Jami Bernard

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.

Don't let the slow, deliberate pace fool you. A lot is going on in David Cronenberg's masterful A History of Violence, and you'll miss it if you blink.

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

A richly inventive, slightly eerie animated movie from Japan.

Another excellent example of how Iranian cinema uses deceptively simple techniques to decode devastating truths about human nature.

An entrancing experience for Potter fans. It's a carefully crafted, dreamy immersion in a world that feels snugly familiar even when evil intrudes.

La Promesse believes that decency is an innate human quality that can surface from any rubble. [16 May 1997, p.47]

A haunting, melancholy work.

Gorgeous, fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful.

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

Of them all, only McCartney looks out of place, perhaps mistaking the venue for Vegas. There in a nutshell could be the answer to why the Beatles broke up.

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

This is a lyrical art movie with admittedly limited commercial appeal, but worth seeing for cinematic explorers.

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.

The remarkable footage includes damning evidence of how the media, the people and the army were manipulated. Which leads to that eternal question - if it's not on TV, did it really happen?

The wheezy Mighty Wind can't blow out the candle of this group's first musical mockumentary, 1984's "This Is Spinal Tap."

As gorgeous and gripping as it is faithful to the spirit of Patrick O'Brian's celebrated series of historical novels.

It's a Master "Plan."

This challenging, inventive movie from Thailand is not for everyone.

Apparently Louis Kahn was not much of a father, raconteur or businessman. But he was a genius, and he left his mark on all the people whose lives he touched.

Boorman doesn't shy from showing Cahill as a complicated man who, in one famous incident, nearly crucified one of his own men for a minor infraction. But the portrait is a loving one, full of empathy for an oddly principled man who, in another line of work, could have made a difference and lived to enjoy it. [18 Dec 1998, p.72]

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

There's plenty to appreciate here but the story is tedious and some of the overacting runs into cultural translation problems.

Even the hardest heart must melt in the face of The Story of the Weeping Camel.

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

Jacques Audiard's amusingly stinging A Self-Made Hero toys with the subjectivity of historical truth by presenting one Albert Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz), loser, cipher, liar. But a brilliant liar. [12 Sept 1997, p.44]

With its mystical mumbo jumbo and even a helpful beam of celestial light in one scene, A Rumor of Angels is a kind of cinematic comfort food for an undemanding audience.

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.