Maitland McDonagh

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.

Walks a thin line between refreshing irreverence and shameless exploitation of offensive gay stereotypes.

Nolan's intention was clearly to cast the material in a more conventional Hollywood mold without turning it into namby-pamby nonsense, and he succeeds admirably.

This ambitious independent feature eschews gore in favor of rubber-reality ambiguity.

Its imagery is never less than breathtakingly beautiful, and is occasionally truly awesome

It's as hard not to ask what former New York Doll David Johansen is doing in their company, prancing his way through an irrelevant version of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor," as it is not to wonder why the audience is so overwhelmingly white.

Creepy, beautifully designed horror yarn about mutant roaches that delivers both artfully eerie atmosphere and some boffo shocks.

It's a raw, haunting experience.

A huge hit in France, this ensemble drama revolves around two very different social groups whose encounters with each other change several lives in surprising ways.

This quietly gripping film is both universal and particular.

A creepy, clever, film buff's delight of a fantasy.