Leslie Camhi

Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's "Leila," makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable.

Despite the choppy script and cartoonishly bad villains, what emerges is a compelling tale of the moral compromises a corrupt system demands of even its most unwilling participants.

Vardalos's parodies of Greek family values are loving and witheringly hilarious.

This evocative film is a poignant testament to the twin forces of love (however blighted) and the unconscious.

Chillingly naturalistic.

If the film's redemptive ending is a fairy tale, it's one we willingly embrace.

Himalaya lacks such lightness, humor, and grace, offering instead the surface beauty of an ancient and inviolate culture.

Falters when it takes a final, violent turn into melodrama.

French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.

With improbable charm, Gabizon knits it all together, his characters' sexual obsessions and earthiness tempered by a soulful melancholy.

Relies on the hefty talents of its two leading ladies.

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

It's also frustrating-we long to learn more about each individual. Still, the sheer fascination and profoundly moving power of these stories transcend the film's more conventional limitations.

Wargnier has assembled a stellar French and Russian cast, but all that talent can't overcome his heavy-handed screenplay.

At times the film's Buddhist lessons feel a bit forced, but the naturalistic performances Davaa has coaxed from a real-life Mongolian family, and her intimate understanding of their culture and values, give this sensitive portrayal its heft.

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.

Infusing Rendell's intrigue with warmth and humor, Miller makes the film's sometimes mechanical and giddy narrative into something grander -- a meditation on maternity as a form of inspired madness.

Van Looy has created a fast-paced and stylish thriller. Declair's Ledda, marvelously suave and vulnerable, provides most of the pathos.

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

What saves this deeply affecting film from being merely a collection of wrenching cases is Corcuera's attention to detail.

Brought to life by the weirdness of its subject matter and the risks Madhur Jaffrey takes in her brilliant performance.

There's much to admire here, including an often witty script and a cast that includes Theresa Russell, Seymour Cassel, and the irrepressible Lupe Ontiveros (Celia's mother-in-law).

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.)

A meditation-brilliant, humorous, and moving-on history and memory.

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