Russell Smith

If you can tune into its somber, hypnotic wavelength, you may be surprised at the raw emotional impact it delivers in key scenes, and at its ability to provoke your imagination long afterward.

Feel-good comedy with none of the pejorative hints of innocuous blandness that term so often implies.

The only reservation I have in recommending this film is the ultimate question of what value there is in this kind of naked, unmediated portrayal of such wretched situations. What Oldman has done is to open a window onto scenes we know are taking place everywhere, all the time. Why -- and if -- we choose to look is a personal call for every viewer.

It's an utterly contemporary film that forces - and rewards - hard reflection on the nature of truth, goodness, and identity.

Efforts to pin down its odd seductive power are as futile as, say, describing the specific sense of disorientation you feel at the instant when a darting cloud suddenly obscures the sun, throwing all your perceptions into a new light before you realize what's happened. Disquieting, but subtly consciousness-expanding. Just see the movie.

Director Jim Sheridan, who has collaborated with writer Terry George on In the Name of the Father and Some Mother's Son clearly understands the weariness that inevitably consumes not only long, seemingly irresolvable conflicts but stories about them.

Ms. Elliott's film is, in part, an effort to reverse his slow slide into obscurity. On this level it's an unqualified success.

With her audience's full attention assured, first-time director Kasi Lemmons then proceeds to unravel a spellbinding, powerfully seductive tale that blends Southern Gothic magical realism and disturbing family drama with the flair of a born storytelling genius.

With its understated moral power, generous spirit, and bracing flashes of dark humor, Titanic Town offers a fresh, subtly illuminating take on an ancient sorrow.

Funny, scabrous, disturbing, tragic, and improbably life-affirming, The General travels its own idiosyncratic path with more real style and substance than the past half-decade of Hollywood gangster movies combined.

For all his superfan's intimacy with b-ball culture, he focuses less on the sport's fascinating mystique than on generic recapitulation of how celebrity culture seduces and devours young minority athletes.

The filmmakers go to obvious pains to add a bit of nutritive value to their sweet, frothy confection.

This film is both too formulaic and too much a one-man vehicle to rate as a true masterpiece. But God strike me dead if I'm lying, this is one gut-busting funny movie.

Microcosmos is more about reverie than revelation. Still, don't be surprised if you come away from it with that feeling, like the aftermath of a deep, strange dream, that your consciousness has been enlarged in a subtle but very real way.

Little effort is made to churn up romantic chemistry between Foster and McConaughey. For better or worse, director Robert Zemeckis sticks to Sagan's original vision for these characters, in which they're basically totems embodying both sides of a philosophical dialectic.

The fact that the blatantly thumbtacked-on happy ending plays as unvarnished fairy tale adds a definite bittersweet tang of irony.

This movie is by no means a classic in absolute artistic terms, but as a reaffirmation of all but forgotten verities it's an unqualified success.

It's a consistently entertaining story.

In terms of sheer, unrelenting visual invention, Velvet Goldmine is a wonder.

From the pure entertainment standpoint, ABL's nonstop action helps it avoid the slack moments that marred “Antz”. The dialogue, kiddie-accessible though it is, is plenty intelligent for adult enjoyment.

With help from talented young director Ferland and a sublime performance from Kevin Bacon, Eszterhas has created a gentle and affecting ode to universal growing-up conflicts within a beautifully rendered evocation of a specific time and place.

The story, serviceable though it is, still shatters like eggshells under even the lightest scrutiny, and the dialogue is often stale beyond belief.

When Eastwood is at the top of his form -- as he is for much of this film -- there's no more spellbinding storyteller in American cinema.

Anyone who can watch this film and deny that the Sex Pistols were one of the four or five most exciting and indelibly brilliant rock groups ever is pumping formaldehyde, not blood, through his veins.

The stunning vitality and passion of this film arises not only from the high-voltage personalities involved (especially Ali and King) but from the way they galvanized political and ethnic pride among the people of the poor West African nation.

It does effectively recall those bygone days when impossibly attractive, charming, and endearingly flawed characters dressed to kill, smoked like creosote plants, and behaved atrociously on the way to rapturous romantic consummation.

Love's real heartbeat is the sheer likability of its attractive young cast and the earnest naïveté with which they reach (through obsessive movie fandom, endless conversation, and polymorphic romantic pairings) for insights just beyond their grasp.

Possibly due to the story's origin as a Ruth Rendell novel, this is the most coherent, viewer-friendly narrative he's ever filmed.