Maitland McDonagh

The vicious clamor the film occasioned in the U.K. is simply the measure of how volatile a subject the relationship between England and Ireland remains more than eight decades after the film's events, and the thinking viewer can hardly help but see parallels between the Irish insurgency and all subsequent guerrilla conflicts.

The title refers to a diorama at New York City's American Museum of Natural History that depicts a whale and a giant squid locked in mortal combat.

Absolutely breathtaking documentary whose close-up shots of birds in flight are so freakishly intimate that the film is compelled to open with the statement they're not special effects.

Director Carl Franklin, who also adapted the screenplay from Walter Mosley's prize-winning novel, isn't particularly concerned with the machinations of mystery plots. Nor is he seduced by the temptations of noir visual style (although Tak Fujimoto's camera work is plenty stylish).

Cuaron lets his enthusiasms show.

While Gilroy deploys the occasional exploding car, the film's climax is all words -- angry, carefully sharpened words -- with the stopping power of large-caliber bullets.

Unlike Woo's successful but rather disappointing "Broken Arrow", this brutal, stunningly choreographed spectacle weaves together lyrical beauty, blasphemy, sadistic cruelty and grotesque sentimentality with breathtakingly smooth assurance.

A bittersweet rite-of-passage story driven by the subtle performances of newcomers Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt.

A dismal misfire that attempts to make black comedy out of the adventures of war correspondents and the dirty business of international politics.

Fresnadillo's film is little more than a gloomy and attenuated Twilight Zone episode, reminiscent of Alex Cox's portentous "The Winner" (1997) without the truly breathtaking conclusion.

Hailed as a clever exercise in neo-Hitchcockianism, this clever and very satisfying picture is more accurately Chabrolian.

Actor-turned-director Andrey Zvyagintsev's feature debut is haunted by an elusive past and suffused with dread about the future, and it's all suggestion without explanation.

A small slice of a suspended life, intimate and filled with the mundane details most people forget when the waiting is over and their real lives begin.

Anyone who remembers Harrison fondly will enjoy this musical tribute, though it assumes a level of familiarity with Harrison's associates that not all viewers will have.

Though it includes a couple of sword fights, Yamada's epic domestic drama could easily be called an anti-samurai film. But its aim is less to subvert the genre's conventions than to deepen them, extending its parameters to include the minutia and rhythms of everyday life.

An astonishing movie that keeps you off-balance from the first scene.

An unabashed call to action that shines a spotlight on a problem whose intimate medical nature relegated it to the shadows.

Funny, perceptive, bawdy, tragic and philosophical, pretty much everything a viewer -- or a listener -- could ask for.

Funny, eye-opening and ultimately very moving portrait by director Kirby Dick.

Weber's losers really are losers -- envious, spiteful, complacent, mean-spirited and ultimately boring malcontents pickled in their own poison, and they drag his film down with them.

Film's real sticky wicket is that the bad guys not only threaten to nuke a major American city but do it — a conceit that might have been more amusing before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center using hijacked commercial jets. Witnesses said the WTC attack looked like a movie; they didn't say it was a movie they wanted to see.

Diablo and director Jason Reitman never undercut Juno, whom Page brings to a fully rounded life (no pun intended) that verges on the frightening: Her vulnerable center doesn't belie her formidable exterior -- it just makes her more than a sitcom-patter machine.

With the exception of a brief sequence on the Galapagos Islands, where Maturin briefly indulges in some pre-Darwinian study of its unique ecosystem, the entire film takes place aboard the ship, and Weir's greatest accomplishment may be that it never feels claustrophobic.

Their downward spiral is like a slow-motion highway pileup: You might think you don't want to watch, but you can't tear your eyes away.

It's as laceratingly entertaining as its predecessor.

Overall, the film is occasionally interesting but essentially unpersuasive, a footnote to a still evolving story.

You don't have to know an arabesque from an alligator handbag to enjoy Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's loving documentary about the various incarnations of the Ballet Russe.

Inventive visuals and funny bits abound, but the film's gritty look and unsentimental characterizations - Harry, Hermione and Ron are far from golden teens - ominously foreshadow the truly wicked shape of things to come.

It's a great place to visit, even if you wouldn't want to live there.

For all the flash and flutter, the movie overall lacks, well, HEFT.

On the downside, it's slackly edited -- comedy is, after all, all about timing and there are way too many lengthy shots of Cho waiting for her audience to respond.

But overall, Jackson goes for the magic by sidestepping every error of judgment and failure of imagination that brought the ponderous 1976 remake thudding to Earth before Kong ever did. He delivers three solid hours of breathless, enchanting entertainment.

Non-musical scenes that move the narrative forward are staged realistically, while the lavish production numbers reflect the star-struck imagination of one-time chorine Roxie, for whom all the world ought to be a stage.

The interactions between the raspy-voiced Hurt and various shallowly cheerful Americans are genuinely charming and dynamic.

Often rings painfully true, but would have benefited from judicious editing.

Often technically rough, but it's painfully compelling.

Serrau effortlessly navigates the tricky transition from ruefully comic chick flick to gritty crime picture.

Davaa and Falorni's film does suggest that camels have inner lives as rich and complicated as the human beings with whom they live in such intimate proximity. But they're also wholly camels, matted, goopy-eyed, gritty with sand and quick to knee an adorable calf in the snout when its demands become annoying.

By turns enthralling, seductive and deeply disturbing.

Mark Moormann's documentary tends to the worshipful, but Dowd, a charmer onscreen, was by all accounts just as appealing in real life.

It's sometimes hard to breath for the sheer volume of acting sucking the air out of the room, and keeping three narratives movie without muddling them all is a hugely ambitious undertaking for any director, let alone one on his second film.

Morrison brings an amazingly sure hand to MacLachlan's prickly screenplay.

Has a terminal case of the cutes.

Lame, derivative comedy.

This minimalist meditation on loneliness and loss is so spare and drained of color that it seems always on the verge of fading into invisibility.

Undeniably handsome..., but no cliché is left unturned, right down to the spray of toy soldiers falling from the hand of a dead child. Everything old isn't new again.

Though Bittner's slacker charm may not be to all tastes, the parrots are natural-born scene-stealers with more than enough charm to seduce the most dubious viewer.

Bielinsky's feature debut is a smart, enormously entertaining thriller whose preposterous conclusion in no way diminishes the fun of getting there.

As M, Dench knows she has a tiger by the tail and isn't fazed in the slightest. Reservations aside, the film marks the beginning of a new phase in James Bond's history, and it promises to be a gripping one.

Beautifully acted and emotionally devastating.

Comprehensive and reverential.

This is a film worth seeing, and LaBute is a filmmaker well worth watching.

Cynical, misanthropic and embittered.

It's as chilling as Algernon Blackwood's elegantly unnerving "The Willows," played absolutely, unsettlingly straight.

A lightweight parody of the porn industry and daytime talk shows that has the look and feel of a middling direct-to-video feature.

An enthralling, suspenseful documentary about spelling bees.

Best of all, though the Simpson clan is 18 years older, they're not one bit wiser.

Spare and quietly heartbreaking, this French-Canadian feature uses a fine brush to depict a teenage girl in the midst of a quiet crisis.

Don’t Go is sufficiently subtle that some viewers will find it dull and lacking in traditionally “scary” moments. But others will appreciate the care with which it walks the line between supernatural and psychological horror.

The filmmaker's command of storytelling is less than assured, and with the exception of Figueroa and Annette Murphy (who plays Pepe's mistress Letti), the film's performances range from awkwardly wooden to amateurishly awful. While Arteta is definitely a filmmaker to watch, this particular movie is a testament to aspirations that considerably exceed his present abilities.

Informative documentary.

It's a sly, subtle portrait of systematic hypocrisy.

The verdict: More thoughtful than Harlin's version, but hardly the invigorating mix of shocks and metaphysical horror needed to revitalize the Exorcist franchise.

A deep and astonishingly authentic streak of melancholy runs through this fifth sequel to the 1976 sleeper that made both struggling actor Sylvester Stallone and hard-luck slugger Rocky Balboa international stars.

Proof that the US has no monopoly on white-trash humor.

Casting a film set in Latin America with Spanish-and Italian-speaking performers acting in English misfires; the actors' diverse accents clash, some are clearly more fluent than others and the sense of relief when anyone speaks a rare line in Spanish is palpable.

This is a psychological study that rejects psychology, an erotic drama of surpassing coldness, and a story of amour fou in which the madness is calculated and the love frozen.

The penguins' matter-of-fact victory over some of the Earth's most punishing conditions is astonishing enough without the epic airs.

Nelson's film eschews sensationalism, and knowing how the story ends in no way diminishes its visceral impact.

The combination of Lee's discomforting subject matter and distancing style -- calculating artlessness punctuated by occasional flights of lyrical fantasy -- makes this slow-moving drama a challenge that doesn't seem entirely worth the effort.

A blockbuster hit in Korea, Park's feature debut is a beguiling mix of the generic and the unfamiliar, and it ends on a shot that's nothing short of heartbreaking.

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

Chalk up another family for Leo Tolstoy and Philip Larkin file: The Paskowitz family is unhappy in its own unique way and mum and dad f**cked them up -- they didn't mean to, but they did.

Equal parts soap drama and ham-fisted morality tale.

The main event is the Mamet-esque battle of foul words between vintage hard-case Ray Winstone and the seething sociopath played by Ben Kingsley.

The film ends on an ambiguous note that will infuriate some viewers and strike others as the only possible finale to Don's sad absurdist journey.

Penn, in particular, is so subdued he's hardly there, while Hurley's seductive, hyper-articulate Adaline is actually ludicrous, sucking suggestively on ice cubes and reciting poetry like a phone-sex operator pretending to be a book-reading babe.

Margaret Brown's documentary is actually an examination of the racial divide in a city that claims there is none.

The multitalented Jaoui and Bacri excel on every level; her direction is efficient and unobtrusive, their script dissects the nuances of corruption by celebrity with a razor-sharp scalpel, and they deliver a pair of subtly unsparing performances.

McCarthy's flawless casting may be the film's greatest strength: Veteran character actor Jenkins and his costars vanish into their characters -- their performances are so subtle and unforced that they don't feel like performances at all.

A dark delight that combines pop-culture wit and genuine emotional depth.

The film's Buck Rogers-style graphics are cool, but the shrilly squabbling brothers -- realistic though they may be -- are insufferable, the story's your-turn/my-turn structure is tedious, and its relentlessly reiterated message about brotherly love and cooperation is really grating.

The story's self-conscious seaminess cries out for the ministrations of a filmmaker like direct-to-video auteur Gregory Hippolyte.

While the transgressive trappings (especially the frank sex scenes) ensure that the film is never dull, Rodrigues's beast-within metaphor is ultimately rather silly and overwrought, making the ambiguous ending seem goofy rather than provocative.

Both informative and intensely moving.

Caustic and despairing, Shrader's film lacks the delicate beauty of Atom Agoyan's "Sweet Hereafter," but has just as much bitter power.

Their doomed fling is oddly hypnotic and ultimately haunting.

Fluff in the tradition of Hollywood's screwball comedies of remarriage, lacking the wit or grace of such classics as "His Girl Friday" (1940) and "The Awful Truth" (1937).

Fincher gets it all right, and Donovan's hippie-dippy "Hurdy Gurdy Man," which bookends the story, has never sounded so hauntingly menacing.

Yugoslavian-born writer-producer-director-editor Vladan Nikolic weaves together the intersecting stories of lost souls who bring their international miseries to New York in this cool, cynical thriller.

Audacious, hypnotic and utterly breathtaking.

First and foremost a celebration of Cuban dance and music.

Slight and whimsical.

The film's extra-special trick, the one that kicks in under your radar because it's so busy with all the flash, is that it makes you care deeply for Lola and Manni.

The movie's captivating details are all in the performances, from Foreman's barking-mad Taylor to Thewlis's smoothly sinister Freddie and Bettany/McDowell's hard-eyed gangster, an amoral bottom-feeder with an expedient streak of sadism.

First-time feature director Tucker displays an astonishingly assured touch, allowing his phenomenal cast to creep into their characters' skins and surrounding them with images of shimmering and slightly threatening beauty.

Brooding ghost story is rich with psychological and political implications that never obscure its fundamental creepiness.

28 Weeks Later is flawed -- the constant reappearance of one key character verges on the absurd -- but it knows where it's going, and it gets there in a chilling blaze of fire, blood and poisonous fog.