Jack Mathews

The movie is filled with sweetly funny moments, but its exposure of class, income and cultural differences makes it an uneasy charmer right up to its violent denouement.

When it's funny, Best is hilarious.

This is Murray's subtlest performance, and one of his best.

Director and co-writer Denis Dercourt infuses Melanie's calculating seduction of the family with a sense of genuine menace. You will not be bored.

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.

This might have come off as both self-indulgent and preachy if McElwee weren't so persuasively earnest. "Bright Leaves" becomes both a mystery and memoir in progress and though the filmmaker does not find the truth he is looking for, it was clearly a quest worth undertaking.

The movie fascinates not so much because of Strummer, whose brooding temperament and flash-and-burn career arc seems pretty routine by rock standards, but because of the way Temple organized and edited the film.

The film should have the edgy wit of "Election" here, but instead is played so straight it's hard to make the shift when things start getting really crazy. But stick with it and you'll be rewarded with a new kind of superhero and a couple of the ghastliest, most outrageous penis jokes ever imagined.

A solidly crafted, entertaining melodrama.

Keane is a movie you might see on a dare, and though I think it is brilliantly conceived, I wouldn't dare to dare you.

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.

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.

The upside and downside of surveillance cameras are explored in ways both funny and sad in writer-director Adam Rifkin's imaginative, ultimately disturbing ode to high-tech voyeurism.

While there is nothing particularly new in the film, it is a stirring celebration of a man of enormous talent, humor and humanity, laid waste by an assassin in New York in 1980.

Though the film is dark and the ideas run deep, it's perversely fun to think about.

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

Has the schematic feel of a disease-of-the-week TV movie, but the connections made between jazz and the minds that produce it turns the film into something much more intimate and compelling.

Shortland's script takes some unnecessary turns, mostly with Joe's drinking and sexual insecurities. But as long as it's focused on Heidi's predicament, it is riveting drama.

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

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.

The performances are first-rate, with the always inventive Macy a standout as the hopeful, tormented Chappy, and Zahn a scream as the lovably imbecilic Wayne.

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.

Super Size Me produces more laughs than a man's gastrointestinal distress should.

The star of this overachieving trifle is not Kidman, it's Paul Rudnick. The New York playwright and screenwriter ("In & Out") has taken a pair of dated watermarks from the '70s - Ira Levin's horror novel and its faithful 1975 movie adaptation - and turned them into a broad, feverishly fey parody.

The course of Martha's relationships with Lina and Mario holds no surprises, but the performances of Gedeck and Castellitto, like the work of a great chef, make something special out of something very ordinary.

Compelling and highly informative.

Director Margarethe von Trotta nearly buries the drama of the protest itself within the awkwardly sentimental framework of a contemporary New Yorker's quest to learn the truth of her widowed German mother's grief and history. But while the film concentrates on Lena, eloquently portrayed by Katja Riemann, the movie earns your empathy.

The greatest strength of this modest production is Jones. ZigZag's autism is mild, meaning his symptoms are subtle, and the 19-year-old novice is completely convincing.