Jack Mathews

Clintonistas may want to look away when Carville and his colleagues lay out their political philosophy for Lozada, or, as he's affectionately known, "Gani." It's pragmatic in a way that defies the needs of the impoverished majority of Bolivians.

The play within the movie is much more entertaining.

What you get out of Batman Begins depends on what you bring to it. It is the most faithful to the origins of the comic strip and it sets up a series very different from the four made by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher between 1989 and 1997.

The setting and circumstances of the war overwhelm the personal story and diminish the dilemma of the title character's love life.

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

Whether you're charmed or bored by the movie depends entirely on your feelings for Amelie, a young woman whose hyper-quirky personality both takes some getting used to and grows old fast.

I don't mean to demean it; it's smart, inventive and well-crafted. But as a feature film, it's a novelty item at best.

Could well end up on the coming Oscar ballot for best foreign language film.

Whether the movie leaves you confused or angry, you will be stimulated to long discussion afterward. How often does that happen these days?

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

No masterpiece, but in a season dominated by films as heavy -- and about as time-consuming -- as brain surgery, a little brain candy is sweet.

Hoffman is a fine actor in a rut, working on a string of socially alienated characters who are variations on the same theme. That's too bad, because the story being told around his static presence is amazing.

The film makes you squirm as well as empathize, but it does need narration.

This epic tale of survival, love and adjustment covers a 59-year period - from 1910, when a band of urban émigrés arrives to start a settlement, to 1969, when only one of them remains.

Provides an intimate, nonpoliticized, uncensored and totally unappealing look at the lives of U.S. soldiers serving during a grim and uncertain period of insurgency.

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.

The result is a charming, inventive, ambitious, surreal mess.

There is a little of all of us in their awkwardness, fears and neuroses, and we root for their success in the mundane as if they were ascending Everest. Elling is still in the running for 2002's most uplifting movie.

It's hard to get a fix on what Hallstrom had in mind. The first half of the movie plays like a frenetic caper comedy...The second half turns psychologically dark.

In a sad twist of technological birth and infanticide, General Motors - with assists from the oil industry, the Bush administration, cowardly California energy officials and apathetic consumers - doomed the future car to the literal scrap heap of history.

Josh Hamilton gives a marvelously engaging performance in this fish-out-of-water comedy.

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.

Haroun is deft at handling the joys and pain of childhood. He neither condescends nor ­­over-sentimentalizes. It is a story of separation anxiety (for Amine) and coming of age (for Tahir) and it's universal.

Does an excellent job of telling Kerry's side of it.

As darkness falls over the movie landscape comes the year's darkest and best movie of them all - Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams.

Miller's film shows how quickly Americans facing perceived foreign threats are willing to ignore basic liberties. Sound familiar?

Beware of movies whose creators boast of the little effort involved. Little reward is what you're likely to get.

"Ghost World" director Terry Zwigoff, working with a depraved script by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, has fashioned the sickest -- and funniest -- black comedy in years.

The film's appeal is for the eyes. Because Henry got to call it art, it's on display once again.

If the structure is a tad out of whack, "No Country" does not lack for action or suspense. Some of the scenes of Chigurh's stalking of Moss are nearly unbearably tense. Bring your worry beads.

Beautifully shot, and graced with another winning performance from the lovely Beart, Strayed nevertheless fails because the relationship between Odile and Yvan never makes us feel the sexual passion it implies.

Working with a doll can't be easy, but Gosling actually makes it feel emotionally real. A scene where he shares an imaginary dance with Bianca, with his eyes closed and a beatific smile on his face, is by itself worth the price of admission.

A powerful movie that should win all the year's ensemble acting awards. Pitt has never done better dramatic work, Blanchett is as convincing as always, and - in introducing themselves to American audiences - veteran Mexican actress Barraza and Japan's Kikuchi are revelations.

The action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon.

Michael Wranovics' documentary replays this sorry chapter in all-American greed in glorious detail.

When you realize The Cooler is not a comedy but a dark and violent love story, it's hard to reconcile its premise with its mood. The saving graces are the performances of William H. Macy as Bernie and Maria Bello.

"Quantum Bull-Bleep" would be a more apt title for the conclusions that the movie draws, but one concept was a revelation to me. One of the scientists said it's a fact that a single object can be in two places at the same time. I guess that explains O.J.'s alibi.

Night at the Museum takes a can't-miss comedy premise and misses by a country mile.

Allen was out of his element in creating characters who feel like East Coast cousins of the Clampetts, and his dialogue has never been more banal or forced.

The best movie I've seen this year.

There's no question she's a smart cookie, but as she herself says, "There's a thin line between smart and crazy."

If there's anybody left who believes in free discourse, the students were clear winners.

A fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Saga too arty for own good.

One of the most inventive, funny and ultimately tragic coming-of-age movies in years.

Miller takes Chekhov's themes and checks them off, but he never gets under his egocentric characters' thin skins.

Ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut doesn't rank among Kubrick's best work.

Among cautionary tales of gloom-and-doom, it may out-gore Gore, but it doesn't entertain.

Though his latest, Sunshine State, shows Sayles usual literary care, it's a very slight work compared with such cinematic tomes as "Lone Star," "Matewan" and "Eight Men Out."

Not quite as funny as it wants to be. Mostly, it's just silly. But as always, the Coens are entertaining themselves first.and their quirky individuality has served them and their fans well so far.

In this candid, fascinating film, Cadigan has the will - and the family support - to defeat his demons. It's clear that for him, the ending is only the beginning, but it's filled with hope.

Good, indecent fun starring two of the most amiable comedy actors around.

Despite being abandoned in the late going by his director, Cheadle gives one of the year's most fully realized performances, and Henson is a revelation.

It is driven by the finely expressed -- if nearly mute -- performance of Lemercier. We learn a lot about this woman and her emotional state from Lemercier's subtle body language. As for Lindon's Jean, well, it's enough that he's there and doesn't require batteries.

A speculative re-enactment of the 1999 Columbine slaughter, told from the point of view of two suburban high school nihilists as they videotape themselves preparing for the last and "best day" of their lives.

The final image of the snow-covered landfill, having consumed the debris, provides a kind of closure for Sauret. But for the firemen, the nightmare continues.

To say Spike Lee is repeating himself is itself repetitious -- he is getting B-O-R-I-N-G!

In Crazy Love, friends of Burt and Linda express as much confusion over their relationship as we feel, and the Pugaches themselves make an unconvincing case for theirs being a love that conquered all. On the contrary, love doesn't seem to have had anything to do with them. She married him out of desperation, and he pursued her out of a sense of entitlement.

This is cheeky sitcom in a minor key, and fated to be a mere footnote on McAvoy's resume.

Some people will want to call it pornography. In one respect, it's the opposite.

Gets too caught up in its escalating violence and strained-to-bursting moral subtexts. It's the blood of souls drenching the screen, and it's a hideous sight to behold.

The incredibly moving post-9/11 drama Reign Over Me proves that behind the funny guy facades of former standup comedians Mike Binder and Adam Sandler are a pair of very serious talents.

I don't know if that makes Infamous a better movie, but it's certainly as good and a lot more fun. British actor Toby Jones is so physically right in the role, you'll think Capote is playing himself.

The black-and-white animation won't dazzle your eyes, but everything else about Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's adaptation of Satrapi's graphic comic book series Persepolis will hold you in its thrall.

The film lacks a certain coherence, and Levi - one of Italy's most important postwar writers - is mostly relegated to an excuse for a sociopolitical travelogue.

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

Passionate, enlightening and unabashedly one-sided, Abby Epstein's documentary is not for everyone. But at the very least, it should be seen by every pregnant woman in America.

No one makes something out of nothing like the French, and in this wispy tale about a jilted middle-age man and the very young housekeeper who briefly lights up his life, writer-director Claude Berri's got plenty of nothing.

Showing as much courage and talent behind the camera as he has while acting in front of it, Roth has crafted for his first film one of the most bluntly graphic and disturbing movies ever done on the subject.

A ponderously slow experience.

Often tedious, sometimes fascinating anthology.

Completely false, manipulative, exploitative and insulting.

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.

Apocalypto exists solely as an action-adventure and a deft cinematic demonstration of man's capacity for cruelty. This is the true passion of Mel.

It's galling to see such a low-life canonized in a film, but it's also riveting drama.

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.

A little Disney Christmas release that comes wrapped in used toilet paper.

A captivating piece of visual wizardry. The house, which eventually frees itself from its moorings and chases after our trio of tweener heroes, is a genuine original.

The dialogue between the captive and the captors gets a little didactic, and the ending is as contrived as it is cynical. Weingartner obviously has more in common with the rich man than the kids.

Given the physical limitations of their characters, Polley and Robbins give remarkably compelling performances, and though the resolution of their slowly evolving relationship is a bit too pat, it is one you won't soon forget.

For a much better film about a similar story, rent "The World's Fastest Indian," with Anthony Hopkins on a motorcycle.

The Stockholm syndrome, that strange psychological malady by which hostages bond emotionally with their captors, is the central theme in this intimate melodrama.

Turturro's Luzhin is a cinematic soulmate of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man and Geoffrey Rush's David Helfgott.

Ron Shelton's boxing pic is long on road work but strictly a flyweight.

Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]

Eisenheim's storybook romance with aristocrat Sophie (Jessica Biel), the childhood sweetheart now expected to become Leopold's princess, is the most compelling thing about a film that should dazzle the eye as much as stir the heart. It does not dazzle.

This is Guest's fourth ensemble parody of showbiz subjects, and though his sketch-comedy style and acting troupe are now familiar, this is his most accomplished movie.

What is lacking in suspense is more than made up for in passion and in sports cinematography virtuosity.

At times, the giddy tone makes it feel like a musical set on the eve of Pearl Harbor, but the acting is uniformly good and it's an absolutely gorgeous film to watch.

Perhaps the most evocative movie of the new year, Campbell Scott's Off the Map, moves at the pace of a Southwestern sunset and ends before you're quite ready to let it go.

Maybe you have to have experienced one of these anti-weather urban cocoons to appreciate the concept of the film, and the prickly people who populate it.

Whether we've reached the critical mass of "misplaced power" is the gist of the current national debate, and Why We Fight is a useful tool in that argument.

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

Like previous films by the literary-minded auteur John Sayles, Honeydripper takes forever to develop its characters, its period and its location. But once it's done all that, the payoffs are rich.

Perversely funny.

Does something no other Jesse James movie has done: It tells the truth.

Much of this is pretty funny, in its perverse, disorienting style, and there's an irrepressible sunniness to the relationship between Lola and Hlynur's mother.

A slicker, faster-paced, high-tech upgrade that lifts the sprightly spirit and the main action set piece from the original while developing its own twists and a new ending that, though a bit too pat and eager to please, is a vast improvement.