Lisa Schwarzbaum

The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism

One of the great virtues of Disney's most elegant animated ''classic'' in years is how blessedly sermon-free this zippy, dignified retelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ripping 1914 yarn is.

Robert Downey Jr. is great in a role no one less magnetically reckless would dare approach.

Cheery, silly, splattery, and respectful of its elders (and betters, particularly Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead").

Certainly Garden State is a very American specimen of debut indie form, its loose, goof-about scenes of comic melancholy reinforced with the glue of quirkiness over cracks in the narrative development.

As a shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people, the engorged romantic tragedy Remember Me stands tall between those towering monuments to teen-oriented cinematic misery, Love Story and Twilight.

Propelled by ferocious sex, nasty violence, and coy interludes of traditional Turkish love songs.

The inventiveness is still superior and the network of fiends and family is extended.

For some four fifths of its length, Jersey Girl is as square as a turnpike-diner place mat.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins are so interesting that it's easy to put up with the decision-making dithering that goes along with the title.

With every detail in this clever peekaboo, the sly filmmaker dangles the possibility that fiction is fact and that Yvan and Charlotte are real -- or at least as real as the movies.

A huge pile of horsefeathers is being peddled as fairy dust in Bigger Than the Sky.

Garish, squeal-pitched preteen comedy.

This dazzling reverie of a kids-and-adults movie, an unusual collaboration between lord-of-the-cult multimedia artist Dave McKean and king-of-the-comics Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), has something to astonish everyone.

The most frightening sight, though, is that of Theron and Bacon, good actors trapped in the muck of making a living.

It's as if, in exploring the scars that shape these personalities, Téchiné has forgotten to color in the flesh.

An overstuffed, unengaging drama that makes time for a love triangle.

Dense with plot intricacies, thick with atmosphere, and packed with showy roles for a hip ensemble.

With Green Zone, though, the malaise has finally hit me. So while Damon's Miller uncovers the (inconvenient) truth of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all I want to know is: How does he suggest we get out?

Requires Neeson to stare coldly and talk to corpses, but Ricci has the greater dramatic challenge: She has to operate, unfazed, in close-up nakedness much of the time.

The movie never gives its heart freely and honestly to the satiny whirl of post-"Chicago" showbiz spectacle it so clearly wants to be.

In their way, Mirabelle and Ray are the deracinated West Coast equivalents of a Woody Allen couple.

Director Scott Elliott, in his feature-film debut, is especially perceptive about what goes on at the edges during deepening family crises, literally at the borders of the screen.

Cagey, high gloss comedy.

A cute premise that, upon closer inspection, rings falser rather than truer. It's pretty good, but not nearly as good as Brooks gets.

Eastwood directs Mystic River with an invigorated grace and gravitas. This is a true American beauty of a movie, a tale of men and their bonds told by and for adults who value the old-fashioned Hollywood-studio notion of narrative.

There are many places a visitor may go astray in 2046 -- places where the filmmaker appears to be a bit at loose ends too. Still, Wong's invitation -- ''Let's get lost'' -- is irresistible.

The star (Allen), unleashed, is so energetic in his approximation of a bearded collie -- his nose sniffing the air, his whole being (which toggles between human and canine form) overcome by the need to fetch any stick thrown -- that his slobbery charm carries the picture.

At times dark and at other times gooey.

A surreal, elegantly melancholy, and yet witty ensemble story.

The easygoing silliness with which this late-summer movie surprise scuttles from mayhem to mayhem and the verve with which the cast throws itself into the fray are so cheering and liberating.

There are no zombies to distract from the plausibility of Right at Your Door. And that's what makes this smart, coolly horrifying American indie thriller one of the scariest movies you're likely to see all year — a post-9/11 nightmare about terrorism, panic, and paranoia with real, waking-life implications.

Stock farce characters and stale scenes of mayhem fill the downtime between the Martin-Latifah skirmishes.

Ed Helms and Ving Rhames score laughs. But the breakout is "Step Brothers'" Kathryn Hahn as the tough (sales)girl who keeps up with the boys.

Each joke and one-liner is a made-for-HBO zinger, each scene with Sandler a reaffirmation of the old friendship between the two successful SNL alums.

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.

A moderately adorable, musically wacky, ecologically activist CG family comedy.

The antics involving ghosts, chases, and burping that divert the small fry don't mix with the jokey, tribute-band dialogue spouting from the Mystery, Inc. gang.

Mesmerizing.

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.

Tsai builds this shimmering story with deft, deadpan wit and a warm, understated love of the absurd, both in life and afterlife.

As for Monster-in-Law, it's tripe on a plate.

Nobody will go to see Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit, novelty-act drama - a naughty peep show for sobersides, disguised as a nature documentary - to hear the songs; everyone will go to see the shagging, which occupies the majority of the screen time.

Hanks towers as a near naked, near biblical man. Zemeckis tells his story -- the screenplay is by William Broyles -- with a control magnificent in what isn't shown as much as in what is.

A visual and aural overload that ultimately tires rather than conveys a feeling of f—-d up-ness.

It's as agreeably sweet as advertised, with a particularly yummy performance by Juliette Binoche.

The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

The chattering smarty-pants who ran the U.S. government on "The West Wing" are slow talkers compared with the motormouthed and hilariously imperfect power elite in the brainy British comedy In the Loop.

Written by Mr. ''Full Monty'' himself, Simon Beaufoy, and, like ''Monty,'' sprinkles pixie dust over the heads of worn out local folk.

An overstructured, overacted indie drama about gambling, addiction, and the sawdusty romanticism of old-time magicians.

The whole film is cracked, but in a stylish, downtown way.

Rudd's talents as a thinking woman's charmer are wasted -- as are those of amiable Jason Biggs in a weak variation on the pop theme of being a gal's gay best friend.

A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost.

This is a sensual, psychologically modern costume drama influenced by both "The Godfather" and gals' guides to empowerment.

A work of American art as classic as it is modern. Note to tourists: Leave before the very end of the credits and you'll miss some of the best and funniest roadside sights.

Surprisingly square portrait of avant-garde artist and director Robert Wilson.

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.

Every signifier in this quintessentially American domestic thriller is in satisfying running order.

Although the talent of a kid with the last name of Culkin may not, at this point, register as such a novelty -- Rory follows brothers Macaulay and Kieran -- there is something precociously mature but natural about the work of this youngest Culkin sibling that stands apart.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who brought his interest in self-discovery and untamed places to Quest for Fire, The Lover, and the IMAX 3-D film Wings of Courage, is at his best re-creating the serene exoticism of the Dalai Lama's Tibet. But the spark of the holy that the Dalai Lama lights in Harrer flickers only fitfully in all the wind in this production.

The vérité fascinates, even if the artifice is obvious.

Between bouts of decisive action, the characters mill around the French countryside (in lovely costumes, to be sure, by Jenny Beavan) as if unsure of which sexual stereotype to bust next.

Hunt is so vibrant that the movie suffers when she's not around.

Every character in The Architect is crazily stuccoed with crisis.

Munro's stark lily needed none of this gilding.

This puffed-up Western set in Big Sky country becomes a small-screen horse opera.

Reproducing a period-piece screwball comedy for a modern audience turns out to be one playful, self-deprecating wink too many for the star, who also directed Leatherheads.

This is a dark story as well as a frothy one. But the bubble of absurdist self-absorption in which Menzel places this specimen of man-child is exquisite.

Under the direction of "Bend It Like Beckham's" Gurinder Chadha, this festively busy and exuberantly multicultural charmer is its own intriguingly postmodern creation.

Still, it's only just a jump shot or two before Glory Road settles into its rudimentary, music-cued rhythms of classroom civics lessons punctuated by on-court action.

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

Tthis isn't just any setup, is it: It's suds being sold as ethno-sensitive reality, a case of coveting thy neighbor's fiesta.

There are moments in A Little Princess--particularly Cuaron's Indian play-within-the-play, which is nearly avant-garde in its conception--when you may just want to clap from pleasure. My advice to you is: Go ahead, you're a grown-up. [26 May 26 1995]

Nothing good happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the riveting, horrifying chronicle of an illegal abortion performed in 1987 when Ceauescu's dictatorial hand still gripped Romania's throat. And yet no lover of greatness in filmmaking will want to look away from one of the very best movies of 2007.

In Catfish, the camera's-rolling readiness to trawl for drama leaves a slimy aftertaste.

Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.

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.

As a sharky, gay TV journalist investigating the story, Tom Selleck charms by playing in contrast to his own determinedly hetero persona.

What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in -- a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.

Like a dowser who can divine hidden sources of water, Atom Egoyan has a talent for locating the dream-state perversity that runs just under the surface of everyday life;

Oscillates between streaky black comedy and sanitary instruction.

Like any great myth, Pan's Labyrinth encodes its messages through displays of magic. And like any good fairy tale, it is also embroidered with threads of death and loss.

If you had never encountered Bullock’s patented brand of appealingly unglamorous, warm-eyed gal before this dispiriting production, you might think the star of Speed and The Net was nothing more than a Marisa Tomei knockoff.

Director Chris Columbus...seals this comedy in an impenetrable bubble of hollow humanism.

Kenan directs with a zingy sense of kids, comedy, fright, and visual perspective. But the movie also shimmers and shakes in all its motion-capture animated beauty with the slyly deep sensibilities of executive producer Robert Zemeckis.

Robbins the agitprop celebrity may be blowin' in the wind, but Robbins, the son of a folksinger, knows how to get audiences clapping along.

There's much that's simplistically grand, worthy, and fine in Perdition. If I yearn for less measured filmmaking that cries out with more reckless despair, it's because I think hell on earth is a meaner, much more interesting, and far less tidy cinematic place than Mendes trusts his audience to handle.

The leisure-time viewer will say, ''Hey, this is sort of like "Casablanca," so why play it again?''

The best thing about this long-awaited feature-length project, a classic Simpsonian interplay of family psychology, social commentary, and brainy visual and verbal jokes tossed off at rat-a-tat speed, is how relaxed it manages to be.

A spare, controlled study in communication gaps and a piercing sketch of suburban American loneliness.

Laddish, one joke, genre scrambling rock & roll fairy tale.

Like a blue plate special at a theme diner, Sunshine State comes with a lot of overdone side dishes thrown on the table at the same time.

In a season of bulging Movies Earmarked for Importance, it is almost startling to come across something as unhyped - and perfectly swell - as The Ice Harvest.

With no headliners to raise hopes, this negligible entertainment has its own boneheaded charms.

The mangy joke in the defiantly homemade documentary 95 Miles to Go is that Ray Romano on a business trip is no different from any other schmo, minus the autograph signing.

Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams' unnecessarily hectic debut feature won several British film festival awards, no doubt for its bounty of low-budget stylized violence and blood, as well as its thing for prostitutes and runaways.

This triumphant sequel to the hard-to-top 2002 original may be the first great comic-book movie in the age of self-help and CGI wizardry, an entertainment in which both the thrills and the therapeutic personal growth are well earned.

One of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see.

Well-meaning but hopelessly lost little comedy.

Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.