Lisa Schwarzbaum

Utterly riveting fictional drama.

It's a great, IQ-flattering entertainment both wonderful and wise.

There's something already exhausted, however, in the intrusively gauzy, wobbly, blurry, zoomy digital-video look of the piece.

Eventually, the senses jam and a mental lube job is in order.

Re-creating that ensemble buzz and that alcoholically fueled soul scraping is an almost impossible task, but in She’s So Lovely, director Nick Cassavetes, working from an unproduced script by his old man (who died in 1989), gives it a ballsy go.

It's as if the star (Douglas) finally gets to integrate all his onscreen personas, all at once.

The movie is overplowed, even if Brad Pitt's debut as a Coen comedy player is eye-catching.

Pay attention to the enhanced detail audible in a new six-track sound mix, which may be the most important cleaning job of all; silence and Jerry Goldsmith's score have never twined so hauntingly.

The movie is sometimes profound in its simple, optimistic message of friendship -- and sometimes it's plain simple.

The film excels in small scenes of cannily chosen Indian everydayness.

As is so often the case since his "Monty Python" days, Gilliam is best at visual games and weakest at storytelling.

The result is a stilted culture clash and a lot of monochromatically conflicted facial expressions from Perry before he's thawed by the love of an ethnic woman.

A genial story of friendship among three young African-American men that gets far on charm even when the cinema technique falters and stalls.

The balance of inspired idiocy to hackneyed buffoonery is out of whack.

Don’t miss this astonishingly bleak, inventive, funny, sumptuously designed film.

This is strictly substandard stuff, with imitative creepy noises, vertiginous camera angles, and long pauses.

But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps.

May be the most kick ass demonstration yet, for the majority of American moviegoers, of what the fuss is all about.

A drama about corruption in the city's transit system that's not only hard boiled but also dipped in egg batter dialogue and deep fried.

Riveting family portrait.

A wildly romanticized Australian druggie drama.

Perfume misses some of the subtler base notes of Süskind's creepier, more self-aware original, but Whishaw and Tykwer blend the movie into something quite heady in its own bottle.

A disturbingly avid re-creation of the last six weeks in the life and slow, self-imposed wasting of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands.

Still, it's refreshing that the animals don't talk.