Rick Groen

Compared with the recent spate of blockbuster sellouts, Severance is a worthy package, and fair compensation for time spent. Best to watch on the big screen, of course.

[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

Yossi is an early spring breeze of a film – too delicate to be substantial but definitely holding the promise of warmth.

There's fun to be had in watching these losers drift without a compass.

It's definitely a Diablo Codyesque cut above the norm – the wit can sometimes feel contrived but at least there's wit to be found.

A film of deceptive narrative wisps and intricate thematic curls.

Indeed, like all bureaucracies, the educational version is a bit of a bully itself. In Sioux City at least, the official response to bullying is to recognize its existence but to deny it's an "overwhelming issue," and retreat behind the comforting bromide that "kids will be kids."

With a track record that stretches from "Monster's Ball" all the way to "Finding Neverland," Forster is clearly a director at ease with a wide range of material. He's found confection-land here, setting his beater on ready-whip and mixing the dough just fine.

Intended as food for thought, but all we really get is a light snack -- the kind that's heavier in presentation than in substance.

This is a formula film with panache.

Is there an admired British thespian who hasn't toiled in Potter's field?

The story in Japanese Story grabs you precisely because it's so wonderfully hard to define.

As a political testament, the result is revealing and important. Yet as a documentary, it wanders here, there and everywhere – long on intensity but short on focus.

Eraser may lack the chameleon wizardry of the the "Terminator" duo, or the imperious mechanics of "True Lies", but the bang-for-the-buck ratio is high enough to appease even the thinnest wallet.

In recounting this conflicted tale, director Rachid Bouchareb displays some valour of his own, resisting what must have been a strong temptation to deal in aggrieved agitprop, and instead, quietly but powerfully, confining his attentions to a small group of indigenous soldiers.

Mother symbolically doubles as Mother Korea, devoted to her land. But is she blindly and uncritically devoted, too quick to forgive and forget sins that should be redressed, to treat any flaws in the national character as simply intrinsic to the country's nature?

Because it's a well-crafted and superbly acted sweet little tearjerker, we're content too -- it's a mild pleasure to watch.

Catch a Fire paints the period with a double-sided brush that gives yesterday its due and puts today on notice.

Happily, the climax races to our rescue... Beyond the grasp of most directors, this is tour de force stuff -- definitely meriting the price of admission and almost worth the three-year wait.

Very well crafted and superbly acted. Whatever you may think of the idea, its execution is admirable.

That level of acting-without-words demands the likes of a Bruno Ganz or a Klaus Maria Brandauer, not a Clooney. Even when flashing his bare derrière in a sex scene, he isn't revealing nearly enough -- his work is just skin deep.

Living in a part of the world where politics, and the pursuit of politics by warring means, are the rule, director Elia Suleiman is the exception.

Payback is nothing if not brave. It's a documentary attempt to give concrete shape to an abstract discussion, using the medium of film to transplant a nuanced thesis – on the concept of debt – from its natural home on the printed page.

The Class is simultaneously old school and new, familiar in its themes but unique in design and, at its best, riveting in execution.

Rare is the movie that arrives without fanfare -- that sneaks between the cracks, pops up relatively unheralded on the big screen, and takes the viewer by delighted surprise. Well, check the moon for blue because Birthday Girl is just such a picture.

Ultimately, She's The One is about less than it seems -- Burns is quite willing to trade off emotional credibility to an easy gag and a neat resolution. Yes, the film's apparent sensitivity comes with a high commercial gloss, but so what -- the lightness is breezy enough to cool our objections. Burns may well be an unabashed entertainer in the guise of an auteur, yet that's an awfully potent combination. Just ask a certain Woody Allen. [23 Aug 1996]

Essentially a love story, as stripped of sentimentality as the landscape is shorn of green, yet an extraordinary love story nonetheless – powerful and poignant and, even in the midst of hope's imminent extinction, hopeful too.

Moore continues another one infinitely more valuable -- the proud line that extends right back to Mark Twain, embracing all those satirists so enamoured with America at its best that they won't stand silent for America at its worst.