Ray Bennett

Atom Egoyan has delivered a big, slick and sexy mystery in Where the Truth Lies, turning the Rupert Holmes novel into a sumptuous tale of show business hype and duplicity.

Most of all, Earhart wanted to be able to fly free as a bird above the clouds, and director Nair and star Swank make her quest not only understandable but truly impressive.

The film is about vanity and pride, and the caging of beauty. Its elaborate fabrication has an intoxicating quality that captures the imagination like all good horror stories.

Poorly structured and at times incoherent.

A polished, fast-moving, entertaining picture whose mainstream success will depend on audiences' tolerance of its tendency to become an abattoir of extreme carnage.

Boyne's tale is starkly cautionary, and writer-director Herman handles a difficult topic with great sensitivity, drawing splendid performances from his young actors with David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga and the other grown-ups reliably efficient.

Cruz's performance deserves to be seen widely, and it should place her again in line for prizes, but the story's pretensions and downbeat mood will not endear the film to audiences.

The brutality of the fights and Schizo's growing ability to outfox his enemies make for a taut and exciting little picture.

Cantet keeps a lid on a story that he could have easily exploited, but he makes his points about beauty, fulfillment, self-indulgence and delusion with a measured hand.

There is little suspense, however, and while all the attention on the small details of their lives is laudable, it isn't very interesting.

The star of the show is undoubtedly Blanchett, who has great fun playing Dylan as a showboat who quite knowingly goes about creating his reputation for rebellious independence.

Turns Jane Austen's nimble satire into a lumbering gothic romance.

A penchant for suffocating close-ups and an overabundance of scenes that go on far too long mar Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain, an otherwise engaging drama about an immigrant Arab family in France.

Atkinson remains an expert clown, and there are sufficient numbers of gags to ensure that Bean fans worldwide will be kept fairly happy.

Whether or not Bobby Kennedy was the man his supporters believed him to be, the film makes a persuasive case that something important in America was silenced when he was gunned down.

Earnest and slow, the film takes time to reveal its intentions and the result is worthy but not engaging.

Good-humored, illuminating and without cant, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border is a rebuttal of what he views as the fulminations and lies of right-wing media at home and abroad regarding the socialist democracies of South America.

The track records of the performers are impeccable, but Issit has obviously never watched an awards show or similar event where comedy actors appear unscripted. Placing the weight of such a preposterous storyline on their improvisational shoulders was a disaster waiting to happen. And it happened.

Beautifully shot and well acted, the film might well cause controversy among fundamentalist believers as a provocative allegory challenging the power of faith.

Only the film's slow pace softens its powerful message.

It's a highly stylized piece of work typical of director Todd Solondz, who renders wildly exaggerated sequences on a topic not generally thought of as a basis for comedy. He leaves it to the viewer to decide if it's insightful whimsy or meaningless drivel.

Witless, soulless and joyless, it displays its video game origins throughout.

Being in Paris is to be inside a work of art, and it is no surprise that in the charming collection of vignettes that make up Paris je t'aime, the art is love.

It is a tremendous achievement that shines a light on the way many countries use criminals to further their domestic and international goals. Politically informative, it also offers great drama with excitement and suspense, and no little tragedy.

Some of the metaphors are a bit too literal but the director largely succeeds with his story and the surprises are convincing. Best of all the film has a terrific sense of humor and the young actresses exploit it delightfully.

Ragged, uneven and potholed with some dire dialogue and performances.

Much of what is shown onscreen is atmospheric filler, while the various characters describe being made outcasts because of their sexuality while holding on to their commitment to their faith.

The new picture allows hardly any flourishes of style and character in the 007 tradition, but moviegoers seeking an adrenaline rush will be well pleased.

An embarrassment to all concerned, the film was written, directed and produced by Soderbergh for reasons that are not readily apparent.

The film clearly wishes to explore the topic of children having children, but it only inspires a great desire to smack them both.

It's a sympathetic portrait of a complex man driven by an anger that still bubbles beneath the surface.

The film's action takes place mainly in one room, with the five characters posturing like angry macho men but slowly revealing their arrested development and juvenile ignorance of life in general and women in particular.

The real pirate radio ships, whose days ended in 1967, wound up being towed away for salvage but the film avoids that fate -- like the best rock songs -- with a rousing finish and a pleasing climax.

Based on the novel by Ruth Rendell, the film could do well with audiences who have a taste for creepy films about murder in the suburbs.

With a cast of Scottish, German and French actors all speaking their own language, writer-director Christian Carion has fashioned a deeply moving and uplifting piece.

A handsome, fast-paced and innocuous adventure that's easy to take but lacks epic scale.

Phoenix plays the romantic lead with great intelligence and enormous charm, making his character's conflict utterly believable, and Paltrow positively glows as the radiant shiksa who dazzles him.

Clever and fast-paced thriller.

A repellent movie filled with gratuitous violence, Election is bound to find an appreciative audience among those who like their cinematic criminals noisy, stupid and deadly.

Brainlessly entertaining action picture.

The film gets seriously weird as it goes along, but without losing its sense of direction or taste for offbeat humor.

The film belongs to Jarvis, however, and she makes the most of it with expressive features that convey Mia's mixed-up emotions from raging temper to sweet vulnerability. She will go far.

The performers are all good with Baquero poised and beautiful as Ofelia and Verdu vital and spirited as the rebellious Mercedes. Lopez gives an extraordinary performance as the bestial captain, an irredeemable villain to rank with Ralph Fiennes' Nazi in "Schindler's List."

Marianne Faithfull is unforgettable as a middle-class, middle-aged frump …in Sam Garbarski's crowd-pleasing comedy-drama Irina Palm.

Ang Lee's lugubrious spy epic Lust, Caution brings to mind what soldiers say about war: that it's long periods of boredom relieved by moments of extremely heightened excitement.

It's an energetic and vivacious film that will appeal to fans of punk rock worldwide and should find its place in the pantheon of great music-film biographies.

Will mesmerize some and mystify others, while many will be bored silly. It's not a dream, Kaufman says, but it has a dreamlike quality, and those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly.

Very funny and a bit sentimental, it's naturalistic comedy of the highest order, with Evets and Henshaw standouts among a terrific cast.

Lacking coherence and suspense, the picture is likely to attract a cult following while disappointing Coppola's fan base.

Powerfully moving but laced with incisive wit, Don't Tell has terrific performances with a wise tone and polished look.

It is a sumptuously told tale of childlike wonder in the face of darkest corruption and war, mixing high comedy, surreal sequences and genuine drama viewed from a wise, jaundiced perspective.

Anne Proulx's 1997 short story in the New Yorker has been masterfully expanded by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana to provide director Lee with his best movie since "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995.

The observational detail is impressive and the two men's growing affection is well-drawn but Takerman's depiction of the conventions and strictures of religion and the impulses of two closeted gay men are too understated to achieve universality.

The film is dark, gloomy and without music, but it is also observant and highly suspenseful, with Mungiu using his often static camera to balance banal cruelty with simple generosity.

Strong performances by Kristin Scott Thomas as the stern Aunt Mimi, who raised the future Beatle from the age of 5, and Anne-Marie Duff as his troubled mother heighten the dramatic appeal of what otherwise is quite a dull film.

A performance film, but sadly the majority of the performers are not the acts that have played at the long-running pop festival over 35 years, but the exhibitionists who make up the crowd.

The director, who also wrote the script, achieves a keen-eyed view of the Turkish expatriates in this film while sustaining his remarkable ability to make them universal.

Fierce and tragic tale of lost hope.

Surrealism is one thing, but The Intruder appears so ill defined and random that it ends up looking simply inept.