Jessica Winter

Begs the question: Did the lads from Squatney trail the zeitgeist at every turn, or were cobandleaders David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel simply in touch with their past and ahead of their time?

Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.

The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.

Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.

The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.

A frat-boy remake of "Pink Flamingos" which isn't all bad.

In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston evokes Billy in Loach's "Kes" and, in the heartbreaking final seaside shot, Antoine in Truffaut's "400 Blows."

Amid the muddy scrubbery of the camp and its hinterland surroundings, Ghobadi catches some striking compositions.

Director Joe Wright coordinates a delightfully cohesive acting ensemble.

Endearing and well-acted.

Often seems less a British new wave front-runner than a charming nouvelle vague tagalong,

Unexpectedly bridges genres -- it's a buddy movie, a horror story, a boy's-own adventure, and a near metaphysical meditation on the limits of human endurance.

A happy ending is never at issue here -- it's clear where she's going, but there's little clue where she's been.

Karine Vanasse, as the protagonist Hanna, is perfectly cast because she has the body of a woman and the sweet, sexless face of a child.

Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.

The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.

With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)

This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.

Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.

Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.

The patient camera leans in closely on the three lead actresses -- extraordinary first-timers all.

Though there's considerable footage of hippie activity (crafting kites, sleeping) and moments of prelapsarian frisson (a cop warns that "there's talk of the Hell's Angels coming down"), the film is resolutely performance-driven.

Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace.

Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.

Unstintingly funny -- far more so than the wince-worthy trailer -- owing to Chan's pairing with droll indie eccentric Owen Wilson, as his would-be gunslinger sidekick.

Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.

Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.

Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.