Jonathan Foreman

No "Crouching Tiger." It lacks the richness of theme and performance that made Ang Lee's film so emotionally satisfying. In fact, watching Iron Monkey makes you realize just how Western and literary the sensibility of "Crouching Tiger" was.

An engaging, bittersweet tale.

So minimalist in characterization and dialogue that the plot all but evaporates -- and so does any dramatic power.

Its bawdy honesty eventually gives way to convention, sentimentality and a frustratingly silly ending.

Ed Radtke's film-fest favorite does at least boast some fine acting, excellent photography and an authentic feel for life on the highway.

Meanders along in a confused, confusing way for what feels like hours.

It's an odd mixture of an unsentimental, darkly humorous take on mental illness with the usual Hollywood loony-bin cliches.

As the plot loses steam, director Mark Pellington (whose paranoid thriller "Arlington Road" was one of the worst movies of 1999) tends to rely on cheap tricks to maintain suspense, although the final catastrophe is very nicely done.

The filmmakers have an pleasurably accurate sense of the embarrassments that darken early adolescence and of the amazing cruelty of teenage girls.

Its abundant laughs are heavily reliant on the chemistry of stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson - who show once again that they're as fine a comic team as Hollywood has ever produced.

Slight but entertaining and occasionally touching.

If you're starved for on-screen nudity and sex garnished with art-film trappings -- The price you'll pay is putting up with the director's relentless Euro-pretension, manifested in a tediously contrived plot crammed with absurd coincidences, clunky symbolism and soap-operatic melodrama.

By far the best single performance in the film - and it is really, really terrific, utterly believable and moving - is by Emma Thompson. To the extent that there is genuine feeling in the movie that doesn't feel slickly manipulative, it's in the scenes involving her character.

There are affecting scenes, and not all of Cacoyannis' additions to the Chekhov text detract from the effect of its moving brilliance.

It's fascinating and moving all the same, both in its depiction of Iranian daily life and in its powerful portrait of female oppression.

Despite the high quality of the acting, Spring Forward is for the most part sleepy, long-winded stuff.

Never much more than hagiography that lets the context of its hero's death remain confused.

Poetic but tedious and all but plotless.

There's something oddly endearing about the Barenaked Ladies. And by the end of the movie, you begin to see just what it is that inspires such intense fan loyalty.

It's a shame that, on top of everything else, the second movie version of The Quiet American -- Graham Greene's brilliant 1955 novel about the French Indochina war -- should be so visually disappointing.

This otherwise undistinguished thriller about cloning is the most entertaining movie from the aging action star for some time.

Uneven, self-conscious but often hilarious spoof.

Formulaic but surprisingly charming.

Thanks to a superb performance by Isabelle Huppert, it's compulsively, gruesomely watchable.

Too often seems like a slightly silly film.

Sometimes hilarious but mostly sitcom-esque geezer comedy.

Works unexpectedly well for its first three quarters.

It's only because the performances are so vividly entertaining -- Mandvi and Puri are particularly good -- and the painstakingly reconstructed locations so lovely that the saggier sequences are tolerable.