Jami Bernard

Turns out to be a thoughtful, beautifully acted story about feeling alive before it's too late to feel anything.

Buscemi wittily captures the desperation of lives gone downhill in prettified surroundings although, like the Trees Lounge patron who suddenly stops breathing, the audience feels the life force slowly being sucked out. [11 Oct 1996, p.70]

This is a movie full of tin-eared humor and situations too contrived to give romance a toehold.

Farmiga is excellent as a woman who is like the mouse she feeds to her son's pet snake - trapped and about to be eaten alive by ordinary circumstance.

This Asian-flavored Hitchcock is a complicated tale with no easy answers.

Matt Damon's performance isn't bad, but it pales in comparison with Law's.

The performance of the movie is Liev Schreiber as Shaw, a man howlingly uncomfortable in his own skin.

Impressionistic and open to interpretation, which is a kind way of saying that there's no way to figure out the ending.

A marvelous cross between "Secretary" and "Lost in Translation."

One of the small pleasures of the movie is likely to escape American audiences. The bank robber is played by Johnny Hallyday, a pop icon of great magnitude in France, and the old man is played by Jean Rochefort, an acting staple of that country's cinema. The mere juxtaposition of these two personalities forms a comic set of expectations.

What keeps these mother-daughter tumbleweeds from drifting right out of consciousness is the unique rapport between the actresses.

The plot is intricate and tight. The preamble is a bit challenging to sort out. But the movie's engine is the relationships and the characters' inner lives, all of it boiling with emotional intensity.

A fascinating whirl of politics and palace intrigue.

Less bloody than its predecessors, Lady Vengeance wraps up with a killer (literally) finale that calls into question the killer instinct. It's one of the reasons Park's brutal films are so emotionally rewarding.

The best part of Zatoichi is its fine sense of rhythm, culminating in a galvanizing clog-dance finish.

Shrek 2 delivers more fun than there is slime in a green ogre's swamp. Much of that is thanks to Antonio ­Banderas, who runs away with Shrek 2 on little cat feet.

Its shapelessness and the cultural differences in acting style will keep this version filed under "cult oddity."

The best part is during the closing credits. Dustin Hoffman does a brilliant, dead-on impression of Evans that captures the essence of the man more than all the self-serving grandiosity that preceded it.

Some of the simplest shots give you the full picture of the price these guys paid for their dreams.

Moll clearly has looked to Hitchcock and Clouzot for inspiration. There are sexual undercurrents between characters, psychological quirks and a murky veneer like the surface of the pool in "Diabolique."

Simple, joyful and downright innocent movie.

Features an absurdist sensibility that ultimately melts your heart. It's certainly one of the stranger movies you'll see.

A pleasant romp through the land of Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.

Yet another film from Iran that has the leisurely pace, sly humor and incontrovertible wisdom of a Sufi parable.

Gosling's performance is a stunner, although the story-telling is otherwise pedestrian. It is the movie's blessing and curse that it does not shy away from Danny's murderous, inexplicable contradictions — or explain them.

A comedy hit, but its secret is that it delves deeper than the usual summer fare.

Uses social and historical perspective to explain what happened then and, perhaps inadvertently, what's happening now.

A simple story that resonates deeply, largely thanks to the actors' ability to invest it with inner life.

Any which way you describe this uncompromising movie, it will never sound palatable. Still, it features one of the most spectacular physical transformations by an actress hungry for a meaty role. I haven't used the term "tour de force" in all of 2003, but now it is time.

The result is a galvanizing mix of intellectual discourse and guillotined heads.

The mere fact that Shakespeare can teach hardened criminals to search their souls gives hope that forgiveness and redemption are possible.

It's an intelligent, chilling movie, but one that can't quite shake those stage origins.

Based on a true story, the movie has abundant humor and uplift - but it's a heartbreaker of extraordinary dimension.

The suspense is as tingly as jalapenos on the tongue.

The segments are introduced with little clichés or homilies, like "Ignorance Is Bliss," but the fierce intelligence of the script reminds us that sometimes a cliché is the only way to express the ineffable.

It's about the kind of kids who could never sit still enough, unfortunately, for a movie that perfectly captures the frustrations, longings, obsessions and torments of the awkward years before manhood.

A thorough, gutsy and appropriately scuzzy-looking documentary.

Film makers Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker dig deep into the story and its ramifications, exposing how the twin evils of racism and anti-Semitism combined to foment institutional injustice, and led — if a silver lining could be found — to the triumphs of the civil-rights movement two and three decades later.

Holm is dazzling as the grubby little misfit, just a little brilliant and a little insane.

The movie's clever ambiguity allows a number of interpretations. Perhaps it is all a dream, a parable, or a combination of wishful thinking and reality.

The movie tells you right up front you're going to get what you came for: big stars, winking inside jokes and a spin on something so familiar it doesn't matter that you don't buy it for one minute. You're not meant to.

Among the movie's oddball treats are Robert Downey Jr. as Grady's flamboyant editor and Rip Torn as a pedantic author and sermonizer known only as Q.

A welcome departure from typical movies about teens, wherein their problems are external (the prom, status). Mean Creek is an adult movie that just happens to star young actors.

Brilliant. [24 December 1997, p. 24]

Its leisurely pace and surreal poetry won't break box-office records, but will surely serve to introduce Mendelsohn as a major new talent.

A pleasure, chock full of creatively choreographed fight scenes.

A story about people learning to know themselves through relationships to others -- delivered with gentle, offbeat humor.

Beneath the noisy, farcical surface of John Turturro's Illuminata is a thoughtful and unusually mature meditation on love.

Handsomely mounted but disappointingly slight.

This intelligently acted and well-paced story avoids most of the clichés.

Even without much in the way of hard facts, Yu makes intuitive leaps, using animated segments to bring to life Darger's work, and therefore the man - or as much of him as it is possible to fathom.

For all its folksy jocularity, the movie inspires a sense of global patriotism. In the big picture, every little dish counts.

Even while trying to access my inner giggly, dreamy adolescent, I found the movie as irritating as a chigger under the skin. The cast is pretty and inoffensive, with America Ferrera, using charisma and fierce emotions to stand out from the pack.

Washington can bank on an Oscar nomination for the most forceful work of his career.

It's not just a movie about an underdog who fights the odds, it's about following one's heart -- despite the obstacles.

It's a sad, rich story, full of misunderstandings, bad bargains, odd parallels.

Poignant, eccentric comedy.

Although way too long at 146 minutes and extremely confusing in structure, the story of a lonely, picked-on eighth-grader (Hayato Ichihara) who finds refuge in the ethereal music of a Bjork-like pop singer packs a solid punch.

A stately and deeply affecting look at the human condition, told in something like a series of snapshots.

Has all the tense crackle of film noir and the molasses drip of irony that is the trademark of movie-making brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.

The movie is mostly a series of frenetic clashes, dubious near misses and car chases. It lacks the human interest and snowy splendor of the first movie, directed by Doug Liman.

The movie isn't a day in the park, but it manages to close on an existentially uplifting note.

Jacques Demy showed up with the lightest touch with his 1960 Lola, a movie that has been called a musical without music.

Smart, psychologically complex film is an offbeat and effective tale.

The slapstick is broad to the point of overkill.

What makes it work so well is superb chemistry and a light touch. The spray-painted cat scene doesn't hurt, either.

This black-and-white movie features an enduring image: an ordinary couple at the dinner table with the giant, Dr. Seuss-like head of the camel ­filling their window ominously, ridiculously, like another dinner guest -- or like the proverbial elephant in the room that no one will address.

A plague of child kidnappings in Italy during the '70s provides the background for this chilling, deceptively simple tale of a rural boy who unearths terrible family secrets and rises to the moral challenge they present.

This movie is not just bad, it is breathtakingly, spectacularly, awesomely bad. You might want to see it out of curiosity. [23 Aug 1996, p.40]

The eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) can't feel pleasure, even though he's surrounded by it, so it's weirdly appropriate that the movie isn't "fun," even if it's amazing to look at.

Daylight sets a record for implausible scenarios and lack of character development. But let's face it if you're going to be stranded in a fireball, you might as well be stranded there with Sylvester Stallone. Twenty years after "Rocky" punched him into the limelight, Stallone presents a more human-scaled character, and he's charming, even gracious. His acting range may not span Manhattan to Jersey, but he inspires confidence even in material as pre-fab as this. [6 Dec 1996, p.59]

Dano is a real find in this daunting role about a teenager's identity crisis. The subject of the movie is dicey but ultimately deeply rewarding.

Doesn't flinch from the serious stuff.

An informative, amusing and unnerving overview of the history and consequences of corporations.

It's an uplifting movie about the rewards of perseverance and community.

The joy of Space Cowboys is in spending quality time with some favorite old actors who obviously enjoy working together.

Of the several threads interwoven here, only one is riveting, thanks to the performance of Sandrine Kiberlain as Betty.

The whole nutty crew finds it rollicking good fun to see themselves lampooned. But there is an unmistakable sorrow behind the humor.

Knowing that the director is Robert Altman gives you a good idea of what to expect: a demimonde of locker-room chatter, catty sniping, backstage politics, high art and low self-esteem. Altman constructs the movie with the same cross-currents of his other ensemble movies.

Makes hoops look like the sexiest game in town.

One of the reasons the move is so funny is that it is only a few degrees away from real life.

In the end, it's a sweeping, important film that overturns everything you learned in school about the birth of this nation.

It's reassuring to see love and sex in one's 70s depicted as fully replenishing. At the same time, it's sobering to think that it's no easier in the twilight of life to make rational decisions regarding the heart.

Go for the extraordinary special effects, by all means, but not if you want to feel good about yourself or humanity. And heed the PG-13 rating, because this movie takes no prisoners.

Sven Wollter and Viveka Seldahl give superb performances as the couple, a once-vigorous conductor and his orchestra's concertmistress. But soon ... well, you know the drill.

Even with the requisite melodrama, it's a rollicking, optimistic movie.

The title-character's redemption comes very slowly. But if you have patience, this is a stately, beautifully composed story.