Lisa Schwarzbaum

With his ripe lips, flirty eyes, and pre-Calvin Klein-era androgynous appeal, the 24-year-old Warren is utterly believable as a boy who drives Natalie Wood plumb insane with sexual frustration in William Inge’s overheated melodrama.

This is an origami story, really, about what a construction of chance the big world is.

Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer.

There's wit but never a wink in this smartly shot production, which pays homage to the 1980s without fetishizing the era.

Veteran French farceur Francis Veber proves that feature-length idiot humor is not limited to the Farrelly brothers.

The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.

A small cubist masterpiece about crime and punishment set in that most split-level of environments, Los Angeles.

Roots matter, is Angelou’s Hallmark-style lesson. So for good measure, novice screenwriter Myron Goble also includes an unsubtle subplot about a candelabra that has been in the family since slaves were freed, thereby throwing one more ingredient into this thick dramatic gumbo.

Gorgeously shot tableaux of random adolescent brutality are interrupted by flashes of computer garble and chat-room talk, backed by ''Lily's'' music, with its blend of Debussy-like arpeggios and Enya-like sighing.

Shortz's gentle manner and French-foreign-agent mustache go a long way toward making him a thinking girl's pinup nerd - and this despite the man's pitiless insistence on making the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle ''tough as a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.''

It's left to Caine to wink and nod at his own contribution to real caper classics of the 1960s and '70s, produced with more emphasis on fun and less on instructive fact-finding.

Streep is a pleasure to behold; less so the rest of The Iron Lady.

Time, Kim Ki-Duk's pointed commentary on surfaces and consumer fads -- with particular meaning for plastic-surgery-obsessed South Korea -- is as tautly ''pretty'' and inexpressive as the results for those who compulsively seek cosmetic perfection.

Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance -- and Whishaw's well-matched response -- results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love.

A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood.

The character can be a dolt, but Cornish is a marvel, exuding a reckless hunger and prowling with a sexuality of potent directness.

What matters is that Tiana triumphs as both a girl and a frog, that dreams are fulfilled, wrongs are righted, love prevails, and music unites not only a princess and a frog but also kids and grown-ups.

As filmmaking, the docu is only travel-diary so-so. But the chance to experience the machine-gun rhymes of ''the Turkish Eminem'' - a young man called Ceza - is priceless.

The romantic troubles of three Irish-Catholic brothers on Long Island don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

A warm embrace of tradition and boisterous, ethnographically rich local culture.

When the florid speeches of volcanic rage and frustration draw to a close - and when Collins and Gooding complete their acting exercises - we still have no clue who these men are and what sent them down their intersecting moral dark alleys.

An irresistibly vibrant concert-tour documentary.

It's a bouncy, loose limbed, ''families do the darnedest things'' sitcom that elicits ungrudging laughs.

The real soullessness here is built into the production, a polished adaptation of Hong Kong-style filmmaking that, with its cast of depressive characters, allows for little Hong Kong-style joy.

It's agony, in a rewarding way, to squirm and cringe and groan through an ordeal so realistically re-created.

With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.

A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.

The movie was a major success for Melanie Griffith, sure, but it was as the secretary's boss ... that Weaver combined all of her star qualities, pulled in laughs, and took home an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.