Jessica Winter

Tonally, however, Earnest boasts perfect pitch, thanks mainly to the blithe, nimble actors.

The kind of quotidian pastoral -- about a simple, honest peasant who finds the greatest love of all -- that the Academy invariably finds irresistible.

The Governess is too dirty-minded to fit the Merchant Ivory mold but not salacious enough to qualify as bodice-ripping laff riot. [04 Aug 1998]

The film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.

Remains a genial lesson in how to both honor and subvert womanly expectations.

Arriving just after the best year for animated film in recent memory, Fantasia 2000 doesn't play like a celebration. In its sentimental yearning for a golden age when another one's upon us, it feels a little like a rebuke.

A plea for equality of opportunity, a worthy objective somewhat obscured by non-disabled actors occupying the lead roles. In any case, one imagines Rory himself would prefer a Farrelly disability blooper reel.

Day-Lewis is as rooted as an oak in his character and milieu, yet easefully disengaged from the film's pensive histrionics.

Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.

Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.

A junk-food movie striving to be nutritious -- it's one of your racier Be Yourself after-school specials crossed with 'Who Moved My Cheese?" for Cosmo girls.

The appealing leads have strong chemistry, but it's the wrong kind: an affectionate big-brother/little-sister rapport that leaves a discomfiting taint on their more amorous clinches.

Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.

A veteran of commercials and music videos, director Chris Nahon crowds out too much of the sprawling combat gymnastics, but his film doesn't lack for luxuriously seedy ambience --his Paris is a retro-futurist sewer.

Gainsbourg is virtually incidental to her mate's screeching navel-serenade, which maintains a stranglehold on the declarative first-person mode of its title.

Comes down to two sorely limited and rapidly tiresome characters.

In lieu of vaporous message-mongering, the languid, episodic narrative -- centering on hapless sadsack Quoyle (Spacey) -- streams along by the gentle force of a convincing melancholic undertow, a dejection and longing that's not so much surmounted as sustained.

This sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.

Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.

A genuine consciousness-raiser, but it's less a social-realist narrative than a high-volume rally.

Ledger's deadpan baritone pumps wit into his tepid one-liners like collagen into a wilted starlet's kisser, and the clumsy staging might not grate so much if the tone weren't so self-congratulatory.

Dark Blue World and Sverak's previous "Kolya" were each written by the director's father, Zdenek, and both films betray a weakness for the symmetrical and sentimental.

The film is so grindingly predictable that I was writing out a full plot synopsis in my notebook before it was half over, though the thick grains of Terry Stacey's photography and Deschanel's understated performance add a little kick to the family-dysfunction paces, and Ferrell's dive-bar rendition of the Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why" is positively riveting. Winter Passing should have been a musical.

If Moon Shadow does sometimes overcome its sentimentalism and faulty parallels, it's because the film is altogether unburdened by cynicism.

Having already looted the Peckinpah and spaghetti-western archives, the director now quotes his own quotations, in service of not a sequel but a vociferous reiteration.

A handsome, mostly tasteful production on par with 2001's Bayley-Murdoch impersonation "Iris."

There are pages missing from this fable: Meadows reports that his financiers asked him to cut one-quarter of his original script just before production began, and his fondness for long takes sits uneasily beside the apparent gaps in the narrative.

Dinosaur amounts to 80 minutes of discouraged Cretaceous trudging, punctuated by the occasional fight or stampede and one pyrotechnic coup: a truly thrilling meteor shower.