Ray Bennett

It's a delightful piece of filmmaking with a marvelous cast topped by Meryl Streep in one of her smartest and most entertaining performances ever.

Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Coriolanus as William Shakespeare's Rambo in a production that delivers heavyweight screen acting at its best.

Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have performed a small miracle in adapting for the screen Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Paced at warp speed with spectacular action sequences rendered brilliantly and with a cast so expert that all the familiar characters are instantly identifiable.

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.

With compelling and charismatic performances by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy as the lovers, and a stunning contribution from Romola Garai as their remorseful nemesis, the film goes directly to "The English Patient" territory and might also expect rapturous audiences and major awards.

It succeeds on almost all fronts. The epic film is a high-octane adventure rooted in fact with a raft of arresting characters, big action sequences and twists and turns galore.

By keeping his (Daly) focus on the two remarkable youngsters without an ounce of sentimentality he succeeds in making something true and satisfying.

That rare beast, a terrific movie that boasts intelligent wit, expert storytelling, delightful characters and grown-up dialogue plus suspense and a wicked surprise ending.

The filmmakers succeed brilliantly in weaving these stories together, taking time to explore depth of character and relationships. The suspense builds throughout as everyone involved becomes lost in a place they don't understand with people they don't know if they can trust.

It's very difficult to mesh fantasy with reality, but with great charm and a light touch, Almodovar shows exactly how it should be done.

De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast.

Polished, funny and utterly charming.

Bright Star may not be a joy forever but it will do until the next joy comes along.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Expertly fashioned documentary-style drama.

The kind of drama that British television used to do so well, a well-constructed, smartly observed story of ordinary people learning how to communicate with one another.

Astonishingly powerful documentary about really, really hard work.

A smart and sophisticated comedy romp.

Herzog's strangely beautiful film has marvelous music and hypnotic imagery. A documentary for stoners and people who are that way naturally, it is a cautionary tale for wishful thinkers.

The movie is filled with small moments of tenderness, insight and considerable wisdom.

Amiel's greatest achievement is that Creation is a deeply human film with moments of genuine lightness and high spirits to go with all the deep thinking.

Assayas makes the point that objects of fascination and affection to one generation may be far less so to the next. And he observes the role that people-friendly museums can play in keeping a nation's treasures safe with pleasing subtlety.

Smartly put together, with interesting characters and caustic wit.

While the men are Danish, there is a universality to their story and a vitality in the filmmaking that should see the documentary in demand around the world.

Brutal but believable, the film in some ways harks back to early Hollywood, when Jimmy Cagney or Richard Widmark played callow villains out of their depth in everyday life.

The Coens' typically superior filmmaking sustains the electrifying mood for most of the picture, but they are undone by being too faithful to the source novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Shot on beautifully utilized film but employing images vividly from the Internet and mobile phones, it's an examination of the power that false ideas may have on people's imagination and beliefs when they are repeated over and over.

Owen carries the film more in the tradition of a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda than a Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford. He has to wear flip-flops for part of the time without losing his dignity, and he never reaches for a weapon or guns anyone down. Cuaron and Owen may have created the first believable 21st-century movie hero.

The film is in the tradition of fighting-the-system stories drawn from real life such as "Erin Brokovich," and its powerful emotional appeal should draw a substantial grownup audience.

Affectionate, funny and action-packed sci-fi spoof.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

Jaunty and entertaining.

Fierce and tragic tale of lost hope.

Presented as a straight documentary about an American pop singer who had one U.K. hit in the 1960s as a member of a boy band and has gone missing ever since, but it plays like the slyest of spoofs.

Despite top-flight acting from Michael Caine and Jude Law, it loses its grip in the third act and let's the air out of what might have been a memorably gripping film.

Murphy's comic brilliance is at the service of the story and he positively shines with a number of diverse and zany impersonations, most enjoyably a Jesse Jackson takeoff.

Thought-provoking story of how terror and paranoia affect two Americans who love their country.

The cast is uniformly fine, but Abbass and Lipaz-Michael shine as two women who bond in the fear that the best of their lives is over and neither of them is happy with what the future holds.

It's a well-constructed and thoughtfully paced drama and almost a thriller, but in the end credibility and tension get lost in the mail.

A winning combination of laughs and genuine shocks.

Grungy and uneven, but it has a rollicking pace and clearly intends to be good fun so that audiences may overlook its unsteady rhythms, pretensions and inconsistencies and take it for the fast and very furious ride it wants to be.

As surprising as it is delicious with an indelible performance by new star Sally Hawkins.

Paced deliberately in a way that reinforces the tragedy of evil flourishing when good men do nothing, Good may find boxoffice returns slow to build but the film's aim is true and patient audiences will be well rewarded.

A ramshackle but likeable story.

There is a lot of very black humor; and it develops, somewhat surprisingly, into something suggesting a kind of cheerful pessimism.

Moviegoers who know their American political history will respond to the film's immediacy and forgive the film's tight focus and narrow view. Anyone hoping for an entertaining drama about newsmen and politics along the lines of "All the President's Men" will be disappointed.

It's an impressive movie, but the indie filmmaker has little to add to the debate beyond the eternal truth that the innocent always suffer most.

It satisfies not only in the tradition of yarns boiled hard and wry, but as a savvy comment on fame and ambition.

Well crafted and acted, Declan Recks' Irish domestic drama Eden, adapted from his own play by Eugene O'Brien, offers an intimate portrait of a husband and wife who have stopped communicating with each other.

In a fine ensemble with many well-drawn smaller characters, Bleibtreu ("Run Lola Run", "The Baader-Meinhof Complex") as the hapless brother, Unel ("Head On") as the fussy chef and Bederke, as a waitress, all stand out.

The real-life tale of a group of female machinists who took on the Ford Motor Co. in England and earned equal pay for women gets a rousing and entertaining telling in Nigel Cole's crowd-pleasing Made in Dagenham.

Played for laughs drawn from characters rather than funny lines, the Norwegian film is a charmer with Stellan Skarsgard for once in a role worthy of his attention.

The film is well worth seeing for its views of the parched wilderness of far-flung Brazil and its talkative depiction of an unlikely friendship.

Matt Dillon is pitch-perfect as Bukowski's alter ego Hank Chinaski.

It's entertaining nonsense with major league special effects, larger-than-life characters and inventive monsters that draw on the "Aliens" and "Predator" models, being terrifying but also vaguely sympathetic.

A full-flavored, absorbing tragedy.

The film's economical style, vivid cinematography and tremendous acting should attract audiences far and wide.

It's worth sticking around for the coda too as it contains some hilarious and very politically incorrect suggestions as to how zombies might be put to work once they've been tamed.

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

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.

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

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

Could easily be filled with cliches but in the hands of filmmaker John Gray, it's a sparkling piece of entertainment that deserves a wide audience.

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.

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

Captain Jack Sparrow is back in excellent form for his fourth adventure in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which is more serious in the hands of a new director, Rob Marshall, and thanks to Penelope Cruz it's also a good deal sexier.

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

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.

All the action is staged with energy, but it gets relentless without anything really funny going on.

The drive to keep alive the name of a young American woman who died beneath a U.S.-made bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier in Palestine continues in Simone Bitton's sober documentary Rachel.

The film is neither intelligent enough nor silly or grotesque enough to become a lasting favorite.

Colorful, noisy and brimming with special effects, the picture may please young audiences simply looking for loud action, but its corny storyline and brittle lack of warmth may discourage both parents and children.

Shot in high definition and filmed at many historic locations, the film somehow still lacks the splendor of an epic, and its urgency to get on with the next plot point leaves much unexplained while context goes out the window.

The film belongs to the women, with Knightley going from strength to strength (and showing she can sing!) and Miller again proving that she has everything it takes to be a major movie star.

The most affecting scenes, however, involve the class of Israeli teenagers visiting Auschwitz.

Complex but cold tale.