Lawrence Toppman

The assault is against our ears, as the soundtrack pours forth a stream of thrash and Goth music.

The result is a film that has "Masterpiece Theatre" production values but not an ounce of dust upon it.

Like all his movies except "Badlands," a taut 1973 debut, "Tree" looks gorgeous, has philosophic ambitions, meanders wherever Malick's imagination takes him and stays dramatically inert.

I never thought I'd crack up watching a family mourn the death of a beloved daughter. But I've never seen a film quite like The Host, and that's far from the most bizarre thing in it.

It gives such a down-to-Earth view of the joys, terrors, boredom, anxieties and camaraderie in a war zone.

Keeps its sense of humor while dealing with serious issues.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with the dull bits left out." Well, Rachel Getting Married is drama with the dull bits left in.

It's an honorable, straightforward, talking-heads-and-old-clips film that sometimes rises to profundity when it touches us deeply. [23 Apr 1999, p.10E]

A Kafkaesque series of interwoven stories that depict the hopeless lives half the populace there (Iran) must lead.

It'll hearten anyone who believed Lee had insights and merely needed to find the right vehicle to express them. Bus is that vehicle. [18 Oct 1996, p.1E]

It depicts a world close enough to our own to be terrifying, yet different enough to rouse curiosity.

(Mendes') film debut shows he can shock not only with noise and nakedness but with subtle observations.

A handsome tribute to an era as quaintly distant as tail-fin Chevrolets and A-bomb scares.

Begins and ends quietly, like stirrings of thunder from a distant storm. In between comes a tragedy that rolls over us like a compact hurricane.

A wild, self-indulgent but completely captivating extravagance.

(The Coens have) never again achieved the one-two punch of Blood Simple and "Raising Arizona" - the first darkly cynical, the second light-headedly comical.

The Witch is a horrifying film, one unique in my experience.

The leads blend as seamlessly as any young-old character coupling I've seen. The prosthetically altered Gordon-Levitt, unrecognizable at first, really resembles Willis.

As usual, Almodovar finds unusual camera angles to break up the straightforward storytelling. But for the first time I recall, not a single male character is crucial to his story, and no actor has a leading role. You won't miss them.

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

At bottom, all Payne's films make us smile, often ruefully but hopefully.

It's possible to groan, chuckle, wince and be moist-eyed, sometimes in a span of seven or eight minutes.

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

The grandest presence here is Eastwood. His directing, like his acting, is minimal: unhurried, spare, unforced, rather somber.

The pleasure comes from watching the clever rodents do their stuff. Computerized images have been kept to a minimum, and real animals provide most of the film's atmosphere.

Tries with intermittent success to juggle two stories.

A perverse kind of payback for every terrorizing cabbie, bullying streetwalker, insulting bike messenger and screaming corner grocer in Manhattan.

The real joke is that the picture's most conventional elements, the superbly acted entanglement between the complicated Orlean and the boastful but unexpectedly thoughtful Laroche, would have made a compelling movie all by themselves -- if written by someone other than Charlie Kaufman.