Michael O'Sullivan

Manages to take the cerebral act of literary creation and make it exciting, sexy even.

Enormously entertaining.

A gorgeously morbid meditation on the interconnectivity of life.

Under normal circumstances, nothing kills a joke faster than trying to explain it. Yet here, such examination is the film's strong suit and provides much-needed respite, quite frankly, from the exhaustion of constant laughter.

Shakes, rattles and rolls the house, building to a climax that makes you almost forget you're in a movie theater and not a football stadium at halftime.

With its cast of back-stabbing functionaries and desk jockeys, Spy Game makes the sport and hard work of espionage seem chillingly real.

In its heart burns the indomitable flame of the human spirit.

After viewing documentarian Stephanie Black's dour exegesis of the wrecked Jamaican economy -- only the most insensitive vacationer will want to set foot anywhere near the resorts and beaches of Montego Bay.

Subtle it's not. Still, the film, directed by Andrew Fleming ("Dick"), gets large and plentiful laughs where it's supposed to.

More love story than thriller, with the mystery providing only slack tension and the December-December romance that ultimately develops between Regina and Camargo crackling with drama and sexual tension aplenty.

One heck of a tale of deliciously unladylike payback.

Like a haiku, it is not what is said, but what is unsaid, that leaves the most lasting echoes.

It's a love story, yes, but one whose sweetness is cut by honest performances, a sharply drawn supporting cast and a fairly serious, yet never self-pitying, tone.

Visually stylish surrealist drama.

Drew Barrymore has figured out what works, and what works for Drew Barrymore is this: Cinderella stories.

The movie is not for the squeamish, but for those who are unafraid to look at what is, perhaps, their own metaphorical "backyard," for those willing to stare into the long, dark night of the contemporary American soul, its bone-crunching message is worth hearing.

A film whose effects are as hard to wash away as blood.

It's a love letter to the myriad ways, large and small, that mail handlers change lives the world over.

Personal and private almost to the point of self-absorption, the film is ultimately saved from neurotic narcissism by the director's self-deprecating humor and unapologetic honesty about his own dysfunction.

The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.

Contrary to expectation, it's neither a movie about religion nor the coming together of enemies. What it is, at heart, is a movie about love.

Short on drama but long on poetry.

In Sheridan's warm and glowing treatment, the moral of the story feels less like a reheated fable than like something utterly, indescribably original.