Jami Bernard

The sexy, psycho Mad Love is like a Spanish "The Story of Adele H.," in which a woman loves once and only once, to the point of self-destruction, in the days before Prozac.

You'd think it would be boring to stare at Thomas's computer screen so intently for 97 minutes, but the movie is eerily riveting.

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

The result is a funny, tender, satisfying blend of fiction and cinema vérité.

It's just like Paul McCartney's first solo album after the Beatles broke up; he played all the instruments himself -- because he could.

A waterlogged bagel, hardly the valentine to New York it imagines itself to be.

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

It's got style and charisma to spare, with all the characters acting from fiery reserves of self-interest, including Christopher Plummer as a bank president with a secret in his safe-deposit box.

The real revelation of Sound and Fury is how it introduces hearing people to a culture they insist on ignoring.

One of the small pleasures of the movie is likely to escape American audiences. The bank robber is played by Johnny Hallyday, a pop icon of great magnitude in France, and the old man is played by Jean Rochefort, an acting staple of that country's cinema. The mere juxtaposition of these two personalities forms a comic set of expectations.

A gore movie with no teeth.

Smart, fun and mildly subversive, but it rides the wave of its joke a little too long.

The film medium allows us to witness a most ravishing cherry orchard. But the grand cast is given to emoting as if they were playing to the peasants in the cheap seats.

A movie that shouldn't be allowed on the same campus as "Animal House."

A black comedy that features Renee Zellweger as the most adorable psychiatric-trauma victim ever.

Freewheeling and mindless.

The story has a definite ick factor that detracts from even the small pleasures the movie might offer its teen audience.

In its unleashing of relentless, cosmic retribution, The Operator is not unlike the recent "Joy Ride."

A collage without context.

Parts of the movie play like French farce, but ultimately Hrebejk uses very simple cadences to unveil, movingly, the big picture.

More chemistry between the leads would have helped. But Laws of Attraction still would have had a tough case making a jury believe these two unlikable characters belong together, except as a way to take them out of circulation.

Its shapelessness and the cultural differences in acting style will keep this version filed under "cult oddity."

Like a good horror movie, the images, jolts and artistically directed disorientation will keep your stomach clenched...Like a bad one, it doesn't make a lick of sense.

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.

Turns out to be less than the sum of its wonderfully silly and bizarre parts.

Letting any other actor run wild like this could have been a disaster, but Depp's peculiar buccaneer is an instant classic of actorly charisma.

Has some good music and hot dancing -- filmed choppily -- but it completely lacks the magic of its predecessor.