Lawrence Toppman

How you feel about Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, one of the most visually stimulating films of this or any year, depends on 1) how much you love animation and 2) what you think of Kahlil Gibran.

You don’t often hear the adjective “uncomfortable” used as a compliment. But you’re seldom going to come across a movie that makes you as uncomfortable as The Diary of a Teenage Girl yet seems as true to life.

I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the Pirates of the Caribbean experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts. To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused.

Like all his (Aronofsky) films, it's lurid, visually stimulating, thoughtful, absurd in spots, well-cast and unrelentingly intense.

In our post-Tarantino world, Fuqua shows remarkable restraint. The long, efficiently filmed battle doesn’t douse us in blood; for once, PG-13 is the proper rating for a violent film.

Daybreakers is more serious, from its A-list cast to its political commentary, with blood as a metaphor for oil. Like the best genre films, it has something on its mind.

Sometimes you have to praise a movie backwards. In a season of clamorous action pictures, dopey comedies and grisly horrors, The Way Way Back is notable for what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t yank on your heartstrings, though you’ll be touched gently at last.

The leads, who were born six weeks apart in 1937, have remarkable hare-and-tortoise chemistry.

Choreographer Hi Hat and director Ian Iqbal Rashid kick the film into high gear every so often with dance sequences, climaxing with a dance-off in Detroit that seems too short.

It's hardly a balanced biography: There's no mention of Jordan's gambling problems or connections with Nike, whose factories overseas were criticized for underpaying workers and treating them badly.

Everything from the book is inserted with wisdom and care, and everything added to pander to kids with short attention spans or adults who need an overtly religious message is unnecessary.

A brain-free ride on a cinematic bullet train.

A good critic likes nothing better than to go in with low expectations and be proven wrong. EuroTrip makes me a good critic. I'd have sworn I'd never laugh again at somebody assaulting a mime, but this goofy comedy makes even that ancient concept fresh.

They have turned a brief, appealing, honest autobiography by Susanna Kaysen into a long, appealing, rather dishonest film.

If you ride the paranoiac tide, letting Jonathan Demme's assured direction carry you along, the sardonic humor and anxiety-inducing message work on you.

Every decade or so, someone proves animation can tell a serious adult story.

Anyone familiar with the movies of Julio Medem knows where "Sex and Lucia" is going. Or, rather, knows that it's impossible to know.

A film that dares to be smart, reasonably complicated and scary while swashing its buckles.

Though its grosses may not soar into the realm occupied by "Superbad" and "American Pie," it has more sympathy for its characters.

Forget the bug-eating, cow-spearing and one-upsmanship of TV's "Survivor." The real results of isolation and deprivation unfold in The King is Alive: madness, suicide and murder.

Watching Lovely and Amazing is like coming into a long-running, well-written television series where you've missed the first half-dozen episodes and probably won't see the next six.

A loving interpretation of C.S. Lewis's beloved parable for children, and it's almost perfect in every detail. Yet there's the one difficulty: It's almost perfect in every detail, fully realized in too few.

John Bailey's cinematography goes beyond the norm: Darkened rooms full of conspirators are as unsettling as Luthan's descent into an unlit subway tunnel. Danny Elfman, a mainstream film composer now that his alternative rock career is over, adds an apt score; he's angling for the late Bernard Herrmann's spot on Hollywood's scare scale. [27 Sept 1996, p.6E]

The script expertly captures kids' behavior.

David Goyer, who wrote the script for Man of Steel from a story he concocted with Christopher Nolan, found a new way to make us care: The title character is disturbed by everything in his adopted home.

Isn't quite smart enough to untangle one large, insoluble problem at the end.

His movies are thrilling and ridiculous in equal measure, and I often laughed with incredulous approval as he wreaked havoc.

I think the trilogy has come to its natural conclusion: However you interpret the ending, we’ve spent enough time with these two people.

Mitchell keeps the direction simple and well-behaved, usually just pointing the camera at the speaker, but you can see why this topic appealed to him.

The feel-good movie of a feel-blah movie year, with all the positive qualities and one negative trait that this description implies.

If you fell in love with the big-hearted sentimentality of Rent when you saw it onstage, the film version will remind you why. If you think Jonathan Larson's musical is ponderous agitprop, the movie won't change your view.

By the end, an end that has a little too much melodrama to it, we can only shake our heads in wonder.

The film has such an expansive, likeable spirit.

From the first gentle meeting of its hero and heroine to the last line of dialogue, The Finest Hours executes all the traditional moves beautifully.

Is it too much to ask that he take a risk next time and kill somebody off, however much we’re used to having them in the “Trek” universe?

As you get into the flow of the narrative, and the strangeness of hearing no dialogue recedes, the movie becomes a rewarding experience.

It offers a grim view of prehistoric life: Carnivores slaughter herbivores, though we're spared most direct shots of this violence.

Why is The Emperor's New Groove Disney's funniest animated movie in years? Because it's the least like a Disney animated movie.

The writing is haphazard at times, though the situations are funny enough in themselves to sustain our interest.

It's a satisfying experience, whatever kind of picture you label it.

Though this film doesn't have the novelty value of the first or the complex plotting of the second, it boasts the most spectacular single sequence.

The picture should satisfy both diehard fans, who liked the plotting and interaction of early Bond films, and "Die Hard" fans, who prefer Bond shaken and stirred by massive explosions, vehicular crashes and gunplay befitting a Central American revolution.

The script by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling gets relaxed, throwaway laughs, even if it doesn’t always hold together.

If you're fond of wigs, you may be in heaven. If you're more interested in Whigs, you may wish the movie had dug deeper under the lovely powdered surface of Lady Georgiana Spencer.

It's hard to fault a script that keeps finding new dilemmas for characters and rewards attentive viewers with in-jokes.

Qualifies as a solid double, maybe a triple.

Rampling carries the film, appearing in virtually every scene.

It's handsomely shot, acted with fervor and reasonably subtle in delivering its message:

It's the chemistry between the stars that makes the film stand out in a drab spring.

If we can’t believe these characters could really be friends, we can live for 101 minutes in a world where they do.

The mediocre original, hampered by a saccharine plot and unconvincing reversals of character, earned lots of money but few plaudits. Now comes Ice Age: The Meltdown, a sequel with more humor, topicality, intelligence and appeal.

When the movie becomes pure fantasy, it's impossible to swallow. (No landlord rents an apartment to a 12-year-old with no adult in sight.)

The rest of this well-intentioned picture never reaches (Washington's) level of subtlety and intensity.

A documentary that's as chaotic, rude and funny as the band could be.

Often powerful, though presented throughout with British understatement.

In an elemental way, though, the film always works. The acting can be basic, a cross between Bollywood directness and Western nuance, but it has weight.

Vertical Limit is like riding a roller coaster for two hours. First it's frighteningly exciting. Then it's mind-numbing

Greene's words haunt us like a prophecy from half a century and half a world away.

This is one of the increasingly rare Hollywood films that treat people in middle age as though their feelings were just as intense and their needs just as valid as those of people half their age.

Gripping but gap-filled Seven Pounds will have half your brain asking "How could this be?" and the other half saying, "Shut up and go along for the ride!" Listen to the latter voice.

Depp gives yet another introspective, slightly mopey performance -- Graham never begins to act (and never has begun, as far as I know). But they're surrounded by an authentic, first-rate English cast.

If your senses haven't been dulled by slasher films and gorefests, if you're a connoisseur of psychological horror, this is your ticket.

One dazzling (if overlong) bridge: technologically advanced, brilliantly designed, spectacularly executed, solid as steel in its unspectacular elements. But unlike its 1999 predecessor, this is a movie that nobody but avid video gamers and motorcyclists needs to see more than once.

Its main pleasure lies in watching Bush thaw under gentle emotional heat applied by the few people who haven't given up on him.

Except for moments of labored symbolism and a too cozy ending, the movie stays sharply focused on its well-chosen targets.

If you've never heard his voice, this is your chance, and you should take it.

The result is an odd mix of honesty and hokum that pilots a course toward greatness before settling into a somewhat lower orbit.