Kirk Honeycutt

The film falls into an interesting intersection between documentary and feature, between reality and fiction.

The film has a winning combination for all sorts of platforms as the story is highly intriguing and the music speaks, or rather sings, for itself.

The film's great gift, though, is Romaner. Unbelievably, this is the first film for the Bavarian stage actress. She fully inhabits the role of this complex personality whose passion for love and art collides with her role of wife and mother.

Now Batmanglij and Marling deliver another terrific and engrossing venture into speculative fiction, Sound of My Voice.

You could point a camera just about anywhere at Comic-Con and record something weird, amazing, funny, stupid or all of the above.

The filmmaker made the film on his family's tobacco farm so perhaps his own memories may filter through those of his fictional characters. Or maybe they're not fictional at all. Jess + Moss is, to put it mildly, open to interpretation.

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's final film about the West Memphis Three demonstrates how the first two docs played a role in galvanizing national support to free the wrongly convicted men.

This is, in a way, a real horror film about everyday things and a disconnected family.

A gloomy but perhaps realistic depiction of the forces of corruption and deceit that produce environmental catastrophes.

You don't have to be an enthusiast of Bollywood to embrace RA.ONE, but it sure would help.

The film grabs at historical facts, mangles them into a plot worthy of a John le Carré spy novel and takes the viewer on a breathtaking ride through ye olde London.

A greater argument for music education in our secondary school curriculum can't be made than Mark Landsman's doc about a Texas high school funk band that tore up the music scene from 1968 to 1977.

The film is chock-a-block with extraordinary performances and no one will fault the filmmaking either. This is a well-made movie, make no mistake. It just suffers from a dysfunctional hero.

One can't escape the nagging feeling that the film doesn't dig deeply enough into its real-life hero. The film doesn't explore all those "whys" and "whats."

Reiser has written his characters with an indelible sweetness and vulnerability, which allows the cast to deliver performances with some depth.

An eloquently shot and closely observed documentary about a poor family in modern-day Indonesia.

The movie does achieve something nearly impossible: Someone who doesn't even like the sport may care about Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics.

It's a long movie that feels short: It grabs you in early scenes, intense though low-key before all hell breaks loose, then keeps you riveted to its mostly male characters.

In a sense, this is not a financial thriller so much as a financial mystery. Which gets a bit lost in the movie's stylized presentation.

The film is a deft, graceful and often poignant story of a woman's quest to find her own identity and a spiritual sanctuary that will give her life hope and meaning.

Danish director Lone Scherfig skillfully adapts David Nicholls' best-selling romantic novel to the screen.

To borrow from TV terminology, the series hasn't jumped the shark yet, but the strain of inventing bizarre deaths is beginning to show.

The film never quite pins the chef down about any of this but in his menu introduction to the staff or off-hand remarks to long-time colleagues you begin to understand the mindset. "The more bewilderment, the better," he declares. He is not joking.

A high-wire act that almost slips as it edges perilously closer and closer to the edge of improbability. But it never does.

Good Neighbors is a film of acquired taste. If one is willing to accept humor in a movie about a serial killer, if one likes a thriller than emphasizes character over thrills, if one is susceptible to a cast of characters that includes three cats, then the movie has found its very selective target audience.

Life in a Day is an experimental project driven by the Internet at its best, where connectivity among the planet's population has become a reality.

The key to its success lies in the determination by everyone involved to play the damn thing straight. Even the slightest goofiness, the tiniest touch of camp, and the whole thing would blow sky high. But it doesn't.

The movie suffers perhaps from too many characters and subplots but all the actors appear to have fun with their characters.

Sticking to its simplistic, patriotic origins, where a muscular red, white and blue GI slugging Adolf Hitler in the jaw is all that's required, Captain America trafficks in red-blooded heroes, dastardly villains, classy dames and war-weary military officers.

The movie gathers momentum with a steady, assured pace, accumulating incidents, characters, secrets and lies until the rush of events is absolutely transfixing. Cinema can sometimes rival the novel in compulsive intensity and Sarah's Key is one such example.

So strong are the emotions - and, yes, the melodrama - that Snow Flower and the Secret Fan represents one of Wang's best films to date.

The best science fiction tells stories about people in extraordinary environments or situations that serve to open up the vast, still largely unexplored terrain of the human heart. Mike Cahill's Another Earth is science fiction at its best.

The loggerhead turtle's journey is indeed incredible. But you would rather the narration, delivered intelligently by Miranda Richardson, didn't feel a need to remind you of this fact so frequently.

By keeping things simple and understated, director Chris Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason have crafted a little gem where humanity is observed with compassion, not condescension.

The six penguins cast in this amiable family comedy steal the movie -- along with any fish they can find -- although the film's star, Jim Carrey, does manage to hold his own. Barely.

The movie is fast, funny and light on its feet, dipping less into politics or religion than into cultural quirks and characteristics.

All the movie's playfulness rubs off on the actors. Scenes crackle with life. The chemistry among all the actors is terrific.

For anyone with a keen interest in this unique American musical form, Rejoice and Shout is a must-see and see-again.

How To Live Forever is less about how to delay or defeat death than a film about what gives life meaning.

The movie has a cheerful good nature and a solid cast of youngsters - including Aimee Teegarden and Thomas McDonell - but any resemblance between this and real high school is, of course, purely coincidental.

To call this movie fascinating is akin to calling the Grand Canyon large.

So don't tell Spurlock he can't have his cake and eat it too. In Greatest Movie, he gleefully accepts his sponsorships on camera just to show you how wrong this all is.

Zokkomon gives Indian youngsters not only their first super hero but, even more tantalizing, he is a young boy "terrorizing" susceptible adults in a small village to the increasingly delight of the town's children.

The cinematography and editing are as superb as the film's feline stars are photogenic and heroic.

One of the finest costume dramas in a long while.

A documentary about autism that's nearly perfect in doing what an advocacy documentary should do: show rather than tell, entertain rather than preach.

Hop delivers plenty of wit, verve and surreal mayhem to entice even the post-adolescent crowd into this jolly (and strangely Christmas-like) Easter egg hunt.

Never less than gripping.

Documentaries have been coming down on humanity so hard in recent years -- from "An Inconvenient Truth" to the latest Oscar winner, "Inside Job" -- that it's refreshing to bask in a bit of optimism coming from a nonfictional film.

The film is only "superior" though, not great. The themes feel shopworn and devotee of crime fiction can point to the any number of antecedents for these characters.

It might even live up to that title: When it ends, you wouldn't mind a bit more, please.

Easily one of the most dynamic cinematic portraits of that decaying, vibrant, impossible city ever made; it treats the city itself as a character.

Biutiful has a strong, linear narrative drive. Nevertheless, and most of all, it's a gorgeous, melancholy tone poem about love, fatherhood and guilt.

In the end, this is a smart movie that could have been smarter. The script feels like it was a draft or so away from total clarity and focus. But the energy of the cast and a dive into an unfamiliar world make the movie rather addictive.

Stripped for action without a moment wasted on unnecessary dialogue, exposition or nuances.

It perhaps started with "The Queen," continued with "Young Victoria" and now achieves the most intimate glimpse inside the royal camp to date with The King's Speech.

Women will love this, and men won't mind the eye candy either, so it looks like this Screen Gems release can't help becoming a hit.

Not hurting matters for foreign and Indian film devotees, the film features two icons of Indian cinema, Madhur Jaffrey and Naseeruddin Shah.

In retelling the still-astonishing story of the political career of Eliot Spitzer, a shooting star whose spectacular crash might forever obscure his accomplishments, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney has all the ingredients for a potboiler: greed, corruption, sex, power, overweening ambition and jaw-dropping hubris.

Liman outfits the film with spy-thriller packaging worthy of his "The Bourne Identity," so the film probably will attract above-average coin and possibly awards attention.

The movie features a great finish, where three movies' worth of subplots and characters dovetail into a breathtaking climax and final confrontation that is positively soul satisfying.

The final act hits like a gut-punch. Worst fears are confirmed, and the protagonist faces a moral dilemma no father should have to confront. Kormakur and his writers give their protagonist no easy way out.

The film never is less than intriguing, right from its tour de force opening sequence, and often full of insights into why people long for answers, sometimes with great urgency.

A wondrous flight of fancy, a stop-motion-animated treat brimming with imaginative characters, evocative sets, sly humor, inspired songs and a genuine whimsy that seldom finds its way into today's movies.

A fully believable, flesh-and-blood (albeit not human flesh and blood) romance is the beating heart of "Avatar." Cameron has never made a movie just to show off visual pyrotechnics: Every bit of technology in "Avatar" serves the greater purpose of a deeply felt love story.

Might be too realistic for its own good: The film takes perhaps a little too much glee in its abilities to manufacture mayhem. That being said, the ride is extraordinary.

Singer has crafted a fine film. One just wishes for greater details -- and a different ending.

The period sets, costumes and cinematography all superbly recreate the brutal era, grand illusions and everyday suffering of the Poles under both the Nazis and the Soviets.

At the heart of the film is a powerful performance by the beautiful and most promising Hao Lei as its tempestuous, complex heroine.

The details are what matters, and thanks to a cast of all-star British elders and a mischievous sense of humor, the filmmakers bring those details to vivid life.

The film is nothing if not provocative.

The vigor and pace is electric, and the movie features three showy performances by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon.

Amusing dark English comedy produces its share of chuckles.

Director Jean-Francois Richet shows a career in crime with pulse-pounding moments of pure cinema, then lets you decide what to make of this homicidal sociopath.

A fine dramatic comedy with fresh characters, witty dialogue and a keen interest in how relationships must have developed among frontier folks, tyrannical ranchers, no-nonsense lawmen and -- oh, yes -- the complicated women on that frontier.

A "soft" epic, a film touching on childhood fantasies with sturdy, unwavering characters driven to evil or good. More "Harry Potter," in other words, than "Beowulf."

For a man apparently making his first film, Woolard carries the movie like a pro. Cross your fingers that this is no fluke, for this guy could be a real comer.

Director Robert Zemeckis not only deploys 21st century movie technology at its finest to turn the heroic poem into a vibrant, nerve-tingling piece of pop culture, but his film actually makes sense of Beowulf. In Zemeckis' hands, it's an intriguing look at a hero as a flawed human being.

A thoughtful and reflective love story about the impact of time on true love.

Beautifully acted and written so its themes are touched upon glancingly rather than with full force.

A somber, often downbeat depiction of human savagery and treachery as well as of human kindness. Writer-director Anthony Minghella has meticulously crafted an intimate epic.

If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of My Sister's Keeper have done.

Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.

The film achieves its power through a careful gathering of crucial details, in wordless glances, cruelties of nature and of man and the relentless determination to gain the promised land.

A real audience pleaser, so long as that audience is mentally agile and adult, for it comes at you from odd angles and features three distinct story lines and 10 main characters.

His heart -- and musical soul -- is in the right place, but the film makes you at times uncomfortable with black and Southern stereotypes that may hinder some from fully enjoying an otherwise benign and cheerful tall tale of the Saturday night when rock came to rural Alabama.

Arguably Eastwood's most ambitious film since his multi-Oscar winner, "Unforgiven." But it lacks the power and depth of that film's dynamic script by David Webb Peoples.

A sprightly musical revue built around Cole Porter songs and a few biographical tidbits culled from his extraordinary life.

"Kings" covers familiar territory but does so with ruthless efficiency, intense performances and a densely packed plot designed to highlight the moral issues that most concern Ayer and Ellroy.

His (Fernando Meirelles) impressionistic, guerilla style of filmmaking works surprisingly well in capturing the hypnotic urgency of le Carre's fiction. And his viewpoint is less British and more Third World.

Perhaps returning to Apocalypse Now will reinvigorate the once brilliant storyteller. Certainly, the images, colors and design still astonish. And let's hope that Apocalypse Now Redux will become the definitive version. For the movie hits home even harder now. [14 May 2001]

The film is unusual in that it is a co-production with the Chinese. Whatever difficulties this imposed on the Western filmmakers, the reward is a period film that feel authentic to its time and place.

Utterly compelling account of a true-life criminal investigation where "truth" can never be pinned down.

The stroke of genius is, of course, the film's hero -- the big, lovable bear that is the Chinese panda.

A really terrific, intensely focused documentary on a fascinating personality.

It took three films, but The Twilight Saga finally nails just the right tone in Eclipse, a film that neatly balances the teenage operatic passions from Stephenie Meyer's novels with the movies' supernatural trappings.

Joel and Ethan Coen clearly are in a prankish mood, knocking out a minor piece of silliness with all the trappings of an A-list studio movie.

Could develop a cult following. But it is hard to envision repeat viewings or any great number of people willing, even vicariously, to undergo the couple's ordeal.