Jack Mathews

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

Has the gentlest feel of any movie I can remember.

Every once in a while, a performance pops out of a Hollywood movie that is so brilliant and unique to the matching of actor to role that it's impossible to imagine anyone else achieving it.

Designed as a giant put-on, "Kiss Kiss" is so inside Hollywood, so anxious to bite the hand that fed Black, that it plays like an elaborate prank. Some of it is a lot of fun; most of it is a lot of nonsense.

Works on every level. The humor and language are as crude as an R rating allows, but Carell and Apatow's script is so hip, funny and - yes - innocent that it's never offensive.

It irks the ink out of me to see Lane exalted as a hero for doing what any responsible editor would do, then being paid to consult on his own canonization.

What stands out, not surprisingly, is the work and passion that goes into the shows. But seeing all this from the inside creates an extraordinary level of empathy for those involved.

As the relationship between the two British schoolteachers begins (quietly), builds (deceptively) and dissolves (spectacularly), Dench and Blanchett give a master class in acting. Pick your own sports metaphor, but watching them go at each other is the match of the year.

The Czech Republic and Russia, the respective homes of Emil and Oleg, should sue.

Fujimori comes off as amiable and in full denial, recalling the positive headlines of his presidency - and there were many - while laying the scandals off on Montesinos.

Mendes -- wants to have it both ways, to get close to mob life, but be no part of it. And he keeps us at a dime-novel distance, too. He has made a dreamy, poetic impression of a world that exists only on film and in comic strips, and that has no resonance for most of us.

The strength of McKay's film is not in identifying a cultural period, but in giving voice to so many great theater people. Their passion is infectious, their stories are priceless and their humor is boundless.

Like Ceylan's earlier films, Climates is as gorgeous as it is self-consciously composed, but an hour and 40 minutes is a long time to spend with Isa, forget three seasons.

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.

A long sit for those unfamiliar with Proust's literary quest and output, but the view is sensational.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger serves as both a prosecution brief on the above charges and an unauthorized biography.

The result of Moskowitz's sleuthing is Stone Reader, a combination mystery, book celebration and -- sorry to say -- intrusively annoying self-portrait of the filmmaker.

It takes us about half the film to adjust to its quirkiness, and we leave the theater with both laughter cramps and the feeling that it should have been funnier a lot longer.

There is a vengeance motif that is worked out in a way that is both emotionally satisfying and completely unbelievable.

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

The fourth documentary screed this summer to have grown out of the left's frustration with the nation's turn to the right. Keep 'em coming, I say.

America's favorite superhero reappears in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, and all we can say is, "Man, oh Man of Steel, it's good to have you back."

While not nearly as elaborate as either film, Heist plays like a combination of "The Sting" and "Mission: Impossible."

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.

Rai's acting is frustratingly passive in Provoked, and the script is laced with prison and courtroom cliches. But the movie gets most of the facts straight and the flashbacks to the wife's abuse are harrowing.

It takes chutzpah to title this movie Déjà Vu; every scene in it rings a bell. Certainly, I had just seen the same affable-righteous performance from Washington in Spike Lee's "Inside Man."

What keeps the film from becoming obnoxiously redundant is the conviviality of the comedians. These are funny people even when they're not telling the joke.

Commits the sin of a hundred sports biographies in overselling its inherent drama.