Lawrence Van Gelder

The buoyancy is only intermittent.

It's easy to be seduced by this film's warmhearted, if slightly utopian, vision.

A rare hybrid: an underdog sports picture that's also a transgender fairy tale.

The team that gave the world "Dumb and Dumber" returns with something feeble and feebler.

Think of it as a modern-day variant on a Shakespearean comedy, only without the verbal felicity or dramatic structure.

Though it generates its share of unintentional giggles, Desert Wind does manage to take us to a seldom-visited place: the hidden corners of the straight male mind.

A well-cast disaster movie more notable for special effects and stunts than for credible drama.

Too much soap opera colors its love story, and the industrial- strength dancing by booted men that is its centerpiece falls short of exhilaration.

The Time We Killed has the raw intimacy of a filmed diary, but as with reading a stranger's journal, it eventually gets dull.

Within that narrow framework, the film is quite successful, using archival photographs, clips from pornographic films and television commercials, and interviews to evoke the period between June 1969, when the Stonewall riots brought homosexuality out of the shadows, to June 1981, when the AIDS epidemic began.

Quite simply a treat for the ear.

With Christopher Eccleston as Jude and Kate Winslet of ''Sense and Sensibility'' as his great love, Sue Bridehead, and with convincing evocations of 19th-century England from locations in Edinburgh and the north of England, Jude remains a handsome if gravely flawed film.

Where "Ringu" derived its power from the simplicity of its premise and the purity of its execution, One Missed Call staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess.

This clunky juvenile comedy lurches among multiple story lines without fully realizing the comic potential of any.

A modest but engaging mixture of comedy and drama that derives most of its energy from the performance of Callie Thorne.

Eventually becomes preaching that is likely to tax the credibility of the unconverted.

What results is a candy-colored broad comedy with noteworthy performances.

Mr. Tarkovsky appears so absorbed in grappling with his own demons that universality suffers. [17 Aug 1983, p.C14]

A fine and loving memorial that preserves his charm, his intellect and his splendid body of work.

If it were medically possible to overdose on claptrap, Orca would be compelled to carry a warning from the Surgeon General.

An offbeat little charmer of a mystery.

The scenery, however, is handsome, and Miss Pays is indeed the sort of beauty who might have inspired Fitzgerald. But on the subject of credible motivation, Oxford Blues is likely to have left him depressed.

A rare and often chilling glimpse into the culture of North Korea.

Instead of sending up their cinematic sources, the creators of Muppets From Space rely too much on this spent screen fuel. Frenetic movement and loud music overwhelm warmth and compassion, and the balance of character, plot, irreverent humor and innate decency that made some of the earlier Muppet movies so welcome is lost.

Jeff Feuerzeig, who won the best-director award at the 2005 Sundance festival, cobbles together a moving portrait of the artist as his own ghost, using a wealth of material provided by Mr. Johnston, from home movies to audiocassette diaries to dozens of original, and often heartbreakingly beautiful, songs.

Rather than seeming classic, Freeway appears to be another film maker showcase, a derivative apprentice work.

Mostly dross, an unintentionally hilarious compendium of time-tested cinematic clichés that illustrates the chasm between hopeful imitation and successful duplication.

Intelligent, insightful, touching.