now we're at the mercy of a screenplay whose beats are too often as poorly calculated as the movie's title.

Fails to fulfill.

Writer-director David Jacobson has an excitingly clear-eyed, unsentimental feel for the intensity of adolescent passion.

Dizdar maintains a knife-edged balance in tone throughout the film

It's a fresh installment in what appears to be a self-perpetuating sitcom of British life.

The deeper strength of Smoke Signals rests on the sensitivity and truthfulness of Farmer’s performance as the ebullient, self-hating alcoholic father, and that of Irene Bedard as the young woman he knew in later life.

Catches the volatile beauty of what it was to be alive and politically aware in the early '70s with a rare accuracy and depth.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons works fast, and the world she conjures is powerfully realized.

Thrillingly unpredictable.

It's great unruly fun.

Williams is a great clown, and Oedekirk and Shadyac give him room to really cut loose, and cure the movie. That’s as it should be.

The sense of loss aroused by the film is oceanic.

Cleverly structured, fast-paced, funny, even moving.

The barometer of the film's undoing is Burns' super-low-key performance, which starts out as a pokerfaced spoof on heroic cool, but takes a misstep more fatal than mere time travel can undo.

Director John Dahl ("Red Rock West," "The Last Seduction") has a pronounced knack for snap reversals and out-of-the-blue shocks.

No parent who's been roped into leading the troops to a matinee need fear being bored: gags are, Simpsons-like, conceived to tickle several generations at once.

It works its magic with such exuberance and passion that the film's length becomes a part of its fun.

The Messenger may be a caricature of theology, but then Besson is a cartoonist of genius.

You come away from Boiler Room eager to see what Younger will do next.

Seen in the bowl's metaphoric reflection, Nolte's Adam, with his patronizing wish to build a great art museum to "give something back" to the poor laborers who built his fortune, is a complex American monster.

The Japanese title means chaos, and that is what is let loose when a powerful king foolishly tries to release the reins of power, in the hopes of enjoying a peaceful old age.

A happy vulgarity still reigns.

A labor of love -- a swan song repaying a lifetime of happy debts to the theater, by grace of two terrific performances.

It's fitting, then, that Dinner Rush boasts Hawks-ian virtues: fiery energy, swift, character-driven chitchat and a tough, upbeat sense of how the world works.

Whaley successfully balances his scenes on a knife-edge of tenderness and anger that was Truffaut's trademark.

Above all, you've got Jennifer Grey, as a rich girl summering in the Catskills and falling for her working-class dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze. The chemistry between them is red-hot, and they're wonderful dancers.

Has such perfect pitch in small matters that, as it builds, it proves no less capable in tackling bigger issues--and what begin as chuckles become deep belly laughs.

Zhang's work is always worth watching, but this is the first of his films in which the sorrows are so heart-rending, its many comic moments so laugh-out-loud human.

The Proposition is a very hard and harsh movie, but it also has a hypnotic, lyrical velocity. As Arthur, Huston exudes dead charisma.

A cleverly plotted, cleanly crafted matinee item -- pure entertainment on a romping continuum with Frankenheimer's "Ronin."

As an audience member, you end up feeling like a sucker for even having tolerated that sickly sweet notion about a father, a son, and their silly radio.

What Harris extracts from himself is nothing less than a psychological nude scene, sustained across two hours.

Among the pleasures the film evokes, as few films have, is the bliss of conversation.

The Godfather traces the arc of this doomed idealism with a beauty that is still fresh.

Writer-director Hans Petter Moland (The Last Lieutenant, Zero Kelvin) has a fine eye for landscapes, but an even surer touch with actors.

Less a movie about stepfamilies than a PSA about how cancer makes everyone behave themselves at Christmas.

This bright farce is spun from interlocking coincidences that only seem far-fetched.

Leonard Schrader adapted the screenplay from the novel by Manuel Puig, and his fearless willingness to explore every corner of human nature serves what is greatest and sweetest in the performances of William Hurt and Raul Julia.

The interactions between the realms of the magical and the everyday are carried off with an easygoing charm.

A smirky black comedy that, like its John Lurie score, is jazzy, dry, and light on its feet.

Funny and light, all the more potent for seeming so effortless.

Chilean-born actress Leonor Varela (TV's Cleopatra, a few seasons back) plays Chavo's mother, who, in her rage to see her children survive, powerfully embodies the film's moral center.

One of the best films of the year thus far.

A superb film by any measure, as deep and harsh as the sin Dillon committed to become great.

This lightweight thriller has an enjoyable premise.

Their discretion makes From Hell less a horror movie than a classical film noir.

It's a disturbing film in the best sense.

Everyone plays their role (and the roles within their roles) to perfection, and writer-director Mamet keeps us guessing what's what and who's who right up until the final minute.

To their great credit, writer Benjamin Brand and director Greg Harrison weave these contradictory variations into an effective puzzle, if one that doesn't quite transcend being a puzzle - it never becomes a mystery, like, say, "Mulholland Drive," or even "The Sixth Sense."

Well-tuned wisecracks and clever plot twists.

Above all, Oshima has fashioned a tale of men among men that feels familiar at first, then moves boldly into more enigmatic terrain.

The film's discretion short-circuits any impulse we might have to regard Glennie as a handicapped person who has “overcome.” Instead, we're led to experience her life as she does - as an adventure in which setbacks are not challenges, but illuminations of untracked paths.

Pellington's sharp, fastball compositions and nerve-splintering cutting style are of a piece with such intelligence, devilishly mixing shock with optimism.

This is the deepest of Jewison's three racially themed films, the other two being "In the Heat of the Night" and "A Soldier's Story."

Astonishingly deep and moving.

Overall, Whitely's debut film may just fill you with an unexpectedly deep elation.

Yet Waiting for Guffman is never mean-spirited. Its weird warmth is perfectly embodied by Guest himself, whose flamboyant, stagestruck choreographer, Corky St. Clair, could have (in less ingenious hands) been a cruel, gay-bashing caricature, but instead becomes a hallucinatory Everyman.

It's a film which aims to persuade us of its truth without props or signposts--and it does so with unforgettable beauty.

First-time writer-director Paul Morrison has a gift for evoking a time and place.

LaGravenese (writer of "The Fisher King," adapter of "The Bridges of Madison County," making his directorial debut) eschews distractions of style and molds our attention to the performances.

Writer-director Sebastian Cordero wrings nerve-racking suspense, and complex performances, from these dynamics.

What transpires is so rich that I've seen this movie three times. The joy of being involved with two wholly truthful (if colorfully fucked up) characters is that exhilarating.

Although this movie doesn't have an ounce of depth, it's so thoroughly amiable and upbeat that you'd have to be in a fighting mood to find fault with it.

An abbondanza of busy, situation comedy twists that snip one's suspended disbelief and send it crashing like a chandelier.

Even as the psychological interdependencies of the two boys take the foreground, the movie gets more and more crowded with fun-house surprises and cliffhanging set pieces.

The main body of the film earns comparison with the military parables of John Ford, particularly "The Long Gray Line" and "The Wings of Eagles."

Mamet's fixation on language is, nonetheless, more effective onstage than onscreen, where the technical and visual requirements distract from the sounds of the words -- the heart of Mamet's work.

May lack any transcendent point that would make it exceptional, but it is certainly a worthy start, and worth catching.

Some critics are badly selling the film short, when the story it tells, measured strictly in terms of emotional power and overall fun, is as moving and pleasurable as any matinee item by Ford, Hawks or Raoul Walsh.

Janssen proves herself an actress of delightful range.

It's a first-rate chamber piece for actors, but Julie Christie brings a particularly layered depth to what could have been a very flat role; a combination of bereaved mother and castaway wife. Her torment and her intermittent joys are so fully communicated that they anchor the film.

Surprisingly moving -- prompting lumps in the throat over what was, after all, a historic moment of the most luminous hope.

Lyrical and funny, Full Grown Men is a tough-minded film about the need to grow up.

The good news is that they've resurrected a franchise with wonderful potential and may eventually grow bored enough of recapping past triumphs to take it in more daring directions.

Taymor has done an inspired job of resurrecting one of Shakespeare's unruliest works, just in time for the new century.

We may not fully grasp what Nora saw in Joyce, but what he saw in her is made unmistakable, and worth seeing.

A fascinating tragedy, easy to underrate.

Inglis offers complicated characters and uniformly worthy performances without falsely manipulating us into sympathizing with anybody but tries too strenuously to fuse his warring polarities of character-driven intrigue and plot-driven treacheries into an allegory of redemption. In the end, that feels like one or two big things too many.

Demonstrating yet again that he knows few limits as an actor, Duvall not only nails the accent, he inhabits the man's flinty, grudge-bearing contrariness with such a furious commitment that it brings out the best in the actors around him.

Here, the volcanic villain behaves like a smart terrorist, taking over almost immediately and holding a collection of excellent actors (Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle) hostage for two hours of "real time."

By-the-numbers Oscar bait -- but Penn does manage, against such odds, to make us see Sam as a person, not a performance.

A reliably solid treat.

The alchemy of good acting under the pressure of sublime film sense makes for a miracle in the hearts of the audience.

Enigmas make Panic involving, and suspenseful.

First-time writer-director Mark Hanlon creates a solidly trippy atmosphere.