Jami Bernard

Director David Kane handles the sprawling cast with aplomb as his characters learn some new steps in this life-and love-affirming movie.

Wolfgang Becker's premise is absurdist and makes great sense as political satire.

Work was never funnier.

The feel-good movie of the summer. And the song this pimp works up, about how hard it is to manage a stable of ho's, is catchy and moving.

Kinetic, sexy and full of meaningful coincidences and intertwined fates.

Too bad Heaven creeps into town when it deserved more fanfare. Consider it buried treasure, a thriller for the art- house crowd.

Thrillers have become so gnawingly generic that The Bourne Identity wakes the senses without leaning on cliché and soundtrack.

Exquisitely moving story.

The four ladies of Friends With Money are people I wouldn't want to ride the bus with (not that some of them would be caught dead on public transportation). They're whiners with little self-knowledge. Perhaps that's what holds them together, but it's not pretty.

A substantial improvement over "X-Men," in many ways, especially in visual and specialeffects departments.

The overall result is a romantic comedy that indulges fantasies, calms insecurities (can an ordinary bloke stack up?), and breaks and mends hearts with surgical precision.

A magnificent looking and occasionally very silly Chinese Western.

And still the dialogue is astonishingly feeble, the acting unforgivably wooden. To paraphrase Yoda, the only creature with ­truly human dimensions ever since Harrison Ford's cowboy-mechanic Han Solo departed the galaxy: Bored I am.

A gripping thriller whose terror -- unfortunately -- comes from real life.

Don't see The Inheritance if you're already depressed. This airless downer from Danish director Per Fly is about an heir who makes one wrong decision from which even lousier decisions effortlessly flow.

This South Korean political satire might not have historical resonance for American audiences -- it's loosely based on the 1979 assassination of dictator Park Chunghee by his own people -- but it takes the same comically dim view of governmental power and procedure as "Dr. Strangelove."

With his haggard good looks and bearish presence, Nolte is the main event in this colorful three-ring circus of a heist picture.

If there's a soft spot in your heart for the sword-&-sandal epic -- and from the star rating above, I think you can guess where I stand -- then you'll swoon with giddy delight over Gladiator.

An excellent movie about a real-life nail-biter, forcefully acted, true to its period and directed with clarity.

Little internal logic and too many signposts. It's easy to see who in the neighborhood knows more than they're letting on, even without X-ray vision or ESP.

The information here isn't necessarily new, but it is packaged in an acid-tongued way along with powerhouse visuals that drive home the filmmaker's nakedly political views.

The darkest, most thrilling entry yet in the movie franchise.

It's like a walking tour inside the head of a deeply troubled, deeply talented young man, where most of the systems have already shut down.

This is a sophisticated and unsettling documentary marred only by a voice-over taken from the writings of Jamaica Kincaid.

The crime isn't that the movie's message is amoral, but that it goes totally unexamined, as if the recess bell rang too early.

Delightful and moving - although fanciful.

The movie pulls off the trick of blurring the distinctions between romantic and platonic attractions across the generations.

It won't cure the ills of the world, but it doesn't need to. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie is adorable in its own spongy way.

While it's not quite as satisfying as Chabrol's underappreciated "Merci pour le chocolat" (2000), it's still nasty fun at the expense of the upper middle class.

As documentaries go, Watermarks is nothing special. But the women who inhabit it are sensational.

There are so many balls in the air in the cheerfully violent Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you'll want to wear a helmet for fear they'll all come crashing down.

Sometimes veers off into preciosity. But it offers something rare in the bond between Andrew and Sam.

A perversely enjoyable entry in that new genre, the biopic of the tawdry TV personality.

A darkly brilliant sci-fi movie about emotions so deep, the story could be taking place within the chambers of the heart instead of an arid space station. At the same time, it is a coldly theoretical piece that could leave viewers unengaged.

Grueling and bleak, but not unintelligent...although it's hardly groundbreaking just because everyone's face gets pulpy.

It's a triumph of the human spirit that so many people in deadly jobs are able, nevertheless, to marry and have a few happy moments despite lives of hellish labor. Glawogger's intrepid camera finds both the shame and the grace in it.

Rock School celebrates music, family, hard work and, yes, Paul Green. Best of all, it shows the flexibility of children to learn and adapt -- even when their teacher is nuts.

Sharp, erotic performances are the mainstay of Olivier Assayas' unnerving Demonlover, a visually stylish movie that equates and fuses high-stakes corporate negotiations with the video-game mentality.

An amusing and unusually compassionate look at today's corporate culture.

Aside from conspiracy theories, Kasparov's undoing inspires a fascinating discourse on genius, competition, humanity and the ghost in the machine.

Viard plays one of the most intriguing female characters in recent film from either side of the Atlantic.

Blood, grotesquerie and humor mix equally in the first two, but the full combo makes a savory witches' brew for Asian-cinema cultists (or Halloween lovers in need of a gore fix).

It's hard to imagine anyone other than Keaton pulling this off.

Nearly scrapes the bottom of the cracker barrel in search of suspense, now that the humans accept the polite mouse as one of their own.

This movie is for select tastes. It's not the fusillade of porn that wears you down, but the melancholy of watching an unremarkable man glide down the tubes as if on a water slide.

The weak story and bland hero are no match for the increasingly exciting visuals, while the score by Steve Jablonsky should be on exhibit in the Hall of Lead.

Concludes in a shower of ashes, which is fitting because this movie is a billowing bonfire of ugly human behavior. Rarely have there been so many characters in need of timeouts, cold showers or house arrests.

A brilliant example of the genre -- with romantic subplots to boot.

Director and co-writer Gurinder Chadha continues in the vein of her previous movies, "What's Cooking?" and "Bhaji on the Beach," exploring with humor and compassion how cultures adapt in foreign climes.

A daring feminist movie that, while straightforward to a fault, is a rare opportunity to sample a female point of view from Iran, where such a thing is usually a veiled subject.

The production is as gaily colored as the margaritas, but the overall result is wan.

Strangely unengaging.

With We Don't Live Here Anymore, it's the audience that may want to leave and start a new life.

Soldier's Daughter is at its best when alluding to the quasi- romantic attachments and undefined crushes that develop in small groups and keep the engines whirring. The inchoate longings go round and round, as subtly as befits the movie's rather smallish canvas. [18 Sep 1998, Pg.57]

This drama offers a chuckle at every turn.

Cho is funnier — and raunchier — in this, her second concert film, than in 2000's "I'm the One That I Want," even if she doesn't break any new comedic ground.

It's a wonderfully silly family movie that holds its audience in high regard.

Best of all, and worth the price of admission, is Cedric the Entertainer.

A delightful and endearing romantic comedy with the shape and resonance of a Jane Austen novel.

A non-sappy and genuinely adorable confection. It wiped away the Scrooge in me for 90 enchanting minutes.

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.

The supporting cast, including Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne and gorgeous Maggie Q, is underused, but the movie delivers the goods.

Garcia's somber narration is a turnoff, but this plucky little diatribe gets you thinking about the larger implications facing future generations.

Old-fashioned comedy-drama.

Busch lovingly and meticulously channels such grand dames as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Norma Shearer in a way that surpasses imitation, camp and drag show. He captures their essence, and therefore the essence of cinema itself.

It's a fanciful tale, but the message is sweet - that the higher arts speak a universal language that transcends politics and ignorance.

If the movie doesn't ultimately transport us to places The Wizard of Oz once took us, that may be partly because "The Sorcerer's Stone" is just the first chapter, with more magic waiting to be parceled out in the coming years.

Perhaps not since Truffaut's "The Story of Adele H" has thwarted love been rendered so compassionately on the screen, its psychology laid bare.

A no-frills, homespun documentary that gives so much more than its humble technical credits would suggest.

(Rourke's) nearly unrecognizable presence is characteristic of the odd pockets of talent (and, sometimes, lint) in Steve Buscemi's film.

Many of the right elements -- the '40s look, the melodrama, the love that transcends reason.

Disturbing, visually stunning thriller.

May actually appeal more to women than men because of the steely heroine, the pitting of love of family against love of filthy lucre -- and the mom-fights-back plot.

The strong script (with updated flourishes by "Bad Santa" writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa) and some of the vibrant child characters pull it through, with the comically reptilian Thornton egging them on with one inappropriate shocker after another.

A worthy addition to what must take up a whole section of the video store - the heartwarming comedy that reaffirms the power of personal choice, while also promising to love and to cherish even the most hidebound cultures.

Cross-dressing and the Irish Troubles don't mix well in Neil Jordan's cloying, fanciful Breakfast on Pluto.

A fascinating, somewhat frightening documentary.

A beautifully composed tone poem about unspoken group dynamics in an isolated community. It is also, in its way, about how love endures.

The sensuous visuals, shot in high-definition video, complement the waking-dream quality of a sometimes confusing story.

Kingsley seems determined to rescue this old chestnut of a character from Jewish stereotypes, but to what end? Oliver's boyhood has become worse than Dickensian - it's bland.

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

We Were Soldiers works. The action is well-staged and realistic. And Gibson is a commanding presence in a role that has more shadings and stature than his usual action heroes.

Has something to add about the toll Western society takes on spiritual values, and the ugliness of consumerism.

Apt to scare kids. [18 December 1998, p.72]

Bai Ling plays a resourceful prostitute from a Malaysian refugee camp who grows harder and more alienated by the day. Nick Nolte, Tim Roth and Temuera Morrison offer strong supporting performances.

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

Unlike Patch Adams, Sy is not lovable. But you wind up feeling for him, much as you feel for Sy's pet hamster on that endless wheel.

It's a diary, collage, meditation, elegy. But, unless you're going for a Ph.D. in code-breaking, it's also a bore.

The dogs are fantastic. The humans need more work with their trainers.

Here’s a British spin on the familiar struggle of the couch potato who plans any minute now to get off his duff.

Director Samira Makhmalbaf made this raw and effective parable with the recognizable help of her father, legendary director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

A smart, old-fashioned spy thriller in which the weapon of choice is brainpower.

Best of all is newcomer Justine Clarke playing a dour illustrator. Clarke's fascinating features register emotions at war, but always governed by a sense of self-deprecating humor.

Scary, all right, but not for the reasons the Dallas church had in mind.

It's hard not to feel empowered by Nathalie Baye.

The real highlight is when Bateman and his co-workers compare custom business cards in a grueling, ego-shattering game of one-upmanship that is so linked to their sense of self it might as well be Russian roulette.

It turns out that puppets can tell us more about who we are as a nation than the most meticulous documentary. In Team America: World Police, the potty-mouthed, crazily brilliant musical from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the result is hilarious, shocking and bound to offend nearly everyone.

With a cast of mostly non-actors, the film seems rough-hewn, like something you'd find rusted along a road. But it's actually a sophisticated blend of crime thriller, coming-of-age story and social realism.