Marjorie Baumgarten

The man whom the FBI described as "extremely eloquent, therefore extremely dangerous" here seems about as threatening as Mother Teresa.

Bassett as Voletta is her usual captivating self.

My be a gearhead's delight, but its appeal to middle-of-the-roaders will be stop-and-go.

Graham maintains a casual charm throughout it all, but she lacks the kind of emotional depth that might have pulled this hodge-podge together.

The film is at its best when painting the atmosphere and detail of 1953 Dublin.

Crude's moving testimony and careful documentation make it hard to turn away from this issue. It will certainly remain in your mind the next time you stop for gas.

Silly and implausible.

Sex may, indeed, be all in the mind, but Romance fails to score in the mind's eye.

A phantom of a movie whose beautiful flakes fall into the deep crevices of memory long after the seasons change.

In the wake of the debacle known as Showgirls, Striptease has had to fight to establish its separate identity and credentials. In retrospect, it appears to have been wasted energy.

Muddled, sloppy, and obfuscating.

The problem with The Third Miracle is that it is thematically ambiguous and never lays out its position on whether it thinks saints are or are not real.

None of it is handled with any emotional believability or grace. Well-worn phrases and plot developments are repeated here as though the world had never heard of "Cinderella."

Certainly movies are a business, but it's only good form for them to at least pretend that they have some reasons for existence other than the purely mercenary. The goal of entertainment has been forgotten here in the mad dash for formulaic guarantees. These comedy nun pushers have forgotten that there's no bottom line at heaven's gate.

A movie that’s so profoundly ridiculous that it has to be admired, if for no other reason other than its sheer willingness to run with its premise and take it to the end of the line.

What's more, they toss a few original twists into a familiar generic set-up and thereby create a thoroughly entertaining and stylish thriller.

The performances are all terrific, but Together never jells as a compelling narrative.

Cadillac Records bobs and weaves, strides and duckwalks, samples and smiles on the sounds that made urban Chicago such a blues melting pot.

This crude live-action takeoff on the Cabbage Patch phenomenon ought to have had star Anthony Newley humming "Stop the Movie, I Want to Get Off."

This French import is a worthy entrant into the adrenalized cadre of action films like "Run Lola Run" and "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior" (which Besson produced). What District B13 lacks in story development it compensates for with stunningly realistic action.

Despite flashes of originality, is a formulaic quagmire that traps bits and pieces from all these genres without really satisfying any of their true aims.

Meets the required minimum dosage of feature-film attributes, and then nods out when it comes to going any further.

More than an appreciation, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song is an inspiration.

The action can be bloody, but is mostly routine. Ultimately, the film’s most eye-catching special effects are reserved for bikini waxes and implants.

When embraced on its own terms, the film will provide an ironic bridge for those who want to share a greater closeness with Smith.

Audiences may find this pap brimming with heart and sympathy for the little guy, but as prescriptions go, Patch Adams is pure placebo.

Winter's Bone never hits a false note.

Redgrave still manages to inspire awe, yet a poetically prosaic moment like the one in which she goes chasing after a butterfly is enough to throw a net over the whole thing.

The performances are extremely good, and the tone maintains a droll continuity throughout.

The sketchy visual traits that differentiate the many characters in this avian universe will leave viewers crying, "Who, who" along with the owls.

Bottle Rocket's minimalist pop has a refreshing flavor but insufficient bubbles for a long, cool drink. Maybe someone ought to think about culling this thing down into a sustainable short film.

There's a comment in here somewhere about leadership and authorship, and it's not that we're laughing too hard to fully comprehend it. In von Trier's world, the laugh is often ON the audience, not WITH the audience.

Nolan creates an effective thriller, although he keeps his stylistic pyrotechnics to a minimum.

What can you say about a movie that includes its outtake bloopers reel before the closing credits?

Director Duke (A Rage in Harlem and countless TV work) rivets our attention with his tightly framed shots and crisp editing that intelligently revives that bygone tradition of jump cuts (though they confusingly disappear completely midway through the movie).

He's a saint in the flesh, but not one who inspires great drama.

Repulsion's depiction of a young woman's dissolution into madness is one of the most harrowing mental descents ever depicted onscreen. (Reviewed 11/24/97)

Farcical mayhem. A convoluted plot that's easy to follow but hard to describe.

It is rich with ideas and contemplations and packed with the sort of existential jokes that tickle the Coen boys so.

Narratively, we all know where the trajectory of the story is headed, thus the culminating match (nearly 20 minutes) takes up too much screen time without adding anything new to the drama.

A forgettable and lackluster fish-out-of-water rom-com.

Jackson does it all in this movie: writes, directs, stars, produces, and designs the makeup.

With a startlingly climactic finale, Body Snatchers only underscores the ultimate illogic of placing your trust in your kin.

This modern cult classic is a triumphantly dark comedy directed by one of the film world's truly original visionaries, Terry Gilliam. "Imagination" is this futuristic film’s middle name.

Benjamin Bratt ably depicts both sides of this character and creates a memorable portrait in the process.

It's an endearing romantic daydream, but misses the bus where matters of reality are concerned.

The movie is a lot of fun if you don't think about it too much, the stuntwork should satisfy the genre fanatics in the crowd even though it doesn't set any new plateaus, and the rapport between Davis and Jackson is enough to keep the sticklers for realism in abeyance at least until the final credits roll.

Tennessee Williams’ study of a crumbling Southern patriarchy is riveting stuff. Although the word homosexuality is never uttered, this Hollywood reworking brings a certain understanding of the son’s latent “immaturity” and his wife’s childlessness. Bolstered by extraordinary performances, this tale’s a summer sizzler.

A masterful synthesis of generic conventions and creative imagination, a sublime amalgam of some of the best tendencies and talent our times have to offer.

Just look at the cast and try to resist the testosterone pull of this movie.

Coprophiliacs looking for a movie that really rings their chimes will be positively tintinnabulating from this arthouse horror number.

Cyrus is very funny, and Keener's supporting work as John's divorced ex also amuses. A pat conclusion nevertheless negates the strength of the restive narrative that precedes it.

If anything, A Few Good Men errs by throwing almost too many elements, themes and moral debates into the mix thus, by default, they sometimes seem shallowly developed and overly simple. Then again, that perhaps allows them to connect with more universal experiences.

There's no denying that Pacino's performance is superb. The rest of the movie plays like a bunch of inconsequentially strung together sequences.

You’ll leave the film wondering why you've never seen a TV ad for an electric car, or why GM is all about selling Hummers these days.

A frustrating exercise in diverted expectations.

A movie that amply delivers on the epic promise of its title, entertaining, enlightening, and emboldening viewers with its deceptively simple premise and execution.

Chills to the bone -- and beyond, but for pure excitement it's best not to look far beneath the surface.

Henkin's vision of Mona Demarkov (Olin) as a remorseless, amoral, lethal, and sexually devastating (you should see what she can do with a prosthetic limb) arch-criminal is a nightmare come to life. But perhaps like dreams, the story works best when played out in the furtive dark spaces of the mind's eye.

The bulk of the documentary observes Pipkin as he traverses the world showing us a score of examples of solutions that are presently working.

The movie brings no new material to the screen and banks on the fact that its underage audience has an unschooled memory. Don't insult your kids with this choppy, unimaginative film product.

I can think of no other movie that has dared to analyze grief and its aftermath with such naked honesty and precision.

A real audience pleaser.

Thornton, who wrote, directed, and stars in Sling Blade, has created an unforgettable character and situation, a film that's sure to become an American classic.

I Stand Alone uses a cannon ball to shatter the psychological horror at the heart of human society.

Any sincere investigation of the situation's ethical dilemmas is hampered by a plot run amok with transparently nefarious evildoers and ever-more ludicrous complications, until it sputters to a conclusion and a thoroughly preposterous epilogue in which all animosities are neatly put to rest. Somebody call a doctor.

No matter the movie's pitfalls, Ray, we can't stop loving you.

The hit-or-miss nature of the gags makes NBT too uneven to recommend, but it's a great calling-card movie for guys who want to become professional comedy writers.

Taylor, Burton, and Harrison are sublime in this sweeping epic of love and nations.

With great subtlety and knowing humor, Eat Drink Man Woman emerges as one of those unforeseen treats.

Preminger strips the musical of all excess and frills. He creates an austere, depoeticized, anti-lyrical world in which nothing obstructs his camera's detached recording of the action. The great themes of Preminger's oeuvre are obsession and the conflict between freedom and repression, themes which are central to Carmen Jones.

It's neither the fulfillment of our worst fears nor the surprise of the week.

It's too bad the language prevents this independent film from being rated PG-13 because this is the kind of movie that might be capable of realistically reflecting teens' lives to other teens.

I'm sorry. I laughed...There's something pleasurable about a comedy that has no pretensions about where it's coming from.

Despite an A-list cast and director, it's astonishing how bad this movie is.

The loosely scripted story is further burdened with clunky dialogue and performances, shoddy continuity.

This is director Pouliot's first film, so perhaps some of his excess cuteness can be overlooked. But then again, maybe not.

A sumptuous ride with breathtaking scenes and a soaring musical score.

The obvious thing is to say that Keep the River on Your Right has unfortunately bitten off more than it can chew -- but not more than we can digest.

The pleasure of watching two alpha males -– Al Pacino and Colin Farrell -– circling each other mano a mano substantially beefs up this otherwise routine spy thriller.

The story is one of those great mad scientist tales in which the potion invented with the best intentions for its enhancement of human life becomes instead an evil force bent on its destruction. The visual effects here are pretty great - and at first comedic - as the Invisible Man smokes and brawls and rocks in a chair. Oh, but then the horror happens.

Lymelife arrives with an impressive pedigree but, unfortunately, little originality.

As arduous to watch as your neighbor’s poorly focused vacation slides.

Like "Bring It On," Stick It is so much better than most of its insipid teen-movie peers yet like her earlier movie, Bendinger's new one is also not all it might be.

Associated with the modernist architectural movement centered in Southern California during the mid-20th century, Shulman’s still photographs are essential to any study of the style’s vast popularization and commercialism.

I’ve seen sick kids exploited for all sorts of reasons – usually as easy ploys to manipulate emotions but sometimes to sell things or encourage philanthropic outpourings – but Letters to God takes the cake (make that the holy wafer).

Everyone knows that the villains are usually the most interesting characters in any movie. So the makers of Despicable Me were wise to cut to the chase and make the megalomaniacal Gru (voiced by Carell) the central character in this animated film.

La Promesse is a penetrating coming-of-age story, one that argues that adulthood begins with the emergence of moral convictions.

It's a shame to once again witness Martin Lawrence squander his considerable comic talents under a fat suit and fake breasts in this shoddy sequel.

There is no better way to while away a Sunday afternoon than with this sprawling saga about the growth of Texas and the families that matured along with the state. If Texas had a state movie, then Giant would be it.

For my money, this Freudian tale about a beautiful kleptomaniac and liar is one of Hitchcock's best accomplishments, certainly one of his most perverse.

Searingly potent and suggestively supple, Carax's images are rich with emotion and ideas.

Despite the film's abundant gory effects, its best technical achievement may be its English subtitles, which move about the screen for better visual and emotional impact, and sometimes dissolve into poofs of blood or other colored effects.

For the most part, it's all fairly predictable material, although McAvoy and his costars invest the movie with dynamic performances that manage to keep the story's characters just this side of stereotype and mediocrity.

Teenthrob Efron will be missed in future episodes by both adolescent girls and their moms who are only too happy to accompany their daughters to the theatre, but he's a handsome talent who's graduated to bigger projects.

Nick and Nora Charles are one of the screen's great couples.

Miike's graphically violent Japanese actioners are not everyone's cup of sake. But if you can handle the bloodshed, Miike's films will open your eyes to the number of ways it can spurt, splat, and drizzle out of a whole variety of natural human orifices and man-made bullet holes.

Lottery Ticket is ultimately no "Friday," but that 15-year-old film's communal vibe is clearly the model Lottery Ticket is chasing.

Lovely to look at, Year of the Fish is an animated feature that pops off the screen like a goldfish leaping free of its bowl.

Among the many things that Baadasssss! is, it is also a movie about moviemaking. In fact, the film should be a primer for anyone about to make an independent film.

Screenwriter Steve Conrad has less success with the female characters: The always dependable Davis is forced into shrewish territory, and David's mother (Judith McConnell) is so barely present that it's a wonder she's written in at all.

A well-chosen cast props up this otherwise shallow story.

Provides a panorama without insight.

At the very least, The Aristocrats provides a survey of some of the best comic minds in the business.

A moving tribute to this legendary artist's life and career.

Blades of Glory, although mildly amusing, has the dank odor of having gone to the well once too often: Ooh, let's dress up Ferrell like an elf – or an anchorman or a NASCAR driver – and see what happens.

Sharp-witted delight.

Unfortunately, the actors don't all behave as though they're performing in the same movie.

This portrait of 1940 France on the verge of capitulating to the Vichy regime is intriguing. However, what keeps the movie engaging is its nutty tone.

The worlds of the natural and the artificial are compared and contrasted in this non-narrative visual orgy.

Knockout ensemble performances like these don't come around all that often, though, and when they do they ought to be savored.

Breaks down before it gets out of the driveway.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

Cairo Time may be your ticket if you're in the mood for love, but the excursion is a cut-rate journey.

Neither slave nor mammy, junkie nor maid, these dawn-of-the-twentieth century African-American women are an unstereotypical breed unto themselves.

A stunningly impassioned and articulate study of a writer's life and the censorial demons that can strangle that voice.

It's the kind of story that shows more than it tells, a story that's forged in the spaces that exist in between characters and spaces.

If taken merely as a vaguely historical spy thriller, Farewell is a dandy tale.

Though formally astringent, Police, Adjective is dotted with lots of humor.

Yet even though Forever After is not as fresh-seeming as its predecessors, it provides passable entertainment, especially for the kids who won’t be familiar with the George Bailey storyline retread – or midlife crises, for that matter.

While Fried Green Tomatoes often veers between being too pat and too vague, too obvious and too unclear, too much of the “I laughed, I cried” school of storytelling -- it still has a charm that stems from its vivid and unique characterizations.

Proves to be a wonderful reality check.

It's a movie perfectly designed for tossing back popcorn (the jumbo kind so you don't have to leave your seat during the show); not until later do you get the empty feeling that you've swallowed an entire bucket of popped air.

Though the soundtrack comes on kind of heavy, the cinematography (by Enrique Chediak) has a beautiful clarity. Yorick's skull or not, Charlie St. Cloud is no Shakespearean drama, but the film should prove to be another solid stepping stone for Efron on his way to a long adult career.

The three-and-a-half-hour-long movie revels in talk as this man ponders life, philosophy, the sexual revolution, the workers' revolution, love, death, and so on. He smokes, drinks, flirts, and talks –­ and the movie is exquisitely of its time.

It's not until the film is over that we fully appreciate the originality of an Israeli film that focuses completely on the family crisis while leaving politics behind altogether.

From its silent opening moments to its breathtaking double-cross conclusion, Le Samourai is the work of one of the film world's great directors working at his expressive peak.

Although slowly paced, it is always stunning to look at -- decadent and perverse in that certain Eurotrashy way.

A movie about life and death; its underpinnings are soaked in the perfume of artistic expression.

This Stanley Kramer-produced film is the original biker movie.

Even at 82 minutes in length, Superstar feels uncomfortably stretched.

Grindhouse raises the bar for a certain kind of movie lollapalooza (and also for the kind of filmmaker who is also a showman, along the lines of a William Castle or Cecil B. De Mille). It's this injection of playfulness and fun and attention to the entire movie-going gestalt that will probably become Grindhouse's lasting contribution to movie history rather than any on-the-screen content of the movie itself.

Cast aside any preconceived expectations you might have regarding this documentary and remember simply this: Winnebago Man is one of the best films you're going to see all year.

More lethal than a nuclear waste dump, Kubrick's komedy at least kills us with laughter... It's one of the greatest - and undoubtably the most hilarious - antiwar statements ever put to film.

Me, I’ve now seen the movie three times and I’ve laughed and I’ve cried. It comes the closest to any movie experience I’ve had in re-creating the aftermath of unexplained suicide. Sometimes there just aren’t any answers.

Christopher Plummer is delightful as this movie’s master magician and impresario of the rickety Imaginarium.

Furry Vengeance would be innocuous enough if only it didn't look as though no effort was made to expand the images past the storyboard phase.

Fails in a pretty spectacular manner but, to its everlasting credit, it goes down swinging and sometimes even connecting.

Scores its ultimate coup de grace though its interviews. Macdonald has lined up an amazing collection of interviewees.

Day Watch falls prey to the curse of most sequels in which "more" is often a thin concept stretched beyond its limits and misconstrued to mean "bigger and better."

A solid contemporary crime drama.

Adults may have a hard time swallowing this toothless tale of PG-rated bloodsuckers, but kids may relate better to its lessons.

Best of all, is this knock-out, though overused, optical effect of a bullet hurtling and whizzing through space toward its target. Sniper is sure to appeal to armchair assassins and fantasy war-gamers. Beyond that audience, Peruvian director Llosa's American debut will appeal to anyone interested in well-made and well-acted pictures that compensate with skill for what they may lack in inspiration.

Although the narrative hiccups in The Holy Land can be chalked up to the mistakes of a beginning filmmaker, they are not disruptive enough to diminish the film’s realistic impact.

In the end, Machete may not be all that original, but it is fresh – fresh as a steel blade to the gut.

Kind of funny and kind of scary, Baghead's central horror motif is merely a structure on which to hang its four-character story about the depth of relationships and the drive to find meaningful work.

Occasionally, the unevenness of the performances in Star Maps becomes distracting and the dastardliness of the characters' dysfunction impinges the bounds of dramatic believability, yet you will be hard-pressed to find another directorial debut this year that equals the narrative and structural audacity of Star Maps.

One thing Siegel got absolutely right in this film is the casting.

With The Ice Storm, Lee seems to have emphasized the details of cultural accuracy over the rudiments of telling a gripping drama.

As things turn out, Clooney’s butt is just one of the many delights to be found on a trip to Solaris.

The film is never less than absorbing to watch. However, in the end, I think Catfish lives up to its namesake's reputation as a bottom-feeder.

Michael Moore has nothing to fear from David Zucker.

Either you cotton to Zemeckis’ motion-capture aesthetic or you don’t: To me, it seems like an awful lot of effort for an insignificant payoff. But it appears that the filmmaker is stuck on the technique – at least until holographic movie technology comes along.

If the mother-child bond is the core human relationship, then this movie implies that we are an emotionally doomed species, though I do not think this was writer-director Garcia’s intent.

Cross of Iron is a WWII movie seen through the eyes of German protagonists. Incredible montage sequences and another parable about Peckinpah’s embattled position within the film industry can be found within.

To its credit, A Time to Kill allows the debate to snake through the entire movie, engagingly pitting characters and speeches against each other, creating a dramatic forum for ethical debate uncommon in most commercial American films.

A welcome and appropriate treat is the flurry of Bob Dylan tunes that can be heard playing in the background of this northern Minnesota story.

Moore succeeds, even though the film as a whole does not fare as well.

Moments of great suspense are sometimes invested with intrinsic humor, moments of trauma can yield great compassion. Often, these seemingly conflicting tones exist all at once, while the oblique mystery never clearly identifies the correct emotion.

The little drama queen who lives inside each of us will find Being Julia hard to resist.

A smart and delightful romantic comedy, yet in the course of creating his new charmer Alexander Payne has sheared off some of the rambunctious edges that made his previous films, About Schmidt, Election, and Citizen Ruth, such marvelous studies in social parody.

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

A formulaic family melodrama whose craftsmanship and sensitivity to its characters raises it to the level of sublime group portrait.

The title, The Last Song, may be wishful thinking for some, but the best they can probably hope for is the close of the era of Hannah Montana movies.

The story's parallels with the present are sometimes inescapable, as when Saladin's fireballs catapulted at Balian's castle strike an eerie resemblance to the "shock and awe" of the U.S.-led coalition's initial assault on Iraq.

There's no getting around this dumb script that's just too silly for words.

This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl.

Spacey, whose Trigger Street Productions is one of the film's producers, digs into his role as the story's snarky mastermind and lure, yet it's all the kind of stuff we've seen him deliver in so many movies before.

This time the acclaimed filmmaker tackles an entire “ism” and, much like its ambiguous title, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore’s film is an unmethodical survey of a gargantuan topic, one that has only grown more so in the year since he began work on the project.

One of the cinema’s very best car-chase sequences – set amid the hilly, windy San Francisco streets – caps this quintessential Steve McQueen policier.

Dench deserves better, and unfortunately it will probably be a long time before she gets another starring role in a movie custom-made for an actress her age.

This Romeo & Juliet is a rich visual feast, besotted with the fervor of its acrobatic camerawork and kinetic staging and its mind-bending aggregation of unrelated but resonant fragments of 20th-century iconography.

Despite a few scattered moments of visceral excitement, the only thing truly frightening about the oh-so-ominously titled Fear is how so many talented people came to be involved in so inane a project.

The end result is a delightful, though a smidge too long, reminder of one of the reasons we so enjoy going to the movies: perchance to dream.

Ultimately never slices things as sharply as it attempts, but it’s definitely a cut above.

A sweet German movie by a first-time filmmaker, who, I would bet, is more than a little familiar with the early work of Jim Jarmusch or just about any Aki KaurismŠki film.

As good as it ever was, and improved slightly by hindsight, experience, and extra cash.

A big generational saga that woos the audience with its humor, spirit, style, and ability. Genius here is an evolutionary thing.

We will be comparing Up with classics like "The Wizard of Oz" for years to come.

A small-scale pleasure, a movie that truly stops and smells the roses.

Emerges as an artful, courageous, experimental work that is as compelling as it is impaired.

A lighthearted action adventure starring four of the most likable guys on the planet.

Junior is passable entertainment, but it could hardly be called fully developed.

William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice may help in bringing some of the Bard's language to life, but this rendition is hardly a freshman course.

This is a bad movie, but one that awakens your senses every so often with flashes of originality and abundant self-belief.

So fascinating is Brother's Keeper that you almost don't quarrel with things like the biased portraits of the prosecuting team and the Deliverance-like banjo-shuffling soundtrack. Brother's Keeper intrigue factor is enormously high and, it could almost be said, that this movie is good enough to be fiction.

Opens strongly and front-loads its best gags into the first third of the film. After that, the jokes begin to repeat themselves, and the plot becomes mired in unintelligible details of the white-collar crime.

It's a good thing this movie has been sitting on the shelf for a year or more, because, apart from the difference in release dates, there's little to distinguish this new cop drama from last year's cop drama "We Own the Night."

The interfacing of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional characters is so shabbily accomplished that it makes you start noticing all the other technical glitches in the work.

Experiencing Evita is like watching one uninterrupted long-form music video divided only by different arias or costume changes (of which there are untold numbers).

Aiming to be this year's Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence never raises a discernible pulse.

Great effects and a nasty undercurrent drive this vehicle.

Just about as great as a movie's ever gonna be... As for the storytellng, The Godfather is an intricately constructed gem that simultaneously kicks ass.

Neither a change of seasons nor truly wonderful performances can breathe life into the dismally enervated Winter Solstice.

Fun and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Déjà Vu has enough style and forward (or is it backward) momentum to viewers aroused. It's only after you leave the theatre that your head starts to throb.

Succeeds as a moody, evocative, and pleasing film, one that underscores its indie roots in sentiment as well as style

It's a giddy blend of horror and comedy.

Dunye's film is smart, sexy (the interracial lesbian lovemaking scene prompted an infamous little ruckus over at the NEA a while back), funny, historically aware, and stunningly contemporary.

Brooks’ early reputation as a film director rests with the success of this raunchy Western spoof. A great cast is eclipsed by the hilarious performances of Korman and Kahn, who plays a Marlene Dietrich-like chanteuse.

The movie's tone concurrently embraces melodramatics and wry humor, a twisted suburban Oedipal knot seen through a sardonic, yet deeply involved, eye.

Cheadle takes what could have been a role as a mere foil and creates a rich portrait of a vaguely discontented married man. Yet the drama sputters once it reaches a contrived and melodramatic climax that feels undernourished and artificial – both less than and more than one had hoped for.

The one thing that is clear from Japón is that a major new visual stylist has hit the screen and that Reygadas’ first film represents the beginning of an auspicious career.

If it weren't so rivetingly realistic, it would be an easy film to dismiss. And if it weren't so easily dismissible, it would be an easy film to defend.

Ultimately, the film feels as glitzy and superficial as the fashion industry itself, a bauble in full regalia, and it’s likely your interest in the documentary will depend largely on your prior interest in the subject matter.

The film is a biting critique of American race relations in the Fifties and a complex study in contrasts and paradoxes.

You simply want the story to go on and on. Let's hope that Holofcener's movies do: Her peregrinations through the lives of contemporary women know few screen equals.

Christian filmmaking has entered a new phase in which its creators have discovered how to soft-pedal their message under wraps of a conventional story.

Time and again, Devor sabotages his own attempt to bring "zoos," literally and figuratively, into the light.

I have to report that I, personally, just don't get it. I intellectually understand what occurs in the movie; I just can't make the leap into calling it a humanistic treasure about life's big questions. Slow and monotonous, the film moves at a deliberate pace and culminates in a meta-fictional moment that is either infuriatingly trite or enigmatic.

Campanella’s script (which is adapted from a novel by Eduardo Sacheri) bogs down, however, when the focus of the story is on Benjamín, who is dogged by his memories and his inability to make a play for Irene.

An additional treat is seeing Hollywood good guy Henry Fonda playing one of the nastiest curs in the West. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great films in cinema history. (8/30/2000 Review)

Talk about your baby boys – Cagney takes the cake here as a psychopathic gangster with a seriously perverse mother complex. A gangster classic.

Though the history and the palace intrigue are not at all difficult for Westerners to grasp, a tighter running time would probably help this epic reach more eyes in America, where it has received the biggest release ever for a Bollywood

Filled more with character studies than narrative intrigues, The Merry Gentleman also provides only sketchy personality details and background information.

In many ways, Not One Less resembles the socialist-realist dramas of the early Communist regimes.

A stunning work of beauty, mystery, contemplation, and grit -- and like sands through the desert hourglass, these are the days of our lives.

The logic of it all will be Greek to anyone not predisposed to the movie's rude and crude humor.

A gripping presentation of a little-known true story and its historical lessons.

Ageism, sexism, classism, and unabashed snobbery rear their ugly heads in a provocatively told story by probably the greatest film melodrama stylist who ever lived.

A movie worth viewing. Besides, it's the only movie to boast NYC millionaire mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg as its executive producer.

Each of the characters is dull and boorish instead of witty and urbane.

Never rings true. It's a dramedy whose blend of melodrama and humor is awkward and incongruous, leaping between the two modes like a fat frog jumping lilypads.

The film moves swiftly and vividly, but in retrospect, numerous plot holes come to mind. Not Forgotten presents a fascinating microcosm but ultimately loses believability when placed in a larger context.

Director Brill makes no stylistic advances from his recent work with Adam Sandler (Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds), and shows no signs of seeking growth or improvement.

Co-directors Rubin and Shapiro deliver the rare documentary that totally entertains, informs, and inspires.

Probably the ultimate writers' film, but it's also a brash, daring, and dynamic film -- as delicate as an orchid but as durable and malleable as the species.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop deserves to be cited for loitering.

Bergman and Grant sizzle in this espionage tale written by Ben Hecht.

Technically, I Am a Sex Addict is a stellar achievement, as it coaxes viewers to accompany Zahedi down avenues of sexual desire that have had little frank exposure on film.

If nothing else, the performances of Connery and Hepburn are welcome delights.

One of the all-time great action movies, The Great Escape also features an all-star international cast. The first half of the movie sets up all the various characters who have to drop their prickly differences and unite to outwit their German captors. Steve McQueen as the Cooler King is a genuine classic.

The height of drollery, a cheeky ode to the liberating power of popular culture, and a fascinating look at an old dog learning some new tricks.

Excellent performances and the steadying camerawork of Haskell Wexler make Limbo a supremely engaging work, but this place to which Sayles condemns his viewers is just one rung removed from Purgatory.

Its cheeky, good fun is what makes Psycho Beach Party an enjoyable, if weightless, romp.

There is no surprise or justice or sense to the whole thing. Just sadness. And a sense of all the lonely people and where they all come from.

But 'neath its candy-coated shell lies several solid grains of truth -- not to mention some fab choreography, a solid-gold title, and a couple of pristine examples (in Swayze and Grey) of what is meant by the term "career-making performance."

The Basketball Diaries is a stepped-on product that never scores.

This comic Disney Western is at its best when Don Knotts and Tim Conway are onscreen as the bumbling bandits who try to steal from a bunch of orphans. Few people remember anything about this movie apart from the hilarity generated by this scene-stealing duo.

The Mighty Ducks may satisfy the Pee Wee hockey players in your household but the rest of you may be turned off by the simplified penance and redemption formula.

The two fantastic performances by Allen and Costner that anchor The Upside of Anger are the reason to see this contemporary drama.

The costume design, however, is the film's most enthralling aspect; replicas of actual Chanel designs were created for the film, and a fresh costume graces nearly every sequence. Alas, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky unfolds on a screen instead of a catwalk.

Hitchcock's comedic charms shine in this delightful story about a corpse that just won't stay buried.

The wonder of The Piano is that such an outwardly simple story could emerge into such a complex swirl of lingering memories.

Eastwood finds the humorous aspects of the character as well, no more so than when the appetite of the widower who lives on beef jerky and Pabst Blue Ribbon becomes the center of attention among the Hmong women cooks.

The director's distinctive editing style, so commonplace today but so unusual for its time, is scarcely apparent in this movie. Also, Meyer's films tend to share a ribald and genuinely funny sense of humor that here gets usurped by a mean and nasty impulse that tends to block out the humor and exaggeration.

A truly provocative essay.

There are moments here in which Shore actually behaves like a recognizable human being with some semblance of feelings, emotions and conscience. Happily, his acting skills are adequate to the task.

In the dark of the theatre Fracture keeps it together – mainly through the sheer will of Hopkins and Gosling.

Definitely a film that marches to its own drumbeat.

An interesting though not extremely successful experiment, but it definitely makes you want to see what Duncan Roy does next.

In this enduringly transcendent love story, Truffaut traces the relationships between three lovers and friends over the years. Moreau dominates every fragment of the movie with her magisterial eroticism. The film works in ways that touch the heart more than the mind.

Just sputters along, albeit pleasantly, while revisiting the realm of the abundantly familiar.

Instead of using actors, Greengrass employed many of the actual air traffic controllers and military commanders who were on the ground that day. Also aiding his film's universality is Greengrass' use of little known actors in the central roles, preventing stardom from affecting our ideas about heroism and patriotism.

Even though the movie is made with an abundance of heart, it's sad to report that the final result has only a weak pulse.

Yet, like it or not, the MPAA ratings is a system in which we all participate – which makes this film important to see if anything is ever going to change.

Mother finds Brooks in top form as he dons the tri-fold hat of director, star, and writer (with co-writer Monica Johnson). His humor has more of an observational zing than a jokey, one-two patter. Within this structure, Brooks uncovers many of the fidgety truths about the relationships between parents and their grown children. The film comeback of Debbie Reynolds is also a most welcome offshoot of this movie.

In so many ways, The Quiet American speaks volumes.

Viewers should be warned that Irréversible means what it says: Your experience of this movie can not be forgotten once the die is cast.