Kevin Thomas

This starry ensemble dazzles, but the film never comes fully alive until its climactic 20 minutes, which are deeply moving.

A satisfying story of love and marriage told with humor and insight.

Not for everyone, but the open-minded should find it enlightening as well as entertaining.

This 1946 version became a key film in postwar Hollywood film noir. Directed by Tay Garnett, it remains one of Lana Turner's (right) very best films. [02 Feb 1997, p.78]

Mildly entertaining, offering generous swaths of Mahler performed by the Bratislava Philharmonic, but it's also inescapably ponderous.

Kusturica works marvels with his endlessly amusing cast, and his film has an appealingly free and easy tone.

Lee's energy never flags, and She Hate Me resonates with authority and impact and daring, but the messages it sends are mixed.

This sleek and sunny comedy is an all-too-rare example of smart and inventive Hollywood filmmaking.

Besson's restored Big Blue proves mystical, intriguing.

Mixes satire and suspense in unexpected ways in a film that is as darkly amusing as it is bitterly critical of bourgeois society's indifference to suffering.

At a time when crassness and dumbing down pervade popular entertainment, especially movies aimed at youthful audiences, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen dares to be smart.

A clever and adroit B picture with A virtues, starting with its ensemble cast.

In its vitality and finesse, Maria Full of Grace is all of a piece -- and both artistically and spiritually itself full of grace.

Proteus is involving and affecting even if it is not completely coherent or fully realized.

Reback's script has real substance and perception, with Alex and Isabel emerging as individuals of depth and dimension, and their story is told with humor, passion and wit.

What Meyers and Shyer have accomplished is to create a pleasant, sentimental domestic comedy out of a family that really has no problems to overcome, not an easy feat.

Wenders’ ideas, emotions--and his characters--eventually do converge in a stately manner, rewarding the patient with a stunning, enlarging vision of human experience, a melding of the material and spiritual worlds.

Surely there is room in the movies for a small film with an unabashed, even old-fashioned but timeless humanist spirit -- and a triumphant portrayal by a veteran star that is likely to be regarded as one of the year's best.

Lemmons' command of cinematic style, her appreciation of the chimerical aspects of life and her ability to inspire actors to give remarkably faceted portrayals mark Eve's Bayou a first film of exceptional promise.

No Man’s Land is such a modest, low-key thriller that you’re caught up in it long before you realize it. A contemporary Faustian tale, it’s one of those nifty little movies that arrive without much notice but prove to be far more enjoyable than many more highly publicized pictures.

Just as silly and tedious as the first two unconnected tales of young gay love -- but lots worse.

Good-natured but it's a dud.

A solid family film that strikes a shrewd balance between tough-mindedness and sentimentality and boasts a fine cast.

The martial-arts sequences are zesty, a description that applies to this well-crafted movie as a whole.

Few people will be able to go along with Bolton's point of view regarding relationships between adults and underage youths, but there's no denying the writer-director, in his feature debut, has avoided sensationalism in telling this story.

An admirable, thoughtful venture, but it may leave you with the feeling that you've seen it all before.

Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.

Wise, understated, warm and witty, it presents stars Michel Serrault and Mathilde Seigner in roles that fit them so perfectly they could have been tailor-made.