Jack Mathews

A small movie that plays like a Western epic.

This is first-rate stuff.

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.

A veteran who was in the Allied force trying to drive Germans out of a landmark Italian monastery asks, "What is more important, a great piece of art or a human life?" That it has taken more than 60 years to get this incredible story told answers the question.

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

Does a meticulous job of summarizing these notorious events, but it is the stories of Liuzzo's five children that gives it fresh emotional power.

There's an inherent distance between movies and their audiences that -- combined with the distance between 9/11 and today's opening of the film -- The Guys can't bridge.

Is the story being told worth a movie on its own merits? No way. Time Code exists as an esthetic event -- either a trick or a treat, depending on your expectations.

Among the unforgettable images is that of artificial limbs floating to earth on parachutes, while below, one-legged men on crutches race each other to the prizes.

A tormented dramatization of the exact same events, and it's as bad as the earlier film ("Dogtown and Z-Boys") was good.

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

An astonishingly intimate and painful coming-of-age story.

Julie Taymor says the idea for her Across the Universe was "to create an original musical using only the songs of the Beatles." That's like saying you're going to create a new element using only gold.

Unlike Glenn Ford, a soft-spoken studio star who was cast against type as Wade 50 years ago, Crowe is a perfect fit. Not because of his bad boy behavior offscreen, but because he can blend charm and menace better than anyone.

The movie adds up to one of the smartest and most ambitious political thrillers in years. But if you find a more difficult movie to follow this year, it will be in Mandarin without subtitles.

Hudson, taking over the role of Effie played on stage by Jennifer Holliday, is in charge of Dreamgirls from her opening scene, blowing away Grammy-winner Beyoncé Knowles, Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx and anyone else who gets in her way.

Sensational...as authentic as news footage, and far more intimate.

A reverse male-bonding tale unlike anything you've ever seen. And it's not the easiest good movie to sit through.

Even without nudity, the sex scene between Meg and Auster is one of the most uncomfortable on film. Not just because of the actors' age difference (Strathairn is 54, Bruckner 17), but because of Meg's inexperience and misplaced trust.

There are many ways to say that war is hell, but few filmmakers have said it with as much imagination, humor, intrigue and humanity as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement.

Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.

It's an interesting profile in self-destruction until the script becomes unhinged itself and has Laura doing things that are not so much outrageous as hilariously stupid.

Pure dumb fun -- horror slapstick that rudely parodies both the arterial violence of slasher films and the topless hedonism of the spring-break ritual.

A vanity project by a moderately talented artist that has moments of real brilliance in it.

Buscemi handles all of this with a casualness that seems exactly right for the milieu. His characters aren't caught up in a great dramatic crisis, they're caught up in everyday life, going over these events like so many speed bumps in time. [18 Oct 1996, p.F12]

The problem is that the movie spends as much time on the boring detective chasing Lucas as on the drug lord himself.

The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving.

D.O.A.P. would be more effective, and more entertaining, if it took a cue from "Dr. Strangelove" and used Sterling Hayden's paranoid, quick-triggered Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper as the model for Cheney to get more outlandish behavior from him.

There is a hint of sentimentality among the pals at the end, but not enough to offset the film's harmless combination of camaraderie and wished-for - oh, how they wish for it - debauchery.

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.

Kempner demonstrates how the star's success and dignified bearing inspired a generation of Jews to fight through the ethnic barriers in all fields.

Gently hilarious comedy.

A sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a soccer fan whose favorite pro team's unexpected success threatens to push him over the edge.

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.

Joy Ride is plenty spooky but there's also plenty of comic relief -- mostly from the perennially goofy Zahn.

While I understand Vergès' oft-repeated claim that he wants to use these sensational cases to point out that the French were no better than the Nazis in their treatment of colonial subjects, it's impossible to overlook his glib dismissal of his clients' crimes and the smug righteousness that rests in the smirk constantly on his face.

The result is a feast for the senses.

Based on the true story of the first emperor of unified China, could be downsized and told as an American Western.

There are certainly glimpses of his underused talent. But there aren't enough of those moments to elevate Croupier above the level of routine melodrama.

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

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.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped has nonetheless brought attention to a nearly lost classic. For more than two decades, "Fingers" was not available on video or DVD and was rarely screened. But it's available now, and if you've never seen it, put it on your must-rent list immediately.

Oddest-of-the-year romantic comedy.

Rather than heightening our sense of empathy, we become numbed by the repetition.

Feels like a college knockoff of Billy Wilder's "The Apartment."

Good music stands alone, and the documentary is jaunty fun.

There is no great story being told here. Mostly, it is a conventional road movie - a buddy comedy even - about the quests of two likable guys. The memoirs exist only because of Guevara's subsequent fame as a revolutionary leader in Cuba, Congo and Bolivia.

Built from a perfect story-telling collaboration.

Remarkable first film.

The result is a long night of confrontations that feel heavily rehearsed and unlikely. There are some good moments, but I didn't believe any of this.

Levinson is so skillful at developing personalities, even among the story's would-be villains, that by the halfway point of the movie, every gesture and expression has unexpected depth and texture. The performances are across-the-board superb.

If, unlike his friends, you don't take anything Andre says seriously, there is a wicked sense of fun about it, and you may even see a little of yourself in one of the characters.

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.

Both frustrating and instructive.

The Specialist allows Eichmann to convict himself, not of complicity in the Holocaust -- to that he pleads guilty, by reason of nationalism -- but as a man unfazed by his own inhumanity.

Fascinating, amusing and ultimately disturbing.

The Bridesmaid is fairly familiar Chabrol country, an exploration of the psychological undercurrent of the bourgeoisie, with heavy helpings of black comedy.

Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.

What we need to remember, what Black Hawk Down reminds us, is that there are no safe missions when you're chasing bad guys. Especially when you have to chase them down a hole.

This computer-animated feature rivals "Cars" for the year's most visually exciting cartoon, but watch your step - most of the movie takes place in the London sewers, where the script may have been conceived.

Surely, this bloodthirsty comic farce about a sadistic backwoods family being hunted by a sadistic backwoods sheriff is the "Citizen Kane" of hix-ploitation horror.

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.

Though Jessica Sanders' rambling documentary about the damaged lives of wrongfully imprisoned men would have made a better subject for an hour-long "Dateline" special, it's still a powerful indictment of a judicial system too anxious to close cases, and then close ranks when someone tries to reopen them.

The island phase of Hanks' performance is simply amazing.

A combination ghost and shaggy dog story that is so well-made and acted you can nearly overlook its murky, unsatisfying ending.

This is ensemble work at its best.

It's frightening because it's so effective in fomenting fear and because it's so easy to recruit bombers among repressed and hopeless societies.

A well-conceived story that is very hard to shake.

The failure of a movie that is so good in so many ways leaves me to wonder if Spielberg is up to this kind of complex, multi-tasking story.

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.

Jonathan Berman's documentary about California's famous Black Bear Ranch is a trip.

The movie never really comes alive, and Crialese's coyness with Lucy's character is more frustrating than mysterious.

Darkly hilarious.

Though we had just heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald, I believed he had done it alone. I still do, even more so after watching Robert Stone's meticulously researched, seemingly unbiased summary of the killing and the major conspiracy theories.

It's fitting that the kangaroo gives the most lifelike performance.

The play's most acclaimed performance - rotund Richard Griffiths as the closeted teacher Hector - is great in the movie, too.

The story feels as urgent as the latest bad news out of the Middle East.

Mostow, with his first feature, has made such a convincing, fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller that you'd swear you'd never seen anything quite like it.

It's nonsense. Even when its big secret is revealed in the final moments, it adds up to nothing more than a dizzy, dark, hysterical waste of time.

Sin City snaps, crackles and pops like no graphic novel ever brought to the screen. Mixing live-action with computer-generated images, it looks like the novels, talks and bleeds like the novels, is as muscular and voluptuous as the novels - and it leaves you breathless as only a movie can.

There's nothing here for commercial reality-TV shows, just history caught on the run, offering a raw and timeless reminder of the day we had our eyes opened to the power of blind hatred.

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

I'm no psychologist, but it took about half this film's overlong running time to figure out that Metallica's problem is that Ulrich is a major pain in the butt.

Intimate, deeply affecting family drama.

Earnest but ambling drama.

Ray and his writers found plenty of material to fill Cooper's capable hands. They've turned what must have been a tedious investigation into a sharp cat-and-mouse game between Hanssen and Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe).