Ray Conlogue

You don't need to have seen a lot of art films to love The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. All it takes is compassionate curiosity and perhaps some lingering memory of the world as a child experiences it.

Clever and confident use of limited resources in an unfamiliar medium. Kenneth Branagh has made the right choice nine out of 10 times, and the tenth is easily forgiven because of the youthful ardor of that bright face and that bright talent. [10 Nov 1989]

Though the Disney logo is on this movie, there is -- possibly excepting little Nemo himself -- not a single cloying, sentimental Disneyesque creature in it. There is, instead, wit and flair in concept and writing, the trademark of the Pixar people who drove the project.

So energized by the subject that it overflows with inventiveness.

This is a great film for those who share the disabused French view of grownup life, but more particularly for those who want to see one of the great actresses of her generation at the height of her powers.

It's a good film. But its exotic allure may lead some to mistake it for a great one.

What a graceful movie this is.

Speaking personally, I wouldn't voluntarily go to this flick. But for those with a greater gross-out threshold, it's a better film than anyone should normally expect in this genre.

But uneven acting isn't fatal here, since Andrew Bergman's screenplay is strong enough and Andrew Fleming's direction seamless enough to carry it forward.

For those who have been waiting for movies to catch up with the graphic possibilities of comic books, wait no longer: The Matrix is among us.

There's a lot to like in this film. As in the original, it has more than a few echoes of Animal Farm in its portrayal of humanity as the exploiter species. It respects both its child audience, by permitting Babe and his sunny decency to win out, and its adult audience, by generating more wit than the average dozen Hollywood films.

Visually the film is a knockout. I'm not sure this will matter to the young adult audience, but the film is philosophically confusing.

Surprisingly entertaining.

Here's a truly novel sports film: It actually has a script, decent acting, sympathetic characters. And it's fun.

What always feels genuine, movingly so, are the faces of the school children caught up in their account of the unforgotten past.

If this rings distant Laurel-and-Hardy, or even Crosby-and-Hope bells, it's on purpose. Gooding's and Sanz's performances are almost a tribute to vaudeville-influenced two-guy comedy.

One of Stephen Chow's extravagant and very funny martial-arts spoof movies.

This is a grimly thrilling movie that falls somewhere between clear-eyed realism and the improbabilities of an action flick.

This engaging documentary is an excursion into the immense "art" form of hip-hop.

This concoction, so bizarre to the adult mind, is actually a charming triumph where its intended under-12 audience is concerned.

Rarely does a fine movie like this have so awkward a title, or so off-putting an opening scene. But there is method in both these madnesses, and a searchingly intelligent and moving story to be told.

The best thing the film does is to show us not only what that mind looks like, but how the creative process itself operates: messily, erratically, outside of most people's morality, but with a force and purposiveness that makes the machinations of the rest of us look irresolute by comparison.

Comes as a pleasure. It's a comic drama set in a Chicago hair salon where the characters are engaging and the story has a bustling richness.

The producers of Hidden in Plain Sight decided that they couldn't deal with Sept. 11 in the film without losing focus on its principal subject. The result is that the film stands as a testimonial to the world as it existed before that date, a world very different from the one we now live in.

Entertaining and well done. Without losing its comic rhythm for a moment, it is also a withering spoof of black victimism and the corrupting effect of racial solidarity on the American legal system.

A beguiling, slow-moving parable.

It's a movie located in an interesting place, but without quite enough self-confidence really to inhabit it.

If you're in the mood for tears and triumph, with a dash of exoticism, Together may well be the film for you.