Michael Sragow

Falls victim to flimsy characters and a love story that strains reality.

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.

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

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

The Sea Inside brings us outside and inside ourselves, and takes us to brave new aesthetic depths.

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

As Laura, Rueda hits sublime notes of confusion, grief and wrath. She's sympathetic enough to make you root for her and complex enough to get you arguing afterward about whether Laura did anything to deserve all this.

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.

And the movie, likable for short stretches, ends up seeming worn and frayed, like Christmas decorations left hanging until spring.

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.

Darger made art as if the lives of his subjects depended on it. That's how Yu has made her movie.

This documentary (like the fact-based 2004 feature Miracle) demonstrates how powerful true sports stories can be when they delve into the mystery of leadership instead of falling back on nostalgia.

Howl's Moving Castle is one animated epic that has it all: poetic intensity, potent storytelling, vivid and surprising characters, and intoxicating powers of visual imagination.

Ragged and frenetic.

The movie may be Nine Queens, but it slakes your thirst for surprises and thrills because of its Nine Jokers.

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.

This movie leaves 'em laughing - and gasping.

In The History Boys, as in all of Bennett's work, irony is what the characters live and breathe - and I mean irony in its truest sense, of using language to present opposite and often sly alternatives to accepted wisdom.

A Mighty Heart has the surface tension of a first-rate docudrama but neither the passion nor the vision to encompass its powerhouse subject.

The Duchess of Langeais is a romantic dance of death.

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."

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.

Sin City is a seedy tribute to rugged masculinity disguised as a rogue's gallery, all the better to please college boys who like their sentimentality slicked with grunge.

The sensuousness of Lemon Tree is its glory.

In every important way, Breach isn't just a solid thriller; it's also an ambitious and engrossing piece of narrative journalism.

The glory of Japanese Story is that even after a daringly abrupt plot turn, the cast maintains its empathy and lucidity without interruption.

Surprisingly moving and intellectually satisfying.

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.