Roger Ebert

There's a lot that's good in White Palace, involving the heart as well as the mind.

This is a serious movie about drinking but not a depressing one. You notice that in the way it handles Charlie (Aaron Paul), Kate's husband. He is also her drinking buddy. When two alcoholics are married, they value each other's company because they know they can expect forgiveness and understanding, while a civilian might not choose to share their typical days.

An intelligent, upbeat, happy movie.

It's interesting that two of the best thrillers of the last several months, "Tell No One" and Just Another Love Story, have come from Europe. Both movies gain because they star actors unfamiliar to us.

Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie). To his credit, he never seems to be having fun as he journeys through club land. Few do, for long. If you know someone like Jamie, take him to this movie, and don't let him go to the john.

Kidman is superb at making Suzanne into someone who is not only stupid, vain and egomaniacal (we've seen that before) but also vulnerably human.

A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive.

Portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.

Whoever cast De Niro and Grodin must have had a sixth sense for the chemistry they would have; they work together so smoothly, and with such an evident sense of fun, that even their silences are intriguing.

A full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic.

Mikhalkov has made a new film with its own original characters and stories, and after all, it's not how the film ends, but how it gets there.

Clockwatchers is a wicked, subversive comedy about the hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers.

A sly little comic treasure.

Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

This becomes Tobey Maguire's film to dominate, and I've never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.

A splendid movie not just because it tells its romantic story, and makes it visually delightful, and centers it on Depardieu, but for a better reason: The movie acts as if it believes this story. Depardieu is not a satirist - not here, anyway. He plays Cyrano on the level, for keeps.

What Mark does, better perhaps than either he or his father realizes, is to capture some aspects of a lifelong rivalry that involves love but not much contentment.

I suspect a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie, and that the movie will build a following. It may gross as little as "Welcome to the Dollhouse" or as much as "Clueless," but whichever it does, it's in the same league.

An action epic with the spirit of the Hollywood swordplay classics and the grungy ferocity of "The Road Warrior."

The movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society.

We increasingly admire the quality of the acting: Both actors take their characters through a difficult series of changes, without ever seeming to try, or be aware of it.

In D.J. Caruso's Two for the Money, you can see Al Pacino doing something he's done a lot lately: Having a terrific time being an actor.

Songwriter is one of those movies that grows on you. It doesn't have a big point to prove, and it isn't all locked into the requirements of its plot. It's about spending some time with some country musicians who are not much crazier than most country musicians, and are probably nicer than some. It also has a lot of good music.

A funny screen version of a very funny (if not very significant) Broadway comedy. It does well as an evening's entertainment.

In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.v

Broadway Danny Rose uses all of the basic ingredients of Damon Runyon's Broadway: the pathetic acts looking for a job, the guys who get a break and forget their old friends, the agents with hearts of gold, the beautiful showgirls who fall for Woody Allen types, the dumb gangsters, big shots at the ringside tables (Howard Cosell plays himself). It all works.

Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure.

An unreasonably entertaining movie, causing you perhaps to revise your notions about women's Roller Derby, assuming you have any.

Like most British family films, Water Horse doesn't dumb down its young characters or insult the intelligence of the audience. It has a lot of sly humor about what we know, or have heard, about the Loch Ness monster.

Those hoping to see a "vampire movie" will be surprised by a good film.

A surprisingly effective film, touching and knowing and, like Deneuve, ageless.

It's poignant to watch the chicks in their youth, fed by their parents, playing with their chums, the sun climbing higher every day, little suspecting what they're in for.

Guggenheim, contends the American educational system is failing, which we have been told before. He dramatizes this failure in a painfully direct way, says what is wrong, says what is right.

Thieves doesn't have the Hollywood kind of ending, where everything is sorted out by who gets shot. It is about the people, not their plot. It is about how the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and the grandsons.

Not a war film so much as the story of a personality who has found the right role to play. Scott's theatricality is electrifying.

Sports movies have a purity of form. They always end with the big game, in triumph or heartbreak. So does The Heart of the Game, although the lawsuit still hangs over the team after the final free throw.

Ruffalo plays the character with that elusive charm he also revealed in "You Can Count on Me."

At the end of The Man Without a Past, I felt a deep but indefinable contentment. I'd seen a comedy that found its humor in the paradoxes of existence, in the way that things may work out strangely, but they do work out.

Penn and Nicholson take risks with the material and elevate the movie to another, unanticipated, haunting level.

Sharp-edged, perfectly timed, funny and thoughtful.

Think of how we read the thoughts of those closest to us, in moments when words will not do. We look at their faces, and although they do not make any effort to mirror emotions there, we can read them all the same, in the smallest signs. A movie that invites us to do the same thing can be very absorbing.

If you have seen the masterful 2002 Brazilian film "City of God" or the 1981 film "Pixote," both about the culture of Rio's street people, then Bus 174 plays like a sad and angry real-life sequel.

tT never grow up is unspeakably sad, and this is the first Peter Pan where Peter's final flight seems not like a victory but an escape.

This is a parable about modern Iran, and like many recent Iranian films it leaves its meaning to the viewer. One of the wise decisions by Rafi Pitts, its writer, director and star, is to include no dialogue that ever actually states the politics of its hero.

Crooklyn is not in any way an angry film. But thinking about the difference between its world and ours can make you angry, and I think that was one of Lee's purposes here.

Reviewing The Naked Gun... is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield - you can get the words but not the music.

The movie is a record by well-meaning people who try to make a difference for the better, and succeed to a small degree while all around them the horror continues unaffected.

A bleak comedy, funny in a "Catch-22" sort of way, and at the same time an angry outcry against the gun traffic.

The movie makes no attempt to soften the material or make it comforting through the cliches of melodrama.

Funny and dirty in about that order.

Undefeated is an emotional and effective film.

The movie's heart is in the right place.

A passionate and explicit film about sexual obsession.

The performances are pitch perfect, even including Gabriel Chavarria as Ramon, the man who steals the truck. It adds an important element to the film that he embodies a desperate man, not a bad one.

Snow White and the Huntsman reinvents the legendary story in a film of astonishing beauty and imagination.

The movie suggests that humans benefitted little from Project Nim, and Nim himself not at all.

Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious.

This is one of the smartest and most provocative of science fiction films, a thriller with ideas.

Quaid is just right as the guilty husband who somehow becomes the wounded party.

A fascinating portrait of an almost likable rogue. You'd rather spend time with him than a lot of more upstanding citizens.

The young actors are powerful in draining roles. We care for them more than they care for themselves. Alfredson's palette is so drained of warm colors that even fresh blood is black.

This is easily the most absurd of the "Star Trek" stories - and yet, oddly enough, it is also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms. I'm relieved that nothing like restraint or common sense stood in their way.

The widespread speculation that Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax only adds to its fascination.

Yes, we know these events are less than likely, and the film's entire world is fantastical. But what happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.

This description no doubt makes the film seem like some kind of gimmicky puzzle. What's surprising is how easy it is to follow the plot, and how the coincidences don't get in the way.

All of these films approach their subjects with such irony that we cannot take them at face value; "White" is the anti-comedy, in between the anti-tragedy and the anti-romance.

Morris' visual style in The Thin Blue Line is unlike any conventional documentary approach. Although his interviews are shot straight on, head and shoulders, there is a way his camera has of framing his subjects so that we look at them very carefully, learning as much by what we see as by what we hear.

The beauty of the film is in its quietness.

Stevie seems destined to end the way it does, and is the more courageous and powerful for it. A satisfying ending would have been a lie.

And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease.

I have a weakness for actresses like Greta Gerwig. She looks reasonable and approachable.

The brothers Maeda are pure gold; the film captures what feels like effortless joy in their lives, and it is never something they seem to be reaching for.

Some of Jackie's dialogue is so good it would distinguish a sitcom.

A formula thriller done as an elegant genre exercise. Johnny Hallyday was brought in by To as a last-minute sub for Alain Delon, and could have been the first choice: He is tall, weathered, grim and taciturn.

What draws us into Private Property is how so many things happen under the surface, never commented upon.

It's an exquisite short story about a mood, and a time, and a couple of guys who are blind-sided by love.

A no-holds-barred comedy permitting several holds I had not dreamed of. The needle on my internal Laugh Meter went haywire, bouncing among hilarity, appreciation, shock, admiration, disgust, disbelief and appalled incredulity.

The film uses a slice-of-life approach to create a docudrama of chilling horror.

A complex, deeply knowledgeable story about a truly lost soul and her downward spiral.

What makes Jackson's film enthralling and frightening is the way it shows these two unhappy girls, creating an alternative world so safe and attractive they thought it was worth killing for.

Sidewalk Stories weaves a spell as powerful as it is entertaining.

Ritt directs with a steady hand, and the dialog by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Flank bears listening to. It's intelligent, and has a certain grace as well.

There are some moments in The Witches of Eastwick that stretch uncomfortably for effects - the movie's climax is overdone, for example - and yet a lot of the time this movie plays like a plausible story about implausible people. The performances sell it. And the eyebrows.

This movie is knowledgeable about the city and the people who make accommodations with it.

The movie is wonderfully entertaining, red-blooded and rousing, and with a production design that makes it uncommonly handsome.

The film has an odd subterranean power. It doesn't strive for our sympathy or make any effort to portray Rosetta as colorful, winning or sympathetic.

Miss Hepburn is perhaps too simple and trusting, and Alan Arkin (as a sadistic killer) is not particularly convincing in an exaggerated performance. But there are some nice, juicy passages of terror, and after a slow start the plot does seduce you.

It's an astonishing film: weird, obsessed, drawing on subterranean impulses, hypnotic.

Walter Hill's "Geronimo," a film of great beauty and considerable intelligence, covers the same ground as many other movies about Indians, but in a new way.

Avoids all sports movie cliches, even the obligatory ending where the team comes from behind.

What is perhaps most interesting about Wolfen is that the story remains plausible given its basic assumptions, of course. This is not sci-fi, fantasy or violent escapism. It's a provoking speculation on the terms by which we share this earth with other creatures.

A meandering documentary, frustrating when Moskowitz has Mossman in his sights and still delays bagging him while talking to other sources. But at the end, we forgive his procrastination (and remember, with Laurence Sterne and Tristam Shandy that procrastination can be an art if it is done delightfully).

Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed.

Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.

We get the sense of a live intelligence, rushing things ahead on the screen, not worrying whether we'll understand.

Now Singleton, too, dares to take a hard look at his community. His characters are a little older, and he is older, too, and less forgiving.

A movie so strange that it escapes entirely from the family genre and moves into fantasy. Like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," it has fearsome depths and secrets.

So what we're seeing here is the emergence of a promising writer-director, an actor and a cinematographer who are all exciting, and have cared to make a film that seeks helpful truths.

All the time Phil and Claire seem like the kind of people who don't belong in a screwball comedy. That's why it's funny. They're bewildered.

The whole movie is quiet, introspective, thoughtful.

One of those joyous films that leaps over national boundaries and celebrates universal human nature.

We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.

It's a comedy, but there's more in it than that; it's a movie about the ways we pursue, possess, and consume each other as sad commodities.

Lumet is exploring the clichés, not just using them. And he has a good feel for the big-city crowd that's quickly drawn to the action.

The movie is, indeed, perhaps the most believable that Herzog has made. For a director who gravitates toward the extremes of human behavior, this film involves extreme behavior, yes, but behavior forced by the circumstances.

The film had a curious effect on me. I was sometimes confused about events as they happened, but all the pieces are there, and the film creates an emotional whole. It's more effective when it's complete than during the unfolding experience.

The photography and sound here are very effective in establishing that a train is an enormously heavy thing, and once in motion wants to continue. We knew that. But Scott all but crushes us with the weight of the juggernaut. We are spellbound.

Episode III has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular. The special effects are more sophisticated than in the earlier movies, of course, but not necessarily more effective.

That it works is because of the high-energy animation, some genuinely beautiful visual concepts and a story that's a little more sensuous than we expect in animation.

A brave, funny, affecting film.

It exists somewhere between parody and melodrama, between the tragic and the goofy. There are moments when the movie doesn't seem to know where it's going, but for once that's a good thing because the uncertainty almost always ends with some kind of a delightful, weird surprise.

Forms a community that eventually envelops us.

The shots are beautifully composed, the editing paces the process of self-discovery, the dialogue is spare and heartfelt, the performances are deeply human -- especially by Efron.

It accomplishes an amazing thing. It explains the national debt, the foreign trade deficit, the decrease in personal savings, how the prime interest rate works, and the weakness of our leaders.

What makes Vice Versa so wonderful is the way Reinhold and Savage are able to convince us that each body is inhabited by the other character.

Another illustration of how absorbing a film can be when the plot doesn't stand between us and a character.

Antwone Fisher has a confrontation with his past, and a speech to the mother who abandoned him, and a reunion with his family, that create great, heartbreaking, joyous moments.

There have been a lot of movies where stars have repeated the triumphs of their parts - but has any star ever done it more triumphantly than Marlon Brando does in "The Freshman"? He is doing a reprise here of his most popular character, Don Vito Corleone of "The Godfather," and he does it with such wit, discipline and seriousness that it's not a ripoff and it's not a cheap shot, it's a brilliant comic masterstroke.

A first-rate, slam-bang action thriller with a lot of style and no little humor.

Although Newman is a delight, the best surprise in the movie is the performance of a new actress named Lolita Davidovich, who plays Blaze Starr. She has a comfortableness in the role that is just right.

Will this movie change anything, or this review make you want to see it? No, probably not. But when you come in tomorrow morning, someone will have emptied your wastebasket.

The bare story itself could be simplistic and silly: Cops chasing a couple of kids on a horse. But when relationships are involved, and social realities, and a certain level of magical realism, then the story grows and deepens until it really involves us. Kids will probably love this movie, but adults will get a lot more out of it.

Little by little, detail by detail, This Is Not a Film leads to a final scene of overwhelming power. I don't think it was even planned - no more than Panahi expected the little actress to take the cast off her arm. It simply happens, and then the film is over, having nothing more to say. Because, after all, it is not a film.

John Sayles and Haskell Wexler, who has photographed this movie with great beauty and precision, have ennobled the material.

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it.

Seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity. But think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character.

The characters are allowed to be smart, to react in unexpected ways, and to be more concerned with doing the right thing than with doing the expedient or even the lustful thing.

The Fourth Protocol is first-rate because it not only is a thriller, but it also pays attention to its characters and shows how their actions grow out of their personalities. Like Michael Caine's other recent British spy film, "The Whistle Blower," it is effective not simply because it's a thriller but also because for long stretches it simply is a very absorbing drama.

Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result.

Brosnan redefines "hit man" in the best performance of his career, and Kinnear plays with, and against, his image as a regular kinda guy.

Not an easy film and is for those few moviegoers who approach a serious movie almost in the attitude of prayer.

Most dances are for people who are falling in love. The tango is a dance for those who have survived it, and are still a little angry about having their hearts so mishandled. The Tango Lesson is a movie for people who understand that difference.

It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.

There are no heavy-handed portraits of holy rollers here, just people whose view of the world is narrow. There are also no outsize sinners, just some gentle singer-songwriters who are too fond of pot and whose lyrics are parades of cliches.

Maryam is more timely now than ever.

The kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by "No Country for Old Men," and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But There Will Be Blood"is not perfect, and in its imperfections we may see its reach exceeding its grasp. Which is not a dishonorable thing.

The movie is directed with efficiency by Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) who knows that pacing is indispensable to a procedural.

It will not appeal to the impatient, but those who like long books and movies will admire the way it accumulates power and depth. It is about youthful idealism, headstrong love and fierce ambition, and is pessimistic about all of them.

The actors are gifted at establishing character with just a few well-chosen strokes (as a short story writer must also be able to do). We learn as much about each of these women in half an hour as we learn about most movie characters in two hours.

Every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next.

Barry Lyndon isn’t a great success, and it’s not a great entertainment, but it’s a great example of directorial vision.

You will either be in sympathy with it, or not. Much depends on what you bring into the theater. It is possible that those who know most about Nijinsky will be most baffled, because this is not a film about knowing, but about feeling.

The funniest movie character so far this year is a stuffed teddy bear. And the best comedy screenplay so far is Ted, the saga of the bear's friendship with a 35-year-old manchild.

Wickedly funny.

Yes, this is a comedy, but it's also sad, and finally it's simply a story about trying to figure out what you love to do and then trying to figure out how to do it.

The film has many virtues, but for me the most enchanting is simply the lust with which it depicts a bold and colorful era in history.

Some of the gags don't work, and yet I laughed at the Farrellys' audacity in trying them. And the humor isn't just gags and punch lines, but one accomplished comic performance after another.

Why did it take me so long to see what was right there in front of my face -- that The Company is the closest that Robert Altman has come to making an autobiographical film?

The film is smart, quick, and made with real wit. It's never just a crude action movie, bludgeoning us with violence. It's self-aware, it knows who Dirty Harry is and how we react to him, and it has fun with its intelligence. Also, of course, it bludgeons us with violence.

The whole movie is so well-cast and performed that we watch it unfolding without any particular awareness of "acting."

Despite its flaws, despite its gaps, despite two key scenes that are dreadfully wrong, Shoot the Moon contains a raw emotional power of the sort we rarely see in domestic dramas.

Colin Farrell is astonishing in the movie.

What made Shackleton's adventure so immediate to later generations was that he took along a photographer, Frank Hurley, who shot motion picture film and stills.

Pretty much required viewing.

Directed with sly grace and quiet elegance by Sally Potter, it is not about a story or a plot, but about a vision of human existence.

The story is as pure and lean as the original fable which formed in Steinbeck's mind. And because they don't try to do anything fancy -- don't try to make it anything other than exactly what it is -- they have a quiet triumph.

The most mysterious character in The Kid With a Bike is not the kid, who after all, has a story it's fairly easy to understand. It is the hairdresser, played by Cecille De France with her sad beauty. This actress carries lifetimes in her eyes.

Keane is played by Damian Lewis. Here he inhabits an edge of madness that Lodge Kerrigan understands with a fierce sympathy.

Anderson is like Dave Brubeck, who I'm listening to right now. He knows every note of the original song, but the fun and genius come in the way he noodles around. And in his movie's cast, especially with Owen Wilson, Anderson takes advantage of champion noodlers.

For a movie audience, The Hours doesn't connect in a neat way, but introduces characters who illuminate mysteries of sex, duty and love.

The movie was made with a lot of love and startingly fresh memories of the early 1940s, and reminds us once again that Spacek is a treasure.

What makes the movie fascinating is that it doesn't settle for a soap opera resolution to this story, with Pilar as the victim, Antonio as the villain, and evil vanquished. It digs deeper and more painfully.

If anybody ever wrote a Field Guide to Alcoholics, with descriptions of their appearance, sexual behavior and habitats, there would be a full-color portrait on the cover of Tommy, the hero of Trees Lounge.

The three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and -- wow! -- Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

There is hardly a moment in the whole film when I knew for sure what was going to happen next, yet I didn’t feel manipulated; I felt as if the movie were giving itself the freedom to be completely spontaneous.

Monsters holds our attention ever more deeply as we realize it's not a casual exploitation picture.

There is no mechanical plot that has to grind to a Hollywood conclusion, and no contrived test for the heroes to pass; this is a movie about two particular young men, and how they pass their lives.

King of the Corner is not plot-driven. It's like life: just one damned thing after another

This is a more thoughtful film, and its action scenes are easier to follow in space and time. If we didn't really need to be told Spidey's origin story again, at least it's done with more detail and provides better reasons for why Peter Parker throws himself into his superhero role.

Twelve and Holding could have been a series of horror stories, but the filmmakers and their gifted young actors somehow negotiate the horrors and generate a deep sympathy.

The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.

A comedy worthy of the best Woody Allen, and Adrian is not unlike Woody's persona: a sincere, intense, insecure nebbish, hopeless with women, aiming for greatness.

Fascinating and has a lot of laughs in it.

The New York art world quickly makes Basquiat a star. His work is good (when you see it in the movie, you can feel why people liked it so much), but his story is better: from a cardboard box to a gallery opening!

This human level is always there beneath the thriller elements. The screenplay takes care to bring the crime story and the personal histories together, so that even the crossed lines of romance work as plot points, not just sentiment.

This movie is impressively staged, the dialogue is given proper weight and not hurried through, there are surprises which, in hindsight, seem fair enough, and "Harry Potter" now possesses an end that befits the most profitable series in movie history.

Something New delivers all the usual pleasures of a love story, and something more. The movie respects its subject and characters, and is more complex about race than we could possibly expect.

Cuaron's version of magic realism consists of seeing incredibly fanciful sets and situations in precise detail, and Johnson has provided him with the freedom and logistical support to create such places as the street where Miss Minchin's school looms so impressively.

The memory of the Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster performances in "Gunfight" haunts the sequel like a ghost, but Hour of the Gun pretty much manages to stand on its own.

Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.

Off the Map is visually beautiful as a portrait of lives in the middle of emptiness, but it's not about the New Mexico scenery. It's about feelings that shift among people who are good enough, curious enough or just maybe tired enough to let that happen.

Margin Call employs an excellent cast who can make financial talk into compelling dialogue. They also can reflect the enormity of what is happening: Their company and their lives are being rendered meaningless.

It is not an entirely successful movie, but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances. And the dialogue in it is actually worth listening to, because it is written with wit and romance.

The most fascinating scenes in Waking Sleeping Beauty involve the infamous Disney work ethic. Friends of mine at the studio said the unofficial motto was, "If you didn't come in on Saturday, don't even bother to come in on Sunday."

A well-crafted example of a film of pure sensation. I do not mind admitting I was enthralled.

It provides the most observant study of working journalists we're ever likely to see in a feature film. And it succeeds brilliantly in suggesting the mixture of exhilaration, paranoia, self-doubt, and courage that permeated the Washington Post as its two young reporters went after a presidency.

A black comedy in the tradition of David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and the Coens themselves...an assured piece of comic filmmaking.

A remarkable documentary by two Irish filmmakers that is playing in theaters on its way to HBO. It is remarkable because the filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, had access to virtually everything that happened within the palace during the entire episode.

Tamara Drewe is one of those British comedies in which, one way or another, we envy all of the characters.

The Dead Zone does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural.

Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time.

Succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story.

It is a great performance by Danny Glover, the portrait of a proud man who discovers his pride was entrusted to the wrong things.

It is easy to analyze the mechanism, but more difficult to explain why this film is so deeply moving.

What I will remember is the photography, and the bliss (just this side of madness) with which the Jeff Daniels character invents his foolhardy schemes.

The movie's delicately timed pacing and Pollack's visual style work almost stealthily to involve us; we begin to feel the physical weariness and spiritual desperation of the characters.

It was produced, written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also wrote American Graffiti, and it has the same sharp memory for those specific moments when young people suspect they are doing certain things for the last times in their lives. So it is bittersweet, of course -- bittersweet, that indispensable street you travel through adolescence on.

Good in so many subtle ways, I despair of doing them justice.

It shows how violent gangster movies need not be filled with stupid dialogue, nonstop action and gratuitous gore. Sonatine is pure, minimal and clean in its lines.

The end of the film understandably lays on the emotion a little heavily, but until then Courage Under Fire has been a fascinating emotional and logistical puzzle--almost a courtroom movie, with the desert as the courtroom.

A film that grows in reflection. The first time I saw it, I was hurtling down the tracks of a goofy ethnic comedy when suddenly we entered dark and dangerous territory. I admired the film but did not sufficiently appreciate its arc.

Hard Candy is impressive and effective. As for what else it may be, each audience member will have to decide.

The movie works like thrillers used to work, before they were required to contain villains the size of buildings.

I'm Not Scared is a reminder of true childhood, of its fears and speculations, of the way a conversation can be overheard but not understood, of the way that the shape of the adult world forms slowly through the mist.

It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as Headhunters did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.

We have all the action heroes and Method script-chewers we need right now, but the Cary Grant department is understaffed, and Hugh Grant shows here that he is more than a star, he is a resource.

The story is predictable, but the style had me on the edge of my seat.

Just about perfect for its target audience, and more than that. It has a great look, engaging performances, real substance and even a few whispers of political ideas, all surrounding the freshness and charm of Abigail Breslin, who was 11 when it was filmed.

Red Rock West is a diabolical movie that exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy.

The movie's strength, then, is not in its outrage, but in its cynicism and resignation.

A wise and touching film with a lot of love in it. I may have given the wrong impression: It's not entirely about drinking, it's just entirely about a drinker.

The sweetest and most openhearted love fable since "The Princess Bride."

The seductive thing about Aronofsky's film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math.

Bottle Shock is more than the story. It is also about people who love their work, care about it with passion and talk about it with knowledge.

The whole movie has a winning sadness about it; take away the story's sensational aspects and what you have is a study in loneliness.

Sayles' film moves among a large population of characters with grace, humor and a forgiving irony.

The movie is not tidy. Like its heroine, it doesn't follow the rules.

A delicious pastry of a movie -- You see it, and later when you think about it, you smile.

It seems aimed at people who loved "Pulp Fiction'' and have strong stomachs. Like it or hate it (or both), you have to admire its skill, and the over-the-top virtuosity of Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland as the girl and the wolf.

Director Gillian Armstrong finds the serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a "family" formula. "

The music is terrific. Idania Valdes dubs Rita's sensuous, smoky singing voice, and the film is essentially constructed as a musical.

Mike Hodges' gritty new film noir I'll Sleep When I'm Dead begins in enigma and snakes its way into stark clarity.

[Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key.

Moore and Bening are superb actors here, evoking a marriage of more than 20 years, and all of its shadings and secrets, idealism and compromise.

These animals aren't catering to anyone in the audience. We get the feeling they're intensely leading their own lives without slowing down for ours.

What is finally clear: It doesn't matter a damn what your will says if you have $25 billion, and politicians and the establishment want it.

The film's title is appropriate. A desperate Catholicism flavors the doomed city.

The real subject of the film is Douglas Bruce sitting on two years of memories and told there is a 95 percent chance that another 30 years may return to him. A lot of people don't want to know when they're going to die. Maybe they wouldn't want to be reborn, either.

The violence in this movie is gruesome (a scene involving the disposal of bodies is particularly graphic). But the movie has many human qualities and contains what will be remembered as one of Pacino's finest scenes.

Above all, it contains characters I care for, played by actors I admire.

In Klute you don't have two attractive acting vacuums reciting speeches at each other. With Fonda and Sutherland, you have actors who understand and sympathize with their characters, and you have a vehicle worthy of that sort of intelligence. So the fact that the thriller stuff doesn't always work isn't so important.

Because it is attentive to these human elements, Ladder 49 draws from the action scenes instead of depending on them. Phoenix, Travolta, Barrett and the others are given characters with dimension, so that what happens depends on their decisions, not on the plot.

Unstrung Heroes has been directed by Diane Keaton with an unusual combination of sentiment and quirky eccentricity.

Oh, God! is lighthearted, satirical, and humorous and (that rarest of qualities) in good taste.

Starting with Mick Jagger, rock concerts have become, for the performers, as much sporting events as musical and theatrical performances. Stop Making Sense understands that with great exuberance.

[Keaton and Nicholson] bring so much experience, knowledge and humor to their characters that the film works in ways the screenplay might not have even hoped for.

Just plain fun. Or maybe not so plain. There's a lot of craft and slyness lurking beneath the circa-1960s goofiness.

The thing about Funny People is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's ABOUT SOMETHING.

In its closing scenes, Hell and Back Again builds to an emotional and stylistic power that we didn't see coming.

The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends quasi-credibility to a story that is entirely preposterous.

An ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary.

To be sure, Scorsese was occasionally too obvious, and the film has serious structural flaws, but nobody who loves movies believes a perfect one will ever be made. What we hope for instead are small gains on the fronts of hope, love, comedy and tragedy. It is possible that with more experience and maturity Scorsese will direct more polished, finished films--but this work, completed when he was 25, contains a frankness he may have diluted by then.

The movie gets the feel right, and there's real energy in the concert scenes, especially the tricky debut of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as the first white act in Harlem's famous Apollo Theater.

As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it.

Foster directs the film with a sure eye for the revealing little natural moment.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

Odd is played by Baard Owe, a trim, fit man with a neat mustache, who may cause you to think a little of James Stewart, Jacques Tati or Jean Rochefort.

It haunts you, you can't forget it, you admire its conception and are able to resolve some of the confusions you had while watching it.

There is a long central section in the film which is a triumph of narrative technique.

Guilty by Suspicion is about a period that is now some 40 years ago (although some blacklist members did not work again until the 1970s). But it teaches a lesson we are always in danger of forgetting: that the greatest service we can do our country is to be true to our conscience.

One of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

The movie is sure to be appealing to younger viewers (they may find it more accessible and certainly less frightening than "Jurassic Park"), and it's smart enough to keep older viewers involved, too.

How this all finally works out is deeply satisfying. Only after the movie is over do you realize what a balancing act it was, what risks it took, what rewards it contains. A character says at one point that she has grown to like Bianca. So, heaven help us, have we.

You might be tempted to think that Arthur would be a bore, because it is about a drunk who is always trying to tell you stories. You would be right if Arthur were a party and you were attending it. But Arthur is a movie. And so its drunk, unlike real drunks, is more entertaining, more witty, more human, and more poignant than you are. He embodies, in fact, all the wonderful human qualities that drunks fondly, mistakenly believe the booze brings out in them.

A big budget historical drama that carries Denmark's hopes into the Oscar season. It provides still more exposure for the rising Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, the latest male sex symbol of the art house crowd.

One view of what happened that day, a very effective one. And as an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene.

This is the kind of movie where every note is put in lovingly. It's a 1950s crime movie, but with a modern, ironic edge: The cops are just a shade over the top, just slightly in on the joke.

A tight, taut thriller with a twist.

It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.

The movie is dark, intense and disturbing.

And the movie succeeds in two different ways: It's sweet and good-hearted, and then again it's raucous slapstick and bathroom humor. I liked both parts.

I enjoyed the film very much. It was a visceral pleasure to see a hard-boiled guy like David Carr at its center.

The two women are very beautiful, gentle and sad together, and the movie is all but stolen by Chowdhry, as the servant who lurks constantly in the background providing, with his very body language, a comic running commentary.

The latest and one of the most harrowing films set along the religious divides in Israel.

I like the way Last Resort ends, how it concludes its emotional journey without pretending the underlying story is over. You walk out of the theater curiously touched.

Bride Flight takes this melodrama and adds details of period, of behavior, of personality, to somewhat redeem its rather inevitable conclusion.

Ritchie has so messy targets that he misses some and never quite gets back to others. But Smile does a good job of working over the hypocrisy and sexism of a typical beauty pageant.

Twins is not a great comedy - it's not up there with Reitman's "Ghostbusters" and DeVito is not as funny as he was in "Ruthless People" and "Wise Guys" - but it is an engaging entertainment with some big laughs and a sort of warm goofiness.

A con within a con within a con. There comes a time when we think we've gotten to the bottom, and then the floor gets pulled out again and we fall another level.