Liam Lacey

The result is an intriguing hybrid, mixing a Japanese reverence for nature (a raindrop shimmering on a leaf is a visual haiku) with quaint Victorian architecture and a story featuring contemporary, Caucasian-looking Japanese characters speaking in American accents. Somehow, it all works.

With Incendies, Villeneuve attempts to balance moment-by-moment authenticity and operatic emotional impact. Much of the time, he succeeds.

A cornball charmer of a film with some beautiful birds and homespun wisdom.

Often more ingenious in appearance than fact. The hunter-gets-captured-by-the-game scenario is predictable and the sequence of shell games does not, when reconsidered, actually add up.

Though most of the content here is too familiar for the film to qualify as an exposé, Totally Under Control adds background context and highlights some of the voices who raised early alarms about the dangers of the disease and the impending social disruption.

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

The payoff is the revitalization of Bond by making him closer to what Fleming envisaged: a sociopath who, fortunately, is on our side.

The gender questions are open-ended and the sacrifices of the artist’s life familiar ground, but Kokuho truly comes alive in the performance sequences that evoke the deep roots of theatre, and the semaphore of emotions represented in gestures, poses, strange movements and painted faces that evoke feelings beyond words.

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

Within the back and forth of family squabbles and warm moments, there are also sprinkles of magic realist beauty.

Most of the participants who knew Armstrong are dead and there’s something melancholy about realizing that the human being behind that voice is silent. What remains is a quality that Marsalis identifies as essential in Armstrong’s music, a gift which he was fully conscious of, conveying a “transcendent joy” through sound.

As usual, the Coens' visual elements are pristine. The contrasting colours in the fire-lit interiors are gorgeous, while cinematographer Roger Deakins keeps the camera close, resisting traditional panoramic views.

Terrence Malick’s latest, A Hidden Life, is one of the year’s most ambitious films and an arguable masterpiece, though, admittedly, your receptivity to it depends on your capacity to experience three solemn hours of waving fields of wheat, theology and Nazi cruelty. c

An ultra-cheap movie, ingeniously promoted through the Internet -- is notable primarily as a model of guerrilla-style niche-marketing.

The film employs a punk-inspired cut-and-paste collages, smashing together footage of police and protestor clashes, rock concerts, television shows and political marches, all annotated with animated handwritten letters, posters, newspaper clippings, and excerpts from RAR’s fanzine, Temporary Hoarding.

McNaughton's film, which has been described as "too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd," is an exercise in revulsion by an often skilled filmmaker. [8 Oct 1990]

Not until the final shot does Noyce rise up to the potential of the history: There's a sudden shiver of recognition, that, my God, these people really lived this.

Hackle-raising in its intensity.

The 11th Green is presented in a deadpan, naïve tone of a fifties’ B-movie or a low-budget X-Files knock-off. The smeary sci-fi effects are deliberately hokey, in contrast to the authentic home movies and newsreel footage. Indeed, the sci-fi story is a kind of feint.

On the positive side, it's still four back-to-back Simpsons episodes, which is still better than most of what either television or the movies have to offer.

Too long by about 20 minutes, and arguably too obsessed with the lineage of names only of interest to other surfers, this is a vicarious kick.