Jack Mathews

It's in French with French actors, but its film noir sensibilities have a filtered Hollywood vibe about them. In other words, it's pretty much a mess.

A personal eulogy, from one artist to another, and an indictment of all systems of government that deny people the right to free expression and the full realization of their talent.

The Savages is a TV movie made for the big screen - and it needs the larger venue to accommodate the huge performances of its stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.

A dazzlingly original visual adventure.

A combination homage, living obituary and darkly moody piece of cinematic poetry.

What follows is an extreme case of reverse courtship, which begins at conception and works backward toward getting to know each other, and then moves forward to one of the funniest birthing scenes ever filmed.

A movie-movie of the first rank.

It is not easy to watch, yet beyond the traps that society and the urban culture have set up for Drey and the other kids, and the traps that Dan is falling into on his own, this is ultimately a hopeful story of common humanity.

May be the best movie of the year.

Newark Mayor Sharpe James is the kind of politician that Tony Soprano would be happy to own.

You may have to go back to 1973's "Paper Moon" and the father/daughter work of Ryan O'Neal and 10-year-old Tatum for equal excellence in nepotism.

The characters are boring, the violence generic, the suspense nonexistent.

Personally, I'd rather have my brain invaded by flesh-eating beetles than listen to 10 seconds of the Sex Pistols -- Truth is, I've rarely had a worse time watching a good movie.

It is an amazing story, filled with quiet moments of profundity and more surprises than you could imagine.

It's an antidote to complacency. The question is, whom is it trying to wake up?

Cuarón relies on his ample visual style, and he has indeed created a film you cannot tear your eyes away from.

A solid delight, the sort of cinematic concoction you might expect from a time-warp collaboration between Preston Sturges and Jim Jarmusch.

One of the best things about Michael Apted's uniquely ambitious and continuing documentary series on the lives of a group of British schoolchildren is that you don't have to have seen the last one to enjoy the next.

May be the year's most derivative film, but it's also the most original.

Clever as it is, Blood Simple is derivative and self-consciously stylized.

Features some of the year's most beautiful scenery and two of its most wooden characters.

For a black comedy whose tangled sequence of events is completely improbable, Pedro Almodóvar's Volver feels absolutely authentic. So, think of everything as metaphor and enjoy one of the year's most delectably twisted treats.

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.

The film is at its most compelling when the witnesses are telling their stories, and at its least in covering Pinochet's circuitous legal route to Britain's House of Lords.

Glover, wearing his close-cropped hair in a pompadour and striking beady-eyed, furrow-browed poses that scare the hair off a tarantula, makes it as much fun as a rat revenge movie can be.

Farrell, adding to the case for his impending stardom, locks into his role with the laser precision of the sniper's rifle scope.

The Exorcist is still shocking, but mostly because of its graphic, anti-religious language. [2000 re-release]

Amen is propelled by a most dubious assumption -- Gerstein's belief that if the German people knew of the Holocaust, they'd stop it.