Lisa Schwarzbaum

The storytelling structure is far more interesting than the story itself. And the elegiac pictures of boats and water are, dismayingly, most engrossing of all.

Well-meaning but hopelessly lost little comedy.

There's great music, an excellent dog, and that indescribable Kaurismäki tension between misery and a cosmic joke.

What the characters in The Witnesses -- and we, the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life.

The intense interviews and damning statistics (20 percent of all female personnel have experienced sexual assault) do the work of whipping up outrage.

A jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between "American Beauty" and "In the Bedroom" on America's psychic highway.

Writer-director Jim Sheridan, co-screenwriter Terry George, and Sheridan's favorite actor (and Oscar winner for My Left Foot) Daniel Day-Lewis reunite in The Boxer with a mellower political message that translates, roughly, into ''Can't we all just get along?''

This is a tough-minded story of change that happens in almost imperceptibly tiny increments - as true growth so often does in reality.

A suspenseful and delightfully creepy French drama.

The comic moments in this ingratiating bit of malarkey from director Peter Cattaneo and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (both TV trained, both making their feature debuts) are winning.

But Levinson's passion to explain how he got from there to ''Sphere'' gives Liberty Heights its own farkatke Hollywood integrity.

While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.

An appreciation that the pain is personal doesn't compensate for the picture's self-absorbed need to alienate.

Did granny intend this stuff for strangers? We'll never know. File this ''therapeutic'' movie, well made and creepy, on the dysfunction-as-art shelf next to "Capturing the Friedmans."

Charms with its amalgam of absurdity, optimism, humor, and avuncular regard for the million small daily chores, rituals, suspicions, and courtesies of dwellers on even the sparsest spots on earth.

Bean's commitment to serious theological examination is exciting, Gosling's performance is riveting, and this fiery and imperfect feature shines as a demonstration of independent filmmaking at its most uncompromising.

Realer and more consequential than much being packaged for TV and movies these days as ''reality,'' the fictional In This World unfolds with the deceptive dispassion of a documentary, but builds with a sure sense of dramatic epic.

The agonizing moments that convey what it's like for Bone to feel helpless and afraid of Daddy Glen even when he's not torturing her are where the art is. The pornographic violence is artifice. [13 Dec 1996]

As the groom's brassy-babe stepmother, Demi Moore does her own share of scenery chewing, but at least she looks like she's having fun.

Ladies! Thelma and Louise drove a '66T-bird, remember?! They picked up a young male hitchhiker 17 years before you did, and they too, um, interacted with a trucker and admired magnificent American sunsets -- is it coming back to you? Nope, it's not, which is exactly why the tires are so low on this creaky vehicle.

The Cuban escapade, designed to provoke, backfires when he loses focus by including Cuban firefighters in an homage to 9/11 first responders.

The technique is impressive. But it would count for little if the human story -- of a magnetic, resourceful, and, in the way of all Rohmer heroines, articulate woman who was mistress to the Duke of Orleans -- weren't engrossing on its own dramatic terms.

A disconcertingly jumpy tale of breathtakingly crummy parenting, the windblown movie dares a tolerant audience not to call Child Services.

Frankenweenie is a cool little flipbook of historical Burtonian style. It even brings back old friends, including "Beetlejuice's" Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara.

Even an audience moved to tender patriotism might wonder how Scott, a proven master of ''Gladiator''-size visual showmanship, could have bombed away the personality of every man fighting until he's left with nothing more than pure combat.

Anna's thoughts matter because, as played by the wonderfully nuanced newcomer Alycia Delmore, the no-bull responses of this perceptive woman are a key to Humpday's sly, wised-up feminist outlook.

The classy production, with its aesthetic graces, is especially convincing about the charisma of the man, a performance specialty of the great Bardem.

Ellis (The Good Wife's Graham Phillips), an alienated teen, smokes weed and hangs out with a goat-obsessed, pot-cultivating surrogate father (David Duchovny, hidden by hair). New Age details aside, though, Ellis is easily identifiable as a distant cousin-by-genre to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield.