Jami Bernard

The movie is set in a gloriously creepy and crumbling Venice. It's the off-season, and every deserted canal and alleyway reeks of bad vibes. Roeg plays masterfully with this menacing atmosphere, jangling the nerves with quick cuts and quixotic possibilities. [16 Oct 1998, p.72]

Spielberg's direction and Melissa Mathison's script never lose sight of the realistic, low center of gravity world of childhood, in which such marvelous adventures happen every day that an alien knocking around the garage is not really such an unusual occurrence. [2002 re-release]

Handsome, passionate and fun. It's everything we go to the movies for.

Borderline brilliant. Tackles the war on drugs from a kaleidoscope of perspectives.

The sunny, funny, toe-tapping Lagaan is the answer to those who ask why they don't make movies like they used to: They do, but in India.

Brilliant. [24 December 1997, p. 24]

With its agile, clever script and winning characters, Toy Story 2 is that rare thing -- an excellent children's movie with no upper age limit.

It took the German restorers four years to ready this print using dupe negatives and old prints found in archives around the world. Their work speaks for itself. Each frame of this classic is drop-dead stunning, the more so now that the movie no longer hiccups its way across the screen.

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

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

An adorable, infectious work of true sophistication.

This audience-pleaser is smart and acerbic. Jaoui has an uncanny ear - as director, co-writer and part of the inspired ensemble cast - for human foibles, self-deception, celebrity worship and female body issues.

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.

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

A daring, teeth-grinding experience that doesn't let the viewer rest easy.

Almodovar is adept at weaving together strands you'd never guess would match.

An insanely delicious animated feature.

The stop-the-presses news from The House of Mirth is the number of fine performances from people you never knew had it in them.

A tart, funny and tremendously sobering movie about the deepest recesses of personal unhappiness.

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

Once in a great while there's a movie that's so funny, infectious and welcoming - a movie that makes you feel so good about America and the people in it - you just want to climb inside the screen and live there. That's the case with Dave Chappelle's Block Party - part comedy, part concert film, part avant-garde experiment, and all of it a joy.

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition.

A marvel of character-driven drama that no serious filmgoer should miss.

A sunny-looking movie about the darkest paranoia.

It's said to be an autobiography, but that pertains only in the loosest sense. It's a comedy. It's a 1920s silent movie. It is practically indescribable. And it is pure genius.

Exquisitely moving story.

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 juicy noir stew of amorality that's the best thing since "Chinatown."

This hunt for revenge is really a quest for self-discovery. The story, acting and brilliant directing elevate Oldboy into a human struggle to know yourself and your place in the universe, and to live with that sometimes terrible knowledge.

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

It's a white-knuckler all the way, with most of that tension coming from the smallest facial expressions exchanged in uneasy silence between compatriots who knew what they were getting into, but were nevertheless unprepared for the moral and emotional fallout of their patriotic actions.

For film buffs and Lynch fans, this is a glorious high.

Normally the sound in movie theaters is of popcorn crunching. But the sound at theaters where Central Station is showing is of hearts breaking.

Pure, eye-popping pleasure.

Smith's gleeful, touching documentary records the agony and the ecstasy of realizing your dream, and intangible ways that such dreams help keep people alive.

Powerfully uplifting precisely because it's so horrifying.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has perfectly wedded form to function by filming Boogie Nights in a style suggesting the grainy texture of porn and the ambivalence of the era.

It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.

Gorgeous, fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful.

The most gorgeous movie of the year. This smashing martial-arts romance from Chinese director Zhang Yimou is stunning in other ways, too, like the eroticism that ripples just beneath the surface.

Gently unfolds into an epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.

You can reexperience the humor and magic -- and the essence of Streisand -- in this William Wyler classic.

A fascinating whirl of politics and palace intrigue.

A caustic, funny, low-budget treat, shot on digital video.

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

This extraordinary film refracts truth through the prism of memory, until what you get is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, full of sacrifice and betrayal.

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

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.

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 amazingly self-assured movie, it percolates with themes and ideas, all held together by the gift of the bull's parts.

A pleasure, chock full of creatively choreographed fight scenes.

Written, acted and directed so intelligently that it stands out from the pack, and is guaranteed to give you the warm glow of holiday movies past -- the kind that celebrated faith in human potential and the value of hard work.

The power of the arts to transcend cultural differences is presumably what moves the German to spare Szpilman, and, perhaps, is the key to Polanski's salvation as well.

The movie is an actors' paradise, and absolutely no one disappoints.

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.

The love and attention Oshii poured into animating Batou's pet basset hound proves that the human instinct dominates even in a movie dependent on technology.

Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.

Harris convincingly creates one "Pollock" after another over the course of the movie.

In making such an appealing movie about characters who are usually swept under the Hollywood rug, Binder does us all a service.

This powerful, compact trilogy speaks volumes about women in Iran.

A droll gem that celebrates movie love with feeling and deadpan humor.

The sniper's life is a lonely one, full of shallow breathing and delayed gratification. Solitary as it is, Jude Law manages to get a little action in the bunkers of wartime Stalingrad in the ambitious but sometimes inadvertently silly Enemy at the Gates.

This winning documentary about fifth-graders who learn ballroom dancing is one of those movies that make the world a brighter place.

Each man winds up owing the other -- and the enormity of the sacrifices they make on one another's behalf are quite moving and have not been duplicated in the movies since.

If there is any justice in the world, Farnsworth will be remembered at Oscar time.

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

A beautifully rich performance by Meryl Streep, [18 September 1998, p. 57]

As strong on action as it is weak on the interpersonal stuff. If Bond can get a new car for each episode, how about some new pickup lines?

Makes hoops look like the sexiest game in town.

"Chocolat" was just a warmup for the stunning display of the male form against National Geographic settings in her new Beau Travail.

The inexplicably terrifying ending is good for a month's worth of nightmares -- no small thing for a movie in such a saturated field.

Gives moviegoers a funny, observant, evanescent approach to the mysteries of human desire.

Bernie Mac gives surprising wisdom and heart - along with the laughs - to what could have been just another generic baseball comedy.

Linklater's ravishing new movie represents a bold leap into the possibilities of technology.

In this cross between film noir and melodrama, there's lust, need, camp and betrayal.

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

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

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.

Clever, buoyant and surprisingly human.

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.

Once Were Warriors has more to say than the traditional TV-movie about spousal abuse. But some viewers will have to pay a price: This is a movie that requires strength and fortitude to sit through.

No matter which floor you're on, the huge cast is extraordinary, and Altman gives the actors free rein to bring their characters to life despite such close quarters.

A sublimely uplifting movie.

A brilliant if slow-paced movie about one man's unwitting journey into adulthood.

A pitch-perfect gem.

Noir has never been this bright.

A great divorce movie. It's also one of the canniest comedies ever made about a certain kind of literary pretension.

Life-affirming story of love, kinship and sacrifice.

Haneke has made a masterly, disturbing movie.

The action is tightly focused and well-paced.

The same audience that loves "March of the Penguins" will eat up this beautifully told, gorgeously shot story of a grieving boy trying to return his pet cheetah to the wilds of South Africa.

Feels like an old-fashioned movie in the way it deals with bold sacrifices made in the name of love, while its setting and chary view of the era's political machinations mark it as distinctly modern.

It's a deceptively simple tale that tackles, serenely and with surprising humor, issues of gender, power, custom and change.

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

In Wide Blue Road, his (Montand) character and the wages of desperation are much more complex. Here is the real lost Atlantis.

This stirring children's movie about separation anxiety is swimming with comic references only adults will catch, thus greatly expanding the potential audience.

Seeing the splendid new version of Pride & Prejudice can be hazardous to your health: There's a very real danger of swooning.

A rare blend of comedy and tenderness whose point is not the horrors of war but the lengths a parent will go to protect his child's innocence.