Kirk Honeycutt

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.

If you liked the play and the compelling ideas Bennett kicks around, the movie makes for an intellectually invigorating couple of hours.

A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.

The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity.

Eye-popping yet ultimately thin and shallow as a page in a graphic novel.

The movie boils down to one character, acting under enormous pressures of space and time, racing to solve a mystery. In this case, that may be good enough.

The film is thought-provoking but not terribly involving.

For all the work that went into the whimsical creatures and painterly palette, the voice actors more or less steal the show.

Brilliantly sung by an extremely talented lyric theater company in Cape Town called Dimpho Di Kopane. Whether this all works will be a matter of opinion -- mine is that it does not -- but the experiment is fascinating.

In this film, everything comes down to the acting. Chris Cooper, one of our finest screen actors, gets inside the mysterious traitor. Ryan Phillippe has just the right gung-ho determination tempered with a touch of naivete as O'Neill. Meanwhile, Laura Linney nails the role of a career agent.

You might call the film "Rear Window Times 100."

This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies.

A fascinating, mythological western.

Marks Disney's rediscovery of a strong narrative loaded with vibrant characters and mind-bending, hilarious situations.

The film feels contained — its design, visual effects and cinematography all in the right balance and proportion. Spider-Man is the hero, and not some element in the filmmaking process.

This is an accomplished suspense-action piece that touches on universal themes of brotherhood, exile, love and honor.

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.

Christian McKay's impersonation of young Orson Welles is sensational in this enjoyable, though slight, historical fiction about a teen who spends a memorable week with the legendary wonder.

Here's a film about kids and for kids that has not lost touch with what it is like to actually be a kid.

Eastwood has always had the gift for comedy in his acting repertoire, but he indulges in it only rarely. His fans might embrace this return to comedy.

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.

Julia Roberts marches through Erin Brockovich like a force of nature. Granted, the movie gives her all of the best lines — to say nothing of its most eye-catching wardrobe. But the actress seizes the film's eponymous role with fire-in-her-eyes possessiveness and injects the character with all the energy and drive she can muster.

A wonderfully vivid and engaging theatrical experience.

Unlike his songs, the film holds something back. It goes deep into a life filled with as much trouble and pain as triumph and accomplishment but never quite gets at the root of who Ray is.

This time, tedium sets in early and never loosens its grip. The gags are obvious, predictable and dull.

A biographical documentary doesn't get any better than this.

Downey and Monaghan are wonderful at playing characters that compensate for the harshness of their past with flippant swaggers.

This is resolutely a film of the imagination. As with all films in Malick's slim body of work, its imagery, haunting sounds and pastoral mood trump narrative.