Michael Sragow

Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.

The Son's Room is the anti-"In the Bedroom." I mean that as a compliment.

When the cast and their director are really cooking, they conjure a bipolar sense of high school-age emotion -- and use it to fuel outrageous fantasy.

A harrowing depiction of a woman's plight under the Taliban.

The movie maintains its comical, rocky equilibrium as long as the screenwriter, Dean Craig, sticks to domestic disasters and a Monty Python parody of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

This movie has its own emotional sorcery. In a raw, humorous way, it grasps how hope and desperation spur magical thinking and, sometimes, real magic.

Few films even try to render the full range of emotions and sensations in female sexuality as the aptly titled Lady Chatterley, directed and co-written by a Frenchwoman, Pascale Ferran.

The most refreshing thing about Man of the Year is its mingling of comedy and suspense with common decency. Levinson asks his countrymen not just to know their limits, but also to reach them.

The whole movie swings broadly from slapstick and mock suspense to song. But the film develops a strong amorous undertow; Kelly's script neatly allows for all the potential couples to get the fate or comeuppance they deserve.

Pearce makes you see why Edie found Warhol as irresistible as he found her. His otherworldly eyes focus on both who she is and what she represents. He sees her as a star.

Uneven and affecting movie.

A terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a pleader.

With everything this film has going for it - humor, intelligence and a splendid ensemble - Richard Linklater's nightmare drug movie, A Scanner Darkly, should be continually compelling. But it loses its fizz after a strong series of pops.

It's the pushiest film around - "in your face" is still in-your-face, even if the dancers are in white-face.

Enough flair and conviction to keep the movie buoyant even when its plot is abrupt and its emotionality conventional.

Has a vitality and novelty rare in any youth movie, let alone one that claps fresh eyes on a cliched vision of a model minority.

Cheeky, brass-knuckles British crime film.

The story may be about cold-blooded murder, but Bullock's pulsating performance is about the getting of wisdom.

Zellweger has a ticklish furriness reminiscent of Jean Arthur in her screwball comic prime.

The movie is full of holes - it lacks the precision and verve of a Francis Veber farce like "The Dinner Game" - but the two actors brew up a sane kind of comedy from their fractious rapport.

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

Foster is strident, Vincent D'Onofrio has little to do but chain-smoke thoughtfully as an accessible priest, and the physical atmosphere is hazy.

Extract is an exuberant original...like no other and one of the best comedies of the year.

This compelling account of the explosive growth of Lyme disease grows to encompass all the peculiar politics, corruption and inertia of American medicine.

Seinfeld is the perfect figure to center a documentary called, generically, Comedian.

For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.

Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.

You Kill Me kills you softly with its smiles.

Superior family fare.

Jet Li and Bridget Fonda form a terrific bond in this action film. And the choreography adds a nice kick, too.

By all means, buy a ticket to The Fast Runner, but don't go expecting a masterpiece; actually, in its first hour, the dramaturgy and staging of scenes set in igloos are cramped and amateurish.

The Bourne Identity keeps you in a state of nervous excitation from the opening shot to the fade-out and has a thread of deadpan humor that vibrates alongside the main action like a third rail quivering next to a hurtling train.

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

Touching and insightful.

Modest, tasty, and it goes down easy, like home cooking.

The movie doesn't add up to much, but it's an effervescent expression of an odd brute-hummingbird sensibility.

Queen Latifah, the star of Barbershop 2 and Beauty Shop, and thus our reigning monarch of big-screen beauty stylists, should fund and narrate a sequel. Because The Beauty Academy of Kabul is good enough to make you want to know how they do.

This comedy of stereotypes pokes fun at poker buddies and coffee klatches only to make room for variations on more recent stereotypes. Some of the boldest 'types provide the funniest bits, such as Jon Favreau's embodiment of an upscale Stanley Kowalski who treats all-male card games as clan rites.

Amy Adams beguiled audiences in "Junebug" and "Enchanted" and breathed humanity into the histrionic "Doubt." In the eccentric comedy-drama Sunshine Cleaning, set in the least picturesque parts of Albuquerque, N.M., she tops her own proven talent for epiphany.

Tautou's kind of talent: priceless.

The genius of Garfield's performance is that he fills him with equal amounts of terror and wonder.

What makes this movie ultra-contemporary is the way Abrams has re-imagined Spock and Kirk as a team of rivals.

Surprisingly moving and intellectually satisfying.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

Luckily, the new The Incredible Hulk is more like those 80-page special issues that comic-book publishers sold in the early 1960s for a quarter, packed with old, favorite story lines.

It has a premise that never stops percolating.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Del Toro stuffs the film with wit and wonderments. Yet, coming out this superhero summer, it plays like a lovingly crafted synthesis of every fantasy saga we've seen in the past decade.

Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.

The movie is best when everything is up in the air.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

Rampling's authority over splintered emotions has the force of revelation.

The original French title is "La Doublure," but The Valet fits Veber. He has become a one-man service industry when it comes to spreading Gallic barbed humor and good cheer.

It's affable entertainment -- a road movie with a smart map and characters who are unpredictable human beings, not just billboard attractions.

Kingsley dims divine Elegy.

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

Because Bar-Lev fails to go the extra mile either as a filmmaker or a friend, My Kid Could Paint That is at best "documentary silver."

Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks snap, tension and bravura...Yet the movie is novel and big-hearted. It often succeeds at substituting a smorgasbord of psychological confusions for comic architecture.

The cascade of ideas proves to be both pleasurable and frustrating. As the movie retreats into a happy-ever-after ending, even its outrageous lies seem more like little white ones.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Like "Anais," the only surprises Breillat has in store for us are bad ones. In the willfully perverse final act, she delivers a sadistic blow to the audience -- with a sledgehammer.

The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.

What proves the validity of Kandahar is that, by the end, all these scenes are human ruins of the same nightmare world.

The Summer Olympics may offer more intricate, arduous and high-stakes spectacles, but nothing will top the last half-hour of Gunnin' for That #1 Spot for adrenalized high spirits.

It's not another rah-rah football film. Thanks to Nolte, it has its own form of true grit.

It wouldn't stick in the memory were it not for Matt Damon's audacious, baggy-pants portrayal of corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, the antihero of this reality-based farce.

It's a soaper with a high grade of imported soap.

Fantasy, not honesty, is the point of The Kid Stays in the Picture.

In his first fiction feature, Zwigoff doesn't forget to bring the funny. But he doesn't bring enough poetry.

For much of its frolicsome, rambling running-time, Son of Rambow is like a guarana-spiked soft drink: It goes down easy and delivers a kick.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

The highest compliment I can pay Pieces of April is that it brings to mind a Paul Simon lyric: "the mother and child reunion is only a motion away."

The excitingly well-made Death of a President imagines the assassination of President Bush as a way of analyzing political violence. And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, sight unseen, has labeled it despicable.

This movie doesn't pretend to be anything more than a cheerful night out, and on that count it scores.

In an age when light-and-easy racial farces have become mainstream hits, he remains a tough-love comedian.

American movies are generally so skittish about sexuality that Adrian Lyne's appetite --and aptitude -- for exploring it in Unfaithful is a relief.

The film's strengths can't be separated from its shortcomings. Despite its heavyweight supporting cast, Stone Reader mostly pays tribute to the enthusiasm and purity of the amateur.

Even at its most hyperactive, Peter Pan has a core of good and bad feeling that will hit home to kids and to adults with honest memories.

Campbell Scott creates a new movie anti-hero -- the weak silent type -- and goes all the way with it in The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Unpretentious and brashly exploitative.

For those of us who wish that John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club" had kept the cheeky tone of Hughes' "Sixteen Candles," what ensues is the best Hughes farce that Hughes never made about adolescent snobbery and heartbreak as well as adult obtuseness.

May be thin, but it's also sharp, like a stiletto.

The bulk of the film merely yearns for lucidity and magic. At its worst, Respiro resembles My Big Fat Italian Nervous Breakdown.

It's an odd duck: a labor-intensive piece of light entertainment.

In Julie and Julia, Ephron, like her heroines, has finally found what suits her: a surprising comic and romantic realism.

Casino Royale marks a shrewd relaunching of a franchise. But Campbell and company show too much of their sweat. If these movies continue to follow Fleming's profane pilgrim's progress, the next Bond movies should be more emotional and funny, with a bit of brass-knuckled charm.

he Kite Runner lives in the galvanic performances of two young Afghan actors, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. They bring home the torment of Afghan life before and after the Taliban and, just as important, the resilience of children everywhere.

Kung Fu Hustle is to "House of Flying Daggers" what "Blazing Saddles" is to "Unforgiven."

Intelligent and robust contempt has become so rare in movies that the first half of Art School Confidential is intermittently exhilarating.

Freedom Writers is the rare inspirational-teacher film that is filled with genuine, jaw-dropping coups of real-life poetry.

Too often when actors portray complicated or enigmatic characters, they seem to be flirting with the audience, playing hard to get. Not Williams.

What makes the movie potent, though, has nothing to do with metaphor or parable. It's that the story provides Connelly, Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Kingsley's wife with all the tools they need to resurrect, flesh out, revamp and criticize outmoded male and female roles.

The fascination, humor and poignancy of Departures, this year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, rests in the Japanese ceremony of preparing bodies for their caskets.

What makes it all work is that Frank remains a self-made hero.

Although the movie is unabashedly alarming, it's also intelligent fun.

It pulls together diverse residents of the city, from produce vendors to academics, and trains a loving eye on their unique environments and the urban landscapes they all share.

Overall, you're left wondering why every big novel needs to be a movie. White Oleander would work better as a four-part miniseries -- or at least as a less conventional screenplay.