Lisa Schwarzbaum

The result is flashy, but the meaning is a bit of a bob and weave.

Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.

Essential, unique viewing.

An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.

The movie is so finely minced a mixture of Sondheim's original melodrama and Burton's signature spicing that it's difficult to think of any other filmmaker so naturally suited for the job.

Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.

Alexander Payne's scathing, subtle, and complexly funny tragicomedy builds a perfect, off-kilter universe--it's a first cousin to "Rushmore."

Flirting is a little too weighed down with stage business to soar. But episode for episode, it's one of the ha-ha-funniest movies currently around.

The many fans of the uniquely droll 2003 animation Oscar nominee "The Triplets of Belleville" will recognize the inventive hand-drawn sensibilities of French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in his loving and lovely new feature The Illusionist.

In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).

The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish.

David Cronenberg's brilliant movie -- without a doubt one of the very best of the year.

The storytelling is the series' best, with a zingy balance of drama, humor, and Deep Thoughts (in a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed with confident exuberance by Irvin Kershner). [Special Edition]

This tender documentary considers the mysteries of both art and coping.

In hovering, The Squid and the Whale becomes its own realistic display of family entropy, as cautionary as it is educational.

Mesmerizing.

Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.

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

The worldview, the sense of childlike fun shaded with adult melancholy, and the joyful, serene attention to visual oddity and wordless beauty could only be made in Japan. And, specifically, made by Hayao Miyazaki.

Around town, Stephen Fry ("Peter's Friends"), as a fluty artiste, dogs Flora with his devotion and declares, "I'm engorgedly in love with you!" That's how I feel about this gem.

The facts are so awful that Dear Zacharycan be forgiven much of its antsiness--as a memorial, as a condolence to Bagby’s parents (who became activists for judicial reform in their late son's honor), and as a howl of grief.

Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.

But it is the steady accretion of hundreds of small moments in this elegant, high-spirited, intensely satisfying production -- the director's third American movie, but the first to approach the dazzle of his Hong Kong stuff -- that, toted up, makes everything right about this des- perately welcome thriller.

Out of the zany strictures of Dogma 95...Danish newcomer Thomas Vinterberg has made a funny, volatile, visually dynamic story about the unraveling of one extended family during the course of a patriarchal 60th-birthday dinner.

Where "No End" is cool and measured, Taxi is hot, anguished, and sometimes as difficult to watch as pictures of torture ought to be.

As Demme's audienc we're at the mercy of political passion overshadowed by style.

The story itself is so powerful and troubling, the moral geometry so vertiginous, and the photography so big that anything other than the natural sounds of snowfall and footfall is a Flat Earth Society intrusion.

The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.