Jack Mathews

Bernstein blunts the inherent tension by zipping everything along at the pace of a snail with a sore foot. Still, Montenegro does wonders in her long silences, and makes her love scene with the eager 72-year-old Cortez look like a hookup at Club Med.

Reilly can play nuts, too, and in a lower gear that reins Ferrell in. They're a great team.

If you've got the patience, this is still one of the all-time exercises in cinematic cool.

Images wash over you like wind-blown rain, fierce and beautiful at the same time, largely shaped into themes by the haunting music of Philip Glass, who is here joined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

It is remarkably, unsentimentally dramatized by Fred Schepisi, courtesy of the pitch-perfect performances of its ensemble British cast.

Energetic, provocative.

Plumbs the issue of sibling love and family responsibility in quietly powerful ways, and the performances of the two stars surpass convincing to reach a level of biographical realism.

Whether he'll achieve his goal of setting the world land-speed record for motorcycles is never in doubt, of course, but getting to a film's climactic scene has rarely been more fun.

It's a human drama, drawn in such careful emotional detail, its two acts of violence -- one shown, one not -- are almost incidental.

As cool a summer lark as you'll find.

The movie belongs to Luke, who brings the heroic Chamusso to life as richly as Forest Whitaker does the evil Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland."

The first pleasant surprise of 2003, a cross-cultural romantic comedy that doesn't stint on romance or comedy, and- - when you least expect and most need it- - throws in some jaunty musical numbers of its own.

The dubbing from German to Polish is off-putting, but it is Schlondorff's best film since his classic "The Tin Drum."

Has the gentlest feel of any movie I can remember.

It's a slight, old-fashioned B movie, the last thing you would expect from an actress coming off a breakout year, but it has a charm and freshness we don't see much these days.

The things you can look forward to, however, are the humor, intellectual musing, emotional tumult, superb acting and challenging adult questions.

Turgoose, in his first film role, is entirely convincing as the strong-willed but naïve Shaun, and Graham is a genuine fright as the feral prototype of the violent skinhead culture on the horizon.

This is melodrama with broad theatrical flourishes, but Dietrich's sensuality is still a natural wonder, and with a new print, the Film Forum run offers a rare opportunity to see it big-screen-size.

As tension mounts through the evening, Giraldi cleverly sweeps in and out of conversations -- and brings it all together in a climax that is as hard to see coming as it is to resist.

This is a pitch-black sendup of a classic femme fatale, a teenage version of the husband-killers in "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice," without the saving grace of passion.

You have never seen a concert film like U2 3D, and it may change your expectations for the rest of your rocking years.

I quibble over a film that has none of the artistic pretensions of "The Silence of the Lambs." This is more of a greatest-hits Hannibal movie, with a thunderingly portentous soundtrack, lots of mugging and autopsy detail, and a bang-up double ending.

By turns cheerful, funny and melancholy, and at all times honest, Nicole Holofcener's Lovely and Amazing stands out in the current run of ensemble women's films.

If you're looking for a bit of an uplift, you could do worse among the gloom of so many holiday dramas.

Seth, who played Nehru in the Oscar-winning "Gandhi," gives a subtly layered performance as a complex, tormented and very decent man in crisis.

He's not someone you may wish you'd known, but he's a fascinating street character.

North Country may be a simplistic account of a hard-won battle, but it will have audiences cheering.

Lost in La Mancha basically catches "Don Quixote" in free fall…It's our loss nonetheless. Gilliam is one of the great film fantasists of our age, and one expects he would have done Cervantes proud.

A "Ben-Hur"-size epic with beefcake, beauty, outsize heroes, flashy duels and epic battles. There are breathtaking vistas, taut political intrigues, dangerous romantic liaisons and one of the greatest wardrobes ever assembled for a costume drama.

Newly minted celebrity couple Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston don't have many opportunities to demonstrate their romantic chemistry in Peyton Reed's funny, heart-wrenching The Break-Up, but they still give what may be the best performances of their careers.

A breathtaking visual history of big wave surfing. This is vicarious daredevilry at its best.

Penn hasn't attempted much comedy since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," but he's masterful here.

Clever as it is, Blood Simple is derivative and self-consciously stylized.

Chinese director Zhang Yimou has made some of the most beautiful movies of the last 20 years, and with his latest, Curse of the Golden Flower, he has also made one of the most deliciously nutty.

Sophie Scholl is the subject of a feature film that has earned an Oscar nomination for a Germany she would have loved to live in.

Despite all the violence that ensues, The Proposition is a psychological Western more in the mold of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" than the John Ford films its stark cinematography resembles. It's about a good man, Stanley, who does bad things, and a bad man, Charlie, fighting his conscience.

The casting of Ferrell and Heder turns out to be inspired. The direction, by a pair of NYU grads who've only made TV commercials and two short films, is pitch-perfect. And - miraculously - the skating sequences are passably realistic.

Dublin-born Byrne and native New Yorker Linney...are both exceptional at depicting characters about to burst from inner turmoil, and Linney, in particular, is heartbreaking.

The Savages is a TV movie made for the big screen - and it needs the larger venue to accommodate the huge performances of its stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.

In the end, I don't know that Delirious has all that much to say about the fame game, but you'll laugh nonetheless.

It's too long, unnecessarily complicated and often silly, but Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is still the purest popcorn entertainment of the summer.

Hurt and Dancy are terrific in these roles, but the power of the movie is in the tension created by Caton-Jones on the same sites where this historical event unfolded.

Hilariously funny, full of fang-popping scares, and guaranteed to increase travel by train.

If you can watch it without weeping over your own predicament, you'll see some serious talent bursting out.

A remarkable and moving account of a part of the French experience that needs more remembering and less forgetting.

This is a riveting story about a man who for years moonlighted as an anonymous hangman while holding a day job as a wholesale grocery delivery man.

The new buddy comedy movie that assumes the names of the series' characters and features the same hot-to-trot, tomato-red and shocking-white 1974 Ford Gran Torino is more fun than a Heidi Fleiss open house.

In condensing Rusesabagina's story, George has undoubtedly overstated the specific dramatic moments; the movie has more cliff-hangers than the "Indiana Jones" series.

Looks a lot like 1950s American gangster films -- particularly, John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" -- but it's decidedly French in its sexual candor and moral laissez-faire.

People unfamiliar with either man may think Altman is mocking Keillor and his 32-year-old radio program here. But, it is pure affection, and the movie is as much up-tempo, irresistible fun to watch as the show is to hear.

The story is fanciful, with grotesquely improbable twists involving the fictional Garrigan (James McAvoy) and one of the dictator's three wives (Kerry Washington). But as Amin, Forest Whitaker's command of the screen is so thorough, so frightening, so ripe with malice that you won't move in your seat for fear of catching his eye.

A charmer, a comedy with drama -- or vice versa.

Hand-held cameras give their surface showbiz relationship a sense of immediacy that, like love itself, has more than a hint of danger.

A mostly accomplished first film, with precise comic timing and some hilarious moments.

A dazzlingly original visual adventure.

This is a family movie in the best sense; it plays to children without talking down and to their parents without pandering. Mostly, it's just good fun.

Other than a tortured apology from Bill Clinton for having misunderstood the gravity of the situation, there isn't a peep of remorse heard from the normally sanctimonious West. And Dellaire's final bit of self-abuse is to blame himself for his failure to shame the world to action.

The first of three planned remakes of Dutch films by the late Theo van Gogh, Steve Buscemi's Interview takes the most unnatural act in human intercourse - the celebrity interview - and makes an explosively funny two-character psychodrama out of it.

This is as bitter and despairing an exploration of the human spirit as any of Bergman's films, and it is just as vibrantly written and directed.

Any opportunity to see Pete Seeger perform, even at age 85, is worth taking - and Seeger is front, center and full-throated in Jim Brown's concert film.

As a sign of how stubborn some irrational religious traditions can be, Hindu protesters forced Mehta to close down her Indian location and finish the film in neighboring Sri Lanka.

There is no turning back; the biggest project in China since the Great Wall and the Grand Canal has claimed its human cost and now must prove its own worth. -

This is good clean fun, with or without the soap, and one of the most spirited entries of the season.