Janice Page

It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.

Meier’s soft touch with the offbeat material is surprisingly mature, to the point of maybe being a bit too reserved.

Actually an above-average farce, at least as featherweight chick flicks go.

It needs only to entertain. And that it does thoroughly, leaving us both charmed and enriched without feeling very preached at. Praise be.

Writer-director Im Sang Soo's coolly stylized political satire doesn't provide a lot of answers, unfortunately, but it does show how the future of a nation might turn on a few drunken insults thrown around at a high-level dinner party.

May not be as dramatic as Roman Polanski's ''The Pianist,'' but its compassionate spirit soars every bit as high.

The film's unhurried pace is actually one of its strengths. Entirely appropriately, the tale unfolds like a lazy summer afternoon and concludes with the crisp clarity of a fall dawn. That's not just a farm movie, that's life.

As rich and literary a work as you might expect.

Lively and beautiful filmmaking. It may leave you scratching your head, but it shouldn't leave you cold.

The film means to provoke a closer look at the faces of good and evil. It questions whether we really live in a world that can be divided neatly into black hats and white hats.

You buy "fair - trade" coffee; you assume you're being socially responsible. But now, along comes Black Gold to tell you that all fair-trade coffee is not created equal, and that Ethiopia, the "birthplace of coffee" and home of some of the world's best beans, may be getting the least fair shake of all.

What's unique about this documentary is that it grips history with both hands, shakes it, examines it, and exits with the entire wrinkled contents bravely in tow.

An invitation to see something a little less pretty, and potentially more enduring.

Hits far more marks than it misses. And no work has brought viewers deeper inside the psychology of war. [06 Apr 2007, p.D10]

Maybe the redemptions offered are simplistic in the context of this place, but they make for a dramatic (if heavily foreshadowed) conclusion.

A movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that’s a key part of the joke.

If there's one image that sums up the filmmaking style of Takashi Miike, it's the close-up of a bubbling hot pot on the family dinner table.

New rule: All Disneynature films must be narrated by Tina Fey.

These children are indeed the faces of war. It's just harder to recognize them because they're the ones someone cared enough to save.

It's fair to say that a meaner documentary might have packed more punch. But it's hard to imagine Michael Moore turning out anything that feels as pleasantly nourishing.

There's an honest, unfiltered quality to what you see and hear.

Unusually compelling, even if it's treacly enough to be "The Chorus" in goose step.

Maybe Tattoo is creepy and stylized enough to pull you along anyway, but if you like your thrillers to dig below the familiar epidermis, look elsewhere.

At the very least, some of the answers and observations offered up in this hybrid documentary/drama/thesis project will surprise you.

As a political thriller, Formosa Betrayed has enough suspense and intrigue to pull viewers along willingly. It doesn’t try too hard, which is refreshing.

The most disturbing thing about this grass-roots-inspired extreme-wrestling documentary by Paul Hough is how much worse you expect the violence to be.

Though it never rises to its full potential as a film, still offers a great deal of insight into the female condition and the timeless danger of emotions repressed.

The film is at its best in Utah, both because in David Gribble's exhilarating cinematography we finally get to feel the full power and intoxication of the sport.