Frank Lovece

Heartfelt as Reno and Applegate are here, the film strands them with an impotently blustering, straw-dog villain and a limp, directionless story.

In the end the film has absolutely nothing to say.

Amusing and at times uproarious.

The movie's physical violence isn't gratuitous -- it's the emotional violence that makes this a movie for grown-ups, not kids.

That rare film aimed at teenage girls that's still enjoyable for grownup viewers.

The latest offender in the odd "let's see what the cute and funny mentally ill can teach us" genre, this mystery/domestic drama commits all the usual sins and clichés.

The story's a bore; its arrhythmic stutter of humor and drama, tension and calm never builds into any coherent emotional arc.

In a film mercifully free of the usual warm and fuzzy movie sentimentality, director Maggie Greenwald and her fine cast shatter most hillbilly stereotypes.

Colossally entertaining.

Most of the film's imagination and energy seem to have gone into the clever casting and flamboyant costume and set design.

If you try to imagine a breezy Cary Grant movie in which Grant makes penis and fart jokes, you'll have some idea just how wretched it is.

A comic masterpiece.

The non-action scenes are so pedestrian that one suspects the good stuff is less due to workmanlike director Lee Tamahori than to one of the best second-unit crews in the biz.

Photographed as harsh spectacle in brown and gray with unfailingly overcast skies, the story is affecting and suspenseful enough when focusing on Vassili, the humble peasant youth, and his patrician adversary playing a chess-like game of cat-and-mouse.

A collection of interconnected vignettes shot as live-action digital video footage which is then 'fed into' computer animation software, Linklater's latest film is an audacious, ambitious undertaking. There's a surreal yet consistent logic to it, which is the film's biggest accomplishment.

Kudos to writer-director Eric Schaeffer for doing a sexually graphic romantic comedy about fiftysomethings without being patronizing or cutesy. With both heart and guts, he honestly depicts how that moony-eyed, falling-in-love rush of endorphins is the same at 55 as it is at 15.

Occasionally marred by purple narration; it's also a mite sloppy in terms of time-passage and geography. Yet its mythic characters feel like genuine, hurting human beings.

Sexist, plot-hole-riddled movie equates women with cows and men with bulls.

Captures the way drug addiction gives structure and purpose to aimless lives, and evokes the breathtaking rapture of a fix. All this and a happy ending, too.

This is as powerful a set of evidence as you'll ever find of why art matters, and how it can resonate far beyond museum walls and through to the most painfully marginal lives.

Feel-good tone notwithstanding (and creepy to boot), there are nagging riddles about the Helfgott story that the film has neither the nerve nor the sense to tackle.

The able cast brings these emotionally complex characters to life, while making Shawn Slovo's occasionally lyrical dialogue sound perfectly natural.

This sweet, lovingly passionate story is nonetheless a charmer. Anderson's technique -- jaggy, product-testimonial close-ups; eerie still-image insertions -- is arresting, but this is an actors' showcase.

Relentless parade of tragedy.

Delightful, off-the-wall, and ultimately moving.

Sarandon is terrific and Penn is in top form, but the film is an achingly earnest message movie with a curiously muddled message.

It would have been nice if Hardwick had a bigger budget for retakes to work out some of the supporting actors' stiffness, but he does keep the story moving, finding the humor in characters caught up in their own machinations rather than cheap wisecracks.

It differs from American films about the period in its evocation of day-to-day passion. The power of beauty is often dealt with in films, but not so often its powerful curse.