Jack Mathews

The question is not whether the movie exactly duplicates the experience of the book, but whether the movie stands on its own. Angela's Ashes clearly does.

Compston, with Loach's uncanny guidance, gives a performance of such natural power you'd think you were watching a drama-class prodigy like James Dean rather than a moonlighting high-schooler.

Redford has rarely done this kind of intimate drama, effectively a two-character play on the mountain, and he's very convincing. As is Dafoe.

One of the curmudgeonly director's sweetest films, and features one of Richard Gere's most affecting performances.

Laced with flashbacks and stylistic tics, but it never loses its forward momentum, and to the last shot, it avoids predictability.

The documentary fascinates not only because of its subject matter but because the three people - whose backgrounds are individually developed - are so likable.

Spellbinding.

Director Emmanuelle Bercot's film offers a fascinating account of how a vulnerable star might mistake fan worship for something real.

Doesn't so much crackle as pop. It has enough double entendres to fill a D-cup, but it has a premise that would have burned a hole in the screen in 1962, when its story is set.

Offering often-hysterical testimony to Vilanch's talent.

Heights is stage-bound throughout, and the secrets it would like to keep are very predictable. But its heart is in the right place, and the performances are first-rate.

This is an entertaining Western with some earnest ideas about forgiveness, redemption and the loss of innocents.

If Intolerable Cruelty isn't a convincing love story, it's a hugely entertaining one, with comic relief -- in the form of Cedric the Entertainer as a voyeuristic private eye and Tom Aldredge as a decaying law-firm boss issuing directives while hooked up to life-support -- piled on top of the comedy.

What separates Diggers from its kin - notably the Ed Burns movies - is the testosterone balance of its masculine script and Dieckmann's sensitive direction. Maybe we need more buddy movies by women.

As an answer to the spreading cultural virus of evangelical conformity, Brian Dannelly's teen farce Saved! is about three teeth short of a full bite. But it leaves an indelible impression.

There are some clunky, juvenile jokes and an excess of shots to that special place on men that make us double over and weep. But there are some very funny, very hip jokes as well.

Slither is neither repetitive nor reverent. It is a dark and hilarious spoof of those movies, one in which both the characters and the audience seem to be in on the jokes.

"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.

A couple of the stories don't quite accomplish what Rodrigo intends, but most are poignant, disturbing, and superbly acted.

Meticulously researched documentary.

The film's standout performance belongs to Ed Harris, who plays a Boston detective with decades of experience and an equal amount of built-up resentment toward people who would harm children.

Hellboy may be a big, noisy goof of a comic-book action film, but love is in the dank, dark, subterranean air as the bulky red-hued palooka tries to win the heart of the pyrokinetic beauty Liz Sherman.

Fuqua's passion for the music comes through in the clear, unobtrusive style of the film, which mixes generous footage of the event's performances with interviews and archival footage, all adding up to a luscious historical snapshot of one America's original art forms.

One of the more uplifting films of the season.

At the stunning conclusion, you feel as if the weight of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come down on your head.

Despite the movie's dramatic weaknesses, I was spellbound by the images.

Delpy wrote the dialogue that gives the film its forward thrust, and "2 Days" is a wonderful first feature.

The whole movie is something of a joke, a feature-length prank that mixes stark violence and shock humor in the mold of Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." Though it is a far less ambitious entertainment than Tarantino's masterpiece, it has its moments.