Leslie Camhi

Handsomely shot, German filmmaker Sandra Nettelbeck's third feature suffers from a certain romantic predictability.

It's a giddy farce worthy of Lucy and Ethel, and Peploe plays up the buffoonery.

Montias's script lacks surprises -- Still, the minor figures surrounding him (Bobby) -- from teenage Puerto Rican beauties to a mobster's middle-aged groupie -- form a gritty urban mosaic, and Bobby's wanton energy is utterly convincing.

Bening's comic gifts make the most of Ronald Harwood's witty screenplay, though she falls flat in her character's rare moments of sincerity.

It lacks the toughness and social insights of its Mexican new wave predecessors like "Amores Perros." And even as the story of one woman's midlife crisis, it's a bit lightweight.

Backed by a strong supporting cast, Whaley makes Jimmy a vivid character, but he never achieves anything like the tragic grandeur of a Willy Loman. He's at once too earnest and too unappealing.

The complex questions Walk on Water raises receive only confused answers.

Marshall Karp's script is clever and funny, though studded with anachronisms.

Berliner captures the eerie beauty of their music alongside their strange dignity. But his mannered style (colored filters, multiple exposures, jump cuts) leaves an uneasy impression about the balance of power in his relationship to his subjects, women of surprising strength and enduring frailty.

The admirable Gainsbourg refrains from overacting, but her leading men never quite transcend the emptiness and inanity of their characters' dilemma.

The filmmakers skillfully evoke the sense of menace that nature holds for many urban dwellers. -- Sometimes, though, the editing is choppy, and the film could use more of a script.

The film's broad performances and heavy-handed moralizing strike a note of condescension sure to be heard by the alienated teenager within us all.

The pacing feels choppy, and the characters' emotions are sometimes too sudden to be believable. (One exception is Rhys Ifans, affecting as Amelia's long-suffering and neglected suitor.)

He's (director Abranches) so focused on creating a strikingly mannerist visual style that he forgets to flesh out his plot and characters.

A bit naive and formless.

Manchevski has a rare visual intelligence, whether filming the face of a dying woman or Times Square's reflection in a windshield. But in reaching for a cubist style of storytelling, he sacrifices character and motivation.

This extraordinary story still sparks controversy in France, but in Berri's hands, it never comes alive...a shadow play of historical icons, rather than a portrait of people in love.

The subjects can be amusing, chilling, or tragic -- but in the end, they offer few surprises.

The problems come in the shadow world, where everything's a jumble, where Dark's compositional strategy ("all clues and no solutions") eventually becomes wearing, and Gordon's direction can't hold it all together.

Even Mastroianni cannot hold our attention for over three hours.

How did this rude monk, prey to depression and satanic hallucinations, change the course of history? Luther offers scant illumination, for the big brown eyes that served Joseph Fiennes so well in "Elizabeth" are little help with the spirit of Reformation.

The Inheritance is most effective in its first half...But the film falters as it moves closer to home and the heart, veering off into melodramatic and quasi-surreal scenarios.

Something lured Paul Cox down memory lane, but he should have stayed at home.

Though Hopkins lovingly re-creates the surfaces of shtetl life, its deep spirituality seems to elude him.

"No poetry after Auschwitz," Theodor Adorno proclaimed. One sometimes wishes he'd added, "And no big-name cinema either."

The writerly restraint that confines them to the airport is admirable, though the fairy-tale ending in Acapulco seems like a throwaway.

It manages to be both ponderous and silly.

Most of the redemptive notes ring false, as does the mythical Manhattan, where the snow is just too clean and everybody lives around the corner.