Jami Bernard

Deliriously inventive.

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.

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.

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."

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.

It's a Master "Plan."

The movie elevated the basic gangster picture into what became known as the niche genre of poetic realism. And, aside from Garbo, never have key lights on a star's face caused so much swooning among fans.

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

You can't look away, not only because the carnage is so masterfully photographed, but because the director sucks you into his bleak, poetic, even sensible vision of cosmic brutality. Not for the faint-hearted!

An immensely uplifting movie whose final, unforgettable frames come as close as anything to answering the big questions about why we bother in a dog-eat-dog world.

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

It's an amazing slice-of-life story that will make you want to rush home and hug the kids.

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.

If only there were a surefire way to describe Guy Maddin's films without scaring off viewers. The quirky Canadian is a genius who produces haunting, exquisitely droll movies that defy explanation.

The perfect sci-fi movie for a post-9/11 world, in that it tells us we're afraid of threats hiding in plain sight.

The white-knuckle center of the movie is Sean Penn, who gives an utterly raw performance as Jimmy, father of the dead girl. It's one of the few times that a parent's grief has felt real on the screen through all its ugly permutations.

A perfect blend of summer action, a big movie with a deeply personal story.

What fans want are good movies. This one isn't particularly funny or romantic, but it's gripping and tragic. It asks some nasty, yet profound, questions about human desire and behavior.

When director Stephen Frears worked with (Jack Black), he must have yelled "Let 'er rip!" instead of "Action!"

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

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]

This romantic comedy is about a love that is destined to be, and it celebrates that warm huddle of caring and craziness called family.

No other mainstream movie has so openly tackled the subject of female sexual experience.

An impressive portrait of the migraine of teenage girlhood, and also works on the more modest level of teen romance.

The results are impressive. Maybe, as the U.S. falls abysmally behind other nations in the sciences, it will get kids interested in that field again.

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

Has a great deal of empathy for that excruciating limbo that is female adolescence.

A charmer with an attractive cast and an excellent soundtrack.