Jonathan Rosenbaum

Subtle and graceful directorial debut.

Writers Liu Fen Dou and Cai Xiang Jun and director Zhang Yang move freely and gracefully between fantasy and reality in this sentimental film, which never becomes as trite or calculated as you might fear.

Its particularities are the best thing about it.

This movie has its share of laughs, but it's also Ron Howard's most personal film, and clearly his most ambitious--a multifaceted essay in fictional form about the diverse snares of child rearing.

Danny Glover, as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, plays onetime pianist Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis.

But if you can get swept up in the story, the movie is imaginative and compelling.

Far and away the funniest comedy in town.

Kidman and Zellweger are uncommonly good, and I especially liked the timely treatment of war as universally brutalizing: even the outcomes of battles are ignored, as are the motives behind the conflict.

Fernando Meirelles stresses old-fashioned storytelling and takes full advantage of his cast, including Danny Huston.

Starts out silly, gets sillier by the minute, and frequently had me and most of the people around me in stitches.

The film's storytelling and heartfelt pantheism are both impressive.

The power and reach of this undertaking are formidable.

This 1981 release is one of Brian De Palma's more interesting and better-made thrillers, though it's even more abjectly derivative than his Hitchcock imitations (borrowing mightily this time from Antonioni's Blowup, as the title suggests).

As usual, Lee tries many kinds of stylistic effects and uses wall-to-wall music (by Aaron Copland and Public Enemy); what’s different this time is how personally driven the story feels.

Just about everyone in this sharp, passionate feature is chillingly good.

A top-notch courtroom drama that will keep you guessing if you haven't read the book; even if you have, it is still a very well crafted story.

One thing I especially like about it, apart from the flavorsome 40s decor in color, is that it's silly in much the same way that many small 40s comedies were.

There's nothing really new...but it has craft, pacing, and an overall sense of proportion, three pretty rare classic virtues nowadays.

Combining the gentle with the vulgar as only the English can, this lively comedy is bursting with character and energy.

For better and for worse, this is seductive storytelling as well as investigative journalism, and I wasn't always sure which mode I was in.

This cagey and compelling 2004 documentary looks at the world of wine, but it's actually a nuanced, provocative piece of journalism about globalization and its discontents.

None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic.

Yet some of the laughs come too easy and linger too long; for the film's message to have maximum impact, the laughter has to stick in your throat.

If the relatively prosaic Minghella, making his movie debut, lacks the suggestive poetic sensibility of Lewton, he does a fine job in capturing the contemporary everyday textures of London life, and coaxes a strong performance out of Stevenson, a longtime collaborator. Full of richly realized secondary characters and witty oddball details, this is a beguiling film in more ways than one.

As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s previous work of exile, it’s possible to balk at the filmmaker’s pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity.

A provocative and stirring climax to the Corleone saga, as well as an autonomous work that sometimes shows Coppola at his near best.

What we don’t know about these characters–and what we don’t see in certain scenes–is often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas’s sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density.

One of the most striking of Ozu’s American-style silents.

Sensitive, intelligent, enlightening, and sometimes surprising.

The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable.

Though Hanks keeps the satirical and critical aspects of this look at show biz fairly light, there's a lot of conviction and savvy behind the steadiness of his gaze, and his economy in evoking the flavor of the period at the beginning of the picture is priceless.

Among the pleasures to be found here are some amusing sidelong glances at how movies get made and the singing talent of Streep as well as MacLaine. There's not much depth here, but Nichols does a fine job with the surface effects, and the wisecracks keep coming.

Ridiculous enough to be hilarious, but this didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying Philip Kaufman's silly romp.

This is why movies were invented.

A few plot details strain credibility, but the characters (particularly the friend's sister and little boy) are persuasively depicted.

A nicely shaped script by Chicagoans Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata makes this independent comedy drama a pleasure to watch.

Carrey's attempted self-immolation in a men's room, which weirdly recalls certain Fred Astaire routines, may be a small classic.

The characters (both animal and human) are solidly conceived, and the storytelling and visuals are expertly fashioned.

A worthy entry in the dystopian cycle of SF movies launched by "Blade Runner" (including "The Terminator" and "Robocop"), this seems less derivative than most of its predecessors yet equally accomplished in its straight-ahead storytelling, with plenty of provocative satiric undertones and scenic details.

More than an interesting curiosity, it's one of Losey's best English efforts, and Viveca Lindfors contributes a striking part as an eccentric sculptress.

Spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious.

Provocative and entertaining.

The wonderful Richard Farnsworth plays the lead, and he was clearly born for the part...a highly affecting and suggestive spiritual odyssey.

I was wooed by its sexy romanticism all the way through to the mysterious and beautiful coda.

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.

Aside from one slow-motion sequence, the film treats its subject with few commercial concessions, so one hopes that the horrible and decidedly unmemorable title won’t keep people away; this may be the best movie about disaffected youth since River’s Edge and Pump Up the Volume.

An entertaining comedy-thriller directed with bounce (if not much nuance) by Barry Sonnenfeld.

This is a fairly accomplished first feature -perky, visually inventive, and unusually nast

Doesn't succeed in everything it sets out to do, which is a lot. But as a statement about the death rattle of 60s counterculture it's both thoughtful and affecting, and Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing.

"Sweetie" and "An Angel at My Table" have taught us to expect startling as well as beautiful things from Jane Campion, and this assured and provocative third feature offers yet another lush parable--albeit a bit more calculated and commercially minded--about the perils and paradoxes of female self-expression.

Many reviews have suggested that this is as politically mild as a John Sayles movie, but Linklater clearly agrees with the frustrated kid who says, "Right now, I can't think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act."

Hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas.

Not even the crude ethnic humor--Billy Crystal's Mel Brooks-ish Miracle Max--pricks the dream bubble, and the spirited cast has a field day.

This taut thriller adds so many twists of its own it might be more appropriately cross-referenced with The Manchurian Candidate, even though it isn't nearly as daffy or as mercurial.

Still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn.

An adroit piece of storytelling from Irish writer-director Neil Jordan that's ultimately less challenging to conventional notions about race and sexuality than it may at first seem... The three leads are first-rate.

McDormand has never been better, but all the performances are interestingly nuanced, including Natascha McElhone's as one of Bale's fellow psychiatric interns.

In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.

The special effects are beautifully handled and the reflections on death attractively peaceful.

The cast - including Derek Jacobi as the modern-dress chorus, Paul Scofield, Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Emma Thompson, and Robbie Coltrane in an effective cameo as Falstaff - is uniformly fine without any grandstanding.

I'm not sure what it all means, but, as in Ed Wood, Burton's visual flair and affection for the characters make it fun.

The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling's Method acting with Hopkins's more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.

The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.

The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars.

It's more than a simple improvement, inverting some of the original's qualities so that the impersonal, well-crafted filmmaking remains lucid throughout.

Greengrass takes pains to keep events believable and relatively unrhetorical, rejecting entertainment for the sake of sober reflection, though one has to ask how edifying this is apart from its reduction of the standard myths.

The virtue of this play and the film of this play is that many readings and meanings are possible. The same can’t be said for the propositions of its detractors, who merely want to sweep an enduring and potent form of liberal protest under the carpet.

This is probably Alan Parker's best film, in part because it's one of his most modest.

Since the virtues of heroism and decency it celebrates are universal, I hope it doesn't get absorbed into the dubious agitprop of American exceptionalism.

Puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone.

Prince himself, passing through a spectrum of costumes and sexual roles, is never less than commanding, as performer, composer, and director.

If you can accept the flouting of logic and credibility that usually goes with this kind of horror picture, this scary and suspenseful genre exercise, chock-full of false alarms and brutal shocks, really delivers.

To my taste, the only serious drawback to this absorbing film is Harris's unimaginative adherence to documentary convention, which obliges him to "illustrate" the voice-overs even when the material matches the narratives only in fictional terms.

Stylistically, it's a remarkable effort -- with a continuous sense of gliding motion -- and the film is entertaining and gripping throughout.

Ambling along like a wry, laid-back “Heart of Darkness” this likable and touching film makes full use of Frank’s remarkable photographic eye and Wurlitzer’s witty, acerbic, and quasi-mystical handling of myth that has already served him well in his novels. The results are a resonant reflection on the music business and a memorable ode to wanderlust–with lots of good music (by Dr. John, Joe Strummer, and others) on the sound track.

This 2006 drama may seem to be worlds apart from the surreal theme-park setting of Jia's previous film, "The World," but there are similarities of theme, style, scale, and tone: social and romantic alienation in a monumental setting, a daring poetic mix of realism and lyrical fantasy, and an uncanny sense of where our planet is drifting.

Robert Redford's best and richest directorial effort.

At once upsetting and highly involving, it packs an undeniable punch.

A must-see.

The film is made up chiefly of found footage and therefore lacks the mise en scene of its predecessors, but it has the added benefit of Davies's voice-over narration, which, thanks to his training and experience as an actor, is enormously powerful.

For me it felt like a good many weeks at a politically correct summer camp, though the talented actors--including Cecilia Roth, Eloy Azorin, Marisa Paredes, Toni Canto, Antonia San Juan, and Penelope Cruz--certainly seem to enjoy the taste of the characters they're playing.

The story is so black-and-white that one feels like hissing the villain (Kenneth Branagh) and cheering the heroines at every stage, but it's so amazing that the simplicity of the telling seems warranted.

Despite a hokey prologue and ending (the latter imposed by producer Charles Evans), this is one of George Romero's most effective and interesting horror thrillers—not as profound as his remarkable Living Dead trilogy, but unusually gripping and provocative.

In many respects this is a black counterpart to The Naked Gun, and very nearly as funny; the bounty of antimacho gags is both unexpected and refreshing.

More good-natured than Michael Moore, these guys score by raising the issue of just how much their amateur antics exaggerate the neocon principles of the WTO.

For one of the first times in his career Jean-Luc Godard has elected not to hector and harass his audience, and it seems to have paid off.

It's a piece of disposable fluff -- though that's exactly what's so appealing about it.

If you think 85 minutes devoted to a "difficult" French philosopher is bound to be either abstruse or watered-down middlebrow stuff, think again.

Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn't catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes's doom-ridden comedy-drama.

Mechanically written, but within its own middlebrow limitations, it delivers the goods.

I don't much like movies about junkies...but this is easily the liveliest and most inventive I've seen since "Drugstore Cowboy" (1989).

The high-powered drive of both the storytelling and the music is riveting.

The movie overall may be routine, but Donner gives it some spark and polish.

The broad Italian family humor gets so thick at times that you could cut it with a bread knife.

It's gripping and provocative, making effective use of Charles Berling and the music of Sonic Youth, though I wish it were a little less indebted to David Cronenberg's "Videodrome."

Duke is a superb director of actors, and, as in "Deep Cover", Fishburne manages to suggest a lot with a deft economy of means.

Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith's script has its witty moments, and some of the secondary characters--such as Larry Miller as the father and Daryl "Chill" Mitchell as an irritable teacher--are every bit as quirky as the leads.

Absorbing and intelligent.

As storytelling it isn'’t always as clean as it might be, but this 1998 first feature by writer-director Lisa Cholodenko is an interesting debut for its nuanced sense of character and its terrific sex scenes--scenes that actually serve character development for a change.

Francis Coppola's stylish and heartfelt tribute to the innovative automobile designer Preston Thomas Tucker turns out to be one of his most personal and successful movies.

The portrait of Carter has been described as hagiography, but it isn't a stretch to view his quiet integrity as saintly next to the track records of his successors.

This 1955 example of kitchen-sink realism about the awakening love life of a Bronx butcher (Ernest Borgnine) and his shy girlfriend (Betsy Blair), directed by Delbert Mann, has never been popular with auteurists, but Paddy Chayevsky’s script, adapted from his own TV play, shows his flair for dialogue at its best, and the film manages to be touching, if minor.

The disparate themes never quite come together, but with many fine performances—John Turturro and Lonette McKee are especially good—you won't be bored for a minute.

This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to "Saving Private Ryan" it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war.

Its brutal take on living under totalitarian rule periodically suggests Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Mullan makes the authority figures (such as the nun played by Geraldine McEwan) grimly believable, but as in "Orphans," there are times when he doesn't know when to quit.

An entertainingly offbeat blend of 19th-century science fiction and Hope and Crosby Road comedies.

It's been a long time since I've seen a teen movie as lively, as unpredictable, as generous, and as tough-minded as this one.

Based on the real-life exploits of Frank W. Abagnale but played more for myth than believability.

Terry Gilliam's third fantasy feature (1989) may not achieve all it reaches for, but it goes beyond Time Bandits and Brazil in its play with space and time, and as a children's picture offers a fresh and exciting alternative to the Disney stranglehold on the market.

As adapted by Michael McDowell and scripted by Caroline Thompson, this 1993 release is at worst a macabre Muppet movie, at best an inspired jaunt. The set designs are ingenious and the songs (music and lyrics by Danny Elfman) are fairly good.

Fortunately, this time around the Ivy League characters project less of a glib sense of entitlement, making them more fun to watch, and Stillman himself gives more evidence of watching rather than simply listening.

It clocks in at over three hours, but Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 classic is gripping. The film rethinks the characters, turning the original's stark Jungian fantasy into a soulless but skillful set of kinetic and emotional effects.

What's most memorable about it is the period flavor, including a detailed and precise account of the jim crow complications blacks had to contend with.

Fortunately, the script by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow isn't half bad, and both Barry Levinson's direction and the performances are agreeably restrained.

Alternately superficial and profound, the film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles's principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter, and briefer appearances by many other Welles cohorts. Michel Legrand supplied the wonderful score.

As long as Spacey is singing, the movie soars.

A movie to savor.

Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios join forces on an entertaining computer-generated, hyperrealist animation feature that's also in effect a toy catalog.

This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution about surveillance and various kinds of denial finds writer-director Michael Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will want to play.

The implied critique of progressive, bohemian parenting is devastating--wise and nuanced, with the painful hilarity of truth.

One can already tell that this film is on to something special during the opening credits.

Engaging and lively.

Adapted by Van Sant and Daniel Yost from an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle, this 1989 feature has the kind of stylistic conviction that immediately wins one over.

Period re-creations so rich you can taste them, and the fine cast.

A singular and essential figure of the Argentinean new wave; [Alonso] is not quite the minimalist some claim, but he can make the simple act of filming feel so monumental that storytelling seems secondary.

Neither PC nor crudely anti-PC, this tough and tender movie, like its characters, is prepared to take emotional risks, and the comic book milieu is deftly sketched in.

I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet's most Hollywoodish picture to date.

Though the film tapers off a little toward the end, there's a climactic scene of recognition between the heroine and her father that was one of the most exquisite pieces of acting I'd seen in ages.

Though it's a good half hour too long, this belated, overblown spin-off of the 60s TV show otherwise adds up to a pretty good suspense thriller.

Well-crafted if relatively impersonal adaptation.

The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal.

Fascinating and instructive throughout.

A must-see.

This bracing courtroom thriller is the most entertaining and satisfying John Grisham adaptation I've seen.

Although most of the elements are familiar and virtually all of the characters are unpleasant, this is a better than average melodrama--mainly because of the volcanic power of Kathy Bates in the title role.

Choreographically stunning like most of Woo’s work, especially before he headed west.

Strongly recommended.

Expresses with uncommon power the highly relevant issue of public indifference to genocide, which is especially well dramatized by a scene with Elias Koteas as an actor playing a Turk.

One of Francois Truffaut's best middle-period films, albeit one of his darkest and most conservative.

The film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated.

Franklin and Murray manages to live up to the demands of a thriller without sacrificing character to frenetic pacing, and the film exudes a kind of sweetness that never threatens to become either sticky or synthetic.

The movie has some of the braggadocio of its white-trash hero, building to its competitive climax as if it were a gladiatorial sporting event, and it carried me all the way.

Superior in every respect to the PBS documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till."

A film about freedom as well as death, this won't suit every taste, but it rewards close attention and has moments of saving humor.

An experimental feature that keeps shooting off its ideas like an endless row of skyrockets, Kikujiro ultimately conveys this grief with such sustained intensity that it can only leave a scorched path of devastation in its aftermath.

John Zorn's ethnically tinged score is effectively minimalist without succumbing to Philip Glass-style monotony, and Harris Yulin is effective as the hero's semi-estranged father.

An efficient little thriller that imparts loads of queasiness and reasonable amounts of suspense while serving as an excellent corrective to the shameless celebrations of LA police power and brutality in Lethal Weapon 3.

Director Erik Van Looy skillfully profiles both the assassin (Jan Decleir, suggesting a tougher, over-the-hill version of Michel Piccoli) and the Antwerp detectives investigating his crimes.

None of the moral ramifications of this dilemma is avoided, and to the film’s credit the behavior of the American press seems more questionable than the machinations of third-world justice.

The most underestimated commercial movie of 1987 may not be quite as good as Elaine May's three previous features, but it's still a very funny work by one of this country's greatest comic talents.

Cunningly scripted and acted, and talky in the best sense, the film is engrossing to watch but not especially interesting to ponder afterward; it's certainly an improvement on formulaic Hollywood, but on a thematic level there's still more windup than delivery.

The movie overextends a patch of folk mysticism toward the end and then adds a silly whimsical coda, but as a comedy of errors it's often hilarious.

Thanks to a remarkable script by Bruce Joel Rubin and the directorial skills of Adrian Lyne, this works as both a highly effective stream-of-consciousness puzzle thriller offering the viewer not one but many "solutions" and an emotionally persuasive statement about the plight of many American vets who fought in Vietnam.

To my taste the only serious distraction and ethical lapse is Gibney's sarcastic, cheap-shot use of popular songs like "That Old Black Magic," "Love for Sale," and "God Bless the Child" to underscore certain points; it seems almost to celebrate the shamelessness of the creeps being exposed.

Just when I'm ready to write off the mockumentary as an exhausted form, along comes this delightful and hilarious improv comedy from the UK in which a bridal magazine sets up a promotional contest for the best offbeat wedding.

But the acting's so good it frequently transcends the simplicities of the script, and whenever Day-Lewis or Postlethwaite is on-screen the movie crackles.

If you decide at the outset that this needn't have any recognizable relationship to the world we live in, you might even find it an unadulterated delight.

One of Penn's best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout.

This comedy drama is an exercise in self-indulgence for O'Toole, but an enjoyable and touching one.

Thanks to a natural and highly charismatic performance by Judd, Ruby in Paradise has a graceful lyricism--as well as a complex sense of what living in today's world is like--that will stay with you; the tempo is slow and dreamy, but the flavor is rich, and it lasts.

Whatever else it may or may not be, Primary Colors is first and last a mainstream Hollywood entertainment. And that means that viewers looking for engagement with political issues are bound to be disappointed.

A powerful piece of social protest, skillfully written, directed, and acted...Hilary Swank as Brandon and Chloe Sevigny as his girlfriend Lana are especially fine.

For better and for worse, it's still a Hollywood movie (and a white boys' movie to boot), but one with a more alert eye and feeling for American life than most of its competitors.

Unlike the classic noirs, this is grounded in neither a recognizable social reality nor a metaphysical sense of doom--just a lot of sexy attitude, humping, and heavy breathing.

This is almost as close to neorealism as to noir—the details of working-class city life are especially fine.

The movie is dominated by Maddin's usual black-and-white photography, silent-movie syntax, and deadpan melodrama.

A touching Fred Zinnemann movie (1960) about an Australian sheepherding family.

Charting the ruthlessness of an ambitious bimbo telecaster in Little Hope, New Hampshire, this staccato black comedy sustains its brilliant exposition and narration until the plot turns to premeditated murder, complete with hapless and semicoherent teenage accomplices.

There's an undeniable formal elegance in the way Ferrara, who coauthored the script with Zoe Lund, frames and holds certain shots, and Keitel certainly gives his all in this 1992 entry in the Raging Bull redemptive sweepstakes.

Especially interesting are the complex relations among the residents of the ghetto.

Woody Allen's welcome return to straight-ahead entertainment, after 15 years of slogging through art-house hand-me-downs, happily coincided with a return to Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and she deftly steals the show.

This is smooth and at times even sensual -- a well-oiled machine.

The film seems a bit studied, but the creepy plot still holds a certain fascination.

Matthew Robbins acquits himself honorably as cowriter and director of this gentle 1987 fantasy about miniature spaceships that land on a tenement in Manhattan's Lower East Side and save the tenants from imminent expulsion and disaster at the hands of greedy real estate developers.

A powerful Christian parable, painful but illuminating, about crime and redemption.

There aren't many movies that deal with middle-aged women, and this one manages to do so with a fair amount of wit and heart.

This impressive first feature by Jill Sprecher, coscripting with her sister Karen, shows that she has an eye and ear all her own.

The film's warmth and sympathy are underlined by some intelligence.

Jean Gabin wasn't yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale about aging and friendship, adapted from a best-selling noir thriller by Albert Simonin, would be hard to imagine without his puffy features.

Miraculously, De Niro and Grodin turn this sow's ear into a plausible vehicle for a buddy movie, and thanks to both of them, this movie springs to life.

Brilliantly conceived and competently executed.

Spielberg does an uncommonly good job both of holding our interest over 185 minutes and of showing more of the nuts and bolts of the Holocaust than we usually get from fiction films. Despite some characteristic simplifications, he's generally scrupulous about both his source and the historical record.

Reputed to be sentimental crowd pleaser, for better and for worse.

The results are high-spirited, with nice ensemble work from Almodovar's team of regulars, but the playlike structure (originally derived from Cocteau's The Human Voice but drastically reworked) is disappointingly conventional.

Striking for its performances -- especially Anthony LaPaglia.

Starting off as a low-key psychological drama, this suddenly turns into a murder mystery that's resolved awkwardly and ambiguously, but the fascination of the characters and milieu remains.

This is a worthy successor to Chinatown - full of ecological and geological insights into Los Angeles history that recall Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and give a view of southern California that could have been conceived only by a native.

Equally impressive is Duncan's stylish handling of decor, dialogue, narrative ellipsis, and pacing, all of which call to mind the Hollywood master Ernst Lubitsch.

Apart from a certain implausibility in the film's initial premise, this is a first-rate entertainment that captures Le Carre's jaundiced if morally sensitive vision with a great deal of care and feeling.

Quirky and nuanced, this movie has a lot to say about sibling rivalry and the current music scene.

Lane’s conceit is handled with such unassuming sweetness and charm that it never comes across as presumptuous or pretentious, and the simple authority of his conclusion–which uses dialogue in order to point out what most of us refuse to hear when we’re walking down the street–is unimpeachable.

This is effective as straight-ahead, action-packed storytelling, losing some of its energy only in the final stretch.

Starting with its romantic and inappropriate title, this is an old-fashioned melodrama, the same movie about police corruption and a cultural crisis of morality that Lumet has been making since the 70s, starting with "Serpico".

There's something a mite pathetic about our culture still clinging to 007, but it's hard to deny that this is one of the most entertaining entries in the Bond cycle, which started with "Dr. No" (1962).

Leisurely pacing of this kind is likely to register as a form of respect for the viewer's intelligence and observation.

Notwithstanding its occasional grotesque nods to postmodernist convention, this is highly entertaining Hollywood filmmaking, full of spark and vigor.

This is the first feature I've seen by writer-director Dominique Deruddere, and I hope it won't be the last.

Amiably unvarnished... Much more successful than most other films that deal with daily life in the projects.

Enhanced by Jason Staczek's superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin's silent-movie models, frenetically edited.

Haneke is still a masterful director, and his authority carries this well-acted and attractively shot account of a family from an unnamed city trying to survive in the sticks after an unspecified catastrophe.

This David Cronenberg masterpiece (1991) breaks every rule in adapting a literary classic - maybe On Naked Lunch would be a more accurate title - but justifies every transgression with its artistry and audacity.

The concept itself is so strong - particularly as a revenge fantasy for anyone who's ever resented hypocritical exploitative shrinks - that it winds up working pretty well anyway.

This is a twilight film, full of sorrow yet lyrical, beautiful, and dark.

I can't say that this feature by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, about the life and art of Harvey Pekar, made me want to run out and buy his comic books, but it does offer a highly interesting and original introduction to them.

This has much of the warmth and feeling for adolescence that Crowe displayed in his first feature ("Say Anything"), though the slick showboating of "Jerry Maguire" isn't entirely absent either.

The story didn't fully answer all my queries about the characters, but did such a nice job of keeping me interested that I wound up appreciating the mysteries that remained.

We finally learn much more about Moskowitz than about Mossman, and more about Mossman than about his novel, but Moskowitz's passion for books is irresistible.

The transition from stage to screen may be bumpy in spots, but this movie is much funnier than Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?, and the long-take shooting style is executed with fluidity and precision.

It's unclear whether this macho thriller does anything to improve the state of the world or our understanding of it, but it certainly sets off enough rockets to hold us and shake us for every one of its 99 minutes.

What mainly registers is the quiet desperation and simple pleasures of ordinary midwestern lives, the fatuous ways that people cover up their emotional and intellectual gaps, and the alternating pointlessness and cuteness of human existence. This may be a masterpiece of sorts, but it left me feeling rotten.

A hokey but highly entertaining tale of corporate greed that should be especially satisfying if you're pissed off at big business.

The extraordinary plateau attained by Hitchcock’s first sound film in relation to his overall development is the sum of many accomplishments: above all, a decisive mastery in moving back and forth between objective and subjective narrative modes.

There isn't an ounce of flab or hype, and the story it tells is profoundly affecting.

What this movie has going for itself in spite of its cloying pleas for indulgence is a playful and interesting narrative structure that precludes much development and comes to the fore only toward the end. The whole thing may drive you batty, but as with "Rushmore," the melancholy aftertaste lingers.

Juicy, adroit, and likable.

Sidney Lumet's direction, like David Mamet's patchy script (which adapts a Barry Reed novel), may not be quite good enough to justify the Rembrandt-like cinematography of Edward Pisoni and the brooding mood of self-importance, but it's good direction nonetheless; and there are plenty of supporting performances—by James Mason, Jack Warden, Milo O'Shea, Charlotte Rampling, and Lindsay Crouse, among others—to keep one distracted from Newman's dogged Oscar-pandering.

Initially this seems naive and archaic, but it conceals a Buñuelian stinger in its tail.

Leftist propaganda of a very high order, powerful and intelligent even when the film registers in spots as naive or dated.

Very competently mounted and acted (there are also juicy parts for Judy Davis, Tony Shalhoub, and Jon Polito), this is basically a midnight-movie gross-out in Sunday-afternoon art-house clothing--an intriguing novelty that revels in effect while oozing with cryptic signifiers.

Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kerrigan returns with his best work to date, at least in terms of narrative drive and suspense.

Cuesta directs the lead actors with such feeling that their misery seems authentic.

Allen's movies specialize in contemplating the notion that money can somehow remove vulgarity or produce gentility. Small Time Crooks may conclude quite conventionally that money can't buy you everything, but most of it flirts even more conventionally with the opposite premise.

The players and their stories are as wonderful as the music, and the filmmaking is uncommonly sensitive and alert.

Proves again that the best documentaries currently outshine Hollywood features as the most watchable, energizing, and relevant movies around.

One of Sidney Lumet's best jobs of directing and one of Al Pacino's best performances (as a bisexual bank robber) come together in a populist thriller with lots of New York juice. Its details are stronger than its structure—the film loses some of its energy before the end—but it's an astonishing fusion of suspense and character, powered by superior ensemble acting.

Eastwood essentially uses the Lady Chablis the same way he did a few extended Charlie Parker solos in Bird--as unbridled, inventive improvisations that challenge the well-rehearsed "head" arrangements of everyone else.

May have some of the trappings of an exotic thriller, but it's basically a character study.

Fascinating oddity.

This is a powerful and persuasive look at an ethnic community and what makes it tick.

The virtues on display are very much those of the heroine: generosity, imagination, charm, and the capacity to keep an audience mesmerized with a good story.

Despite some signs of muddle and uncertainty, this is a surprisingly strong picture about a convict (Hoffman) on parole in LA learning what the supposedly “normal” world is all about.

Their gross-out humor is basically sweet tempered, for all its tweaking of PC attitudes, and though this film looks slapdash, its script (by the Farrellys, Ed Decter, and John J. Strauss) is surprisingly well put together.

Like Wenders's other road movies, this is largely about the spaces between people and the words they speak—Antonioni updated and infused with German romanticism; the various means of indirection through which the hero communicates with his son (Hunter Carson) and wife (Nastassja Kinski) constitute a striking motif.

Upon closer inspection its story and characters grow more mysterious, ultimately bordering on the unfathomable.

It's also quite energetic -- there isn't a boring shot anywhere, and writer-director Schnabel is clearly enjoying himself as he plays with expressionist sound, neo-Eisensteinian edits, and all sorts of other filmic ideas.

In general, the dogs-as-mirrors theme--the crazy things people do with and in relation to their pets--is what keeps this going, and the laughs are sporadic but genuine.

As a well-directed star vehicle with a couple of good action sequences, this is good, effective filmmaking, but I was periodically bored; when Ford and Pitt aren't lighting up the screen nothing much happens.

An amiable demonstration of how two charismatic actors and a relaxed writer-director (Brad Silberling) can squeeze an enjoyable movie out of practically nothing.

If you treasure Gilliam at his best and take his ideas seriously, you'll probably be infuriated as well as delighted.

Bernardo Bertolucci's visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time.

This is a good, solid, intelligent drama about the ambiguities of what does and doesn't constitute courage under fire

The film has a fresh and imaginative feel for period detail that the talented cast - which also features Gabriel Byrne, Christian Bale, Eric Stoltz, John Neville, and Mary Wickes - obviously benefits from.

Certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism.

It may drive you nuts, but it’s probably the most inventive and original Godard film since Passion.

High-spirited martial arts and comedy, with heavy doses of Star Wars and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Yes, the picture is flawed, but it is still something unusual in contemporary movies, a work that deserves to be called honorable, and not only in its intentions.

This is a fascinating and easy-to-take set of musings on a fascinating artist.

As directed by Rob Reiner from a script by Lewis Colick, it offers the most decent and convincing portrait of the contemporary south I’ve seen in ages (apart from Sling Blade).

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

Part of the grace and beauty of The Plot Against Harry stems from the fact that although it has at least three dozen characters and a complicated plot, it glides past the viewer with the greatest of ease.

All in all, an unusually amiable and well-made comedy.

A first-rate police thriller (1948) directed by Jules Dassin when he was still in his prime and before he was blacklisted, shot memorably in New York locations.

Beginning with almost no dialogue at all, Le samourai unfolds like a poetic fever dream.

Harry Kumel's stylish Belgian vampire film with a cult reputation (1971) is worth seeing for several reasons, not least of which is Delphine Seyrig's elegant lead performance as a lesbian vampire who operates a luxury hotel. The baroque mise en scene is also loads of fun.

Experimental films are frequently criticized for being boring because they say and do too little, but the best of them put us in exhilarating overdrive because they offer too much.

A few of the set pieces are fussy or overly extended, but the rest is tolerable bone-crunching diversion.

Shot in July 2003, this collectively made video documentary is by far the most comprehensive account I’ve seen of how Iraqis view the U.S. war and occupation.