Marc Mohan

Her film is just as effective as a portrait of two unknowable, individual souls caught up in events of global scale.

You might not be able to picture yourself in such a life, but you'll be glad that it persists.

In addition to providing a fascinating, agenda-free look at an unseen way of life, the film presents a lesson that should be welcome among people of any faith or none at all.

The domestic and romantic turmoil all gets resolved a bit too neatly to seem realistic, but realism isn't the goal; this is comfort food, plain and simple, and achieves its modest goals in nearly effortless fashion.

Throughout, Sophie exhibits the quality common to all of history's great martyrs, a preternatural calmness that perseveres despite (or perhaps because of) the inevitability of her doom.

The edited footage has an intensity and immediacy you won't find on cable news networks.

Tommy Wiseau's film oozes sincerity, which is then slathered in a thick coating of oblivious narcissism, and sadly serves as an example that not everyone should follow their bliss...It's the emotional earnestness that places The Room squarely within Susan Sontag's famous definition of pure camp.

At its core, the story is a Mars vs. Venus case study.

The glory of "Breathless" lies less with its narrative, though, than with its style, a self-conscious blend of drawn-out conversational scenes and rapid-fire cuts of action. [14 Dec 2001]

Manages to excavate enough universal pathos from the mundane to find something truly extraordinary in the ordinary.

A haunting, melancholy fable, Tony Takitani is the kind of film that could seem tedious from a mere description. Approached with the right mind-set, however, it's a hypnotic mood piece on love and loss, one that knows -- at 75 minutes -- not to overstay its welcome.

This gritty take on Grimm's suffers from mannered supporting performances and an inconsistent level of realism.

The result is a hybrid of "Falling Down" and "Short Cuts" without the iconic central character of the former or the latter's clear-eyed humanism.

Ultimately, ATL is the same old teenager angst in a mildly novel package.

In this involving if slightly unfocused documentary, director Daniel Karslake takes a two-pronged approach in examining how religion has been interpreted -- some would say twisted -- into, at its worst, monomaniacal homophobia.

An old-fashioned story of courage and self-sacrifice in the face of war and deprivation. It's also sappy, boring and obvious.

Director Jim deSeve has done an excellent job of providing both historical and personal perspective on a topic that provokes heated emotional reactions.

The good news is that this movie is no "Spanglish;" the bad news is that Sandler's performance is actually better than the material deserves.

The Harvey Girls isn't really anything special, cinematically speaking. This run-of-the-mill Judy Garland musical is notable mostly for its Oscar-winning song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe."[10 May 2002]

Land of the Dead is huge. It's Romero doing what he does best: using zombies to create a lowbrow social parable. It shows up junk like "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" for the brainless pap it is. And it's got something that even the best previous "Dead" films have lacked: good acting.

Ultimately, though, it's unfortunate that the movie tries to make so many oblique comparisons to more modern tragedy (paparazzi with sketchbooks; yes, we get it!), since Georgiana's life seems fascinating enough on its own.

What this alteration says about societal trends of the past three decades is open to debate, but the change is a tiny hint that earnest fidelity to the source was not a top priority.

The result is a frustrating and disturbing mishmash of vague philosophical noodling, which even the best-chosen cast can't imbue with zip.

The result is an exercise in emoting that features one of the worst Southern accents in recent memory and does about as much to establish the actor's range as "Battlefield Earth."

Every so often there's a tabloid news story about the Virgin Mary seen in a piece of toast or Mother Teresa on a tortilla, and most of us equate them with Elvis sightings. This film is for the rest.

It's a refreshingly human-scale saga.