Jami Bernard

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.