Russell Smith

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.

To put it as kindly as possible, Fuqua is a well-intended tyro who wrongly assumes that his obvious love for action movies qualifies him to make them himself.

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.

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.

With this artlessly profound and affecting story of love, von Trier emerges as one of those blessed filmmakers who've managed to blend their early stylistic flamboyance with enough human empathy to make their work both visually and emotionally compelling.

Yet a nigh-miraculous blend of high spirits, poignancy, gentle satire, and unpretentious insight into the nature of human aspiration make this one of the most impressive films you're likely to see this year.

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 driving forces behind Dick's courageous, defiantly candid film are curiosity about all things human and a desire to explain the seemingly inexplicable.

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.

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.

[A] distinctive, thought-provoking film.

Buena Vista Social Club is obviously intended less as a concert film than as a set of cinematic liner notes about the vanishing musical culture.

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.

In this magnificent, profoundly tragic film, Nolte and Coburn each turn in career-best performances as a father and son who embody the ancient, seemingly ineradicable male pathology of violence, retribution, and the slow death of the soul.

For all its knock-'em-dead acting and aggressively stylish direction, Hilary and Jackie is still best described as arthouse comfort food.

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.

Hall, one of our least appreciated great actors, is mesmerizing as Sydney.

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.

Fonda brings all of his childhood frustration and angst to the screen in one of the year's most unexpectedly brilliant acting performances.

Just the thing to clear your Capra-glutted holiday movie palate.

Despite the florid trailers' emphasis on bodice-ripping romantic imagery, Elizabeth is above all a political thriller.

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.

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.

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

Breakdown further illustrates the axiom that every truly original movie must be remade again and again until it achieves a state of sublime, all-encompassing idiocy.

Down in the Delta, like a gratingly platitudinous self-help tape, sugarcoats the complex one-step-back, two-steps-forward nature of personal and social progress. And like the drugs and booze it condemns, it provides a warm rush of euphoria, but no real answers.

If you feel hostile toward art that not only confuses you but then also suggests that your confusion is precisely the point, you'll probably want to pass on Sonatine. But if disciplined, minimalist storytelling, formal innovation, and contemplation of mystery for its own sake appeals to you, a real feast awaits you in the films of Takeshi Kitano.

A center ring extravaganza of smackdown movie entertainment

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.

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

If you're fed up with the stultifying, formula-driven character of today's mainstream films, give Fallen Angels a try. At the very least you'll be engaged, and if you're lucky you may just recapture some of your original wonder at the seductive power of movies.

This film's intelligence and uncompromising originality commend it to even moviegoers with zero tolerance for top hats, parasols, and crap English accents.

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

Director Francis Ford Coppola, who established his towering reputation with an adaptation of another pulpy pop novel, hasn't exactly uncorked another The Godfather here.

Assuming that rich human insight, great production values, and topnotch acting still count for something, Mrs. Brown should have no trouble finding an appreciative audience.

From the fan's perspective this is sheer bliss, the next best thing to pouring a couple of glasses of grappa and sitting down with a bona fide film immortal (and world-class raconteur) for a long, intimate conversation.

Ironically, the problem may lie in Baird and screenwriter John Pogue's over-eagerness to give us what they think we want.

My advice: Go; see; laugh yourself silly.

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.

Thanks largely to the raw bravery and intensity of the two leads' performances, Happy Together takes a quantum leap forward in terms of visceral power.

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

Unostentatious originality, psychological insight, and stark beauty make it well worth any film lover's time.

Nothing but tarted-up melodrama.

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

The underlying problem is the mainstream film format's length constraints, which seem to have forced a rude bowdlerization of the story.

Unfortunately, for all his large soul and exquisite mastery of image, Nava is also one of the worst writers to ever accrue more than two major-movie screenwriting credits.

Due largely to the tremendous innate warmth and conviction of leads Quaid and Caviezel ("The Thin Red Line"), you may find yourself cutting a surprising amount of slack for this patently ridiculous tale.

One of the truest-seeming movies I've seen in some time and as one of the most odd and haunting.

Neither Hopkins nor Baldwin can be faulted. Both explore and illuminate their half-realized characters as best they can, but creating any real power or suspense is just too big a bear to kill.

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

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.

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.

Clockwatchers may not be a Grapes of Wrath for the Nineties, but its intelligence, slow-boil outrage over grunt workers' dehumanization, and subtle assertion of their power to resist make it a terrific piece of pro-labor propaganda.

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.

Commands respect as mainstream filmmaking with more of an agenda than just pimping cinematic junk food to the brain-dead masses.

Cinque, the rebel leader, is played by former model Hounsou, a mountainous figure who speaks in a gutteral roar and seems to embody the rage and confusion of an entire exploited continent.

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.

For my money the most gloriously, enchantingly trivial play in the Shakespearean canon, A Midsummer Night's Dream may also be the most screwup-proof of the bard's works.

All in all, this is perhaps one of those films you applaud more for design than execution while hoping at the same time that its boundary-testing restlessness becomes more widely influential.

In essence, the artistic failure of She's So Lovely is traceable to a single, supremely ironic fact: For a story by a writer with so much professed faith in the power of truth to bubble up out of apparent chaos, there's hardly anything here that feels recognizably true.

Perhaps the most vexing flaws in this movie are its irresolute plot structure and tone.

On a more basic level, I simply found it so hard to penetrate the two main characters' cauterized psyches that, in the end, I hardly gave a damn what happened to them.

Sorvino and Kudrow, for whatever inscrutable reasons, seem to be having a blast with their ridiculous characters, and both shine in the loopy set-pieces and dream sequences that pepper the story.

In the end, though, the undeniable power and emotional richness of this film swing the balance toward the good.

As enjoyable as it is, it's hard to escape a sense of Analyze This being the work of competent talents who knew exactly where the good-enough line was and didn't feel particularly inspired to push far beyond it.

For all its flaws, Better Than Chocolate is a fair enough entertainment value -- certainly no less meritorious overall than, say, Runaway Bride. But, like many other films that have boasted both a high likability quotient and a positive social message, it seems to be getting a bit more credit than it really deserves. And as far as I'm concerned it's no favor to allow a filmmaker of Anne Wheeler's obvious gifts to operate so far below peak efficiency.

It's a consistently entertaining story.

Much like the DNA-scrambled beast to which the title alludes, this film is a chimerical chop-shop product, consisting mostly of spare parts pulled from Alien, Jurassic Park, and even The Ghost and the Darkness.

Annaud (The Lover, The Name of the Rose, Quest for Fire) may be, with all due respect to Stanley Kubrick, the most talented adapter of literary source material in recent film history. Seven Years confirms his mastery by doling out a perfect ratio of moving interpersonal drama and visual enchantment.

Though Cuaron slips a time or two during his stylistic highwire act, his refreshingly original movie, aided by Hawke's career-best acting in the lead role, is a joy to watch.

Rare two-for-one Chan special.

Within the context of films that include the word booty in their titles, it serves up an unusually fresh, inventive and good-natured brew of pure lascivious fun.

Yet for all its unmistakable visual trademarks (hypersaturated colors; mad-scientist tinkering with film stocks and editing technique; sudden presentation of enigmatic, troubling images), this is also the most radical departure Stone has ever made in terms of basic sensibilities.

A slight, oddly lifeless movie with dubious appeal for even the most incorrigible Simon devotees.

It's far from unenjoyable, but the dank shroud of the overfamiliar lies heavy over all, kind of like watching an Elvis concert circa 1976.

The script, partly written by an uncredited Terry George ("Some Mother's Son," "In the Name of the Father") strains mightily for insight but never quite breaks through.

There's an undeniable energy, originality and -- most hearteningly -- optimism here that makes Beefcake well worth your time, shortcomings and all.

Wall to wall blood 'n' guts laced with surprisingly keen social satire, much of it targeting the fatuousness of media culture.

Most of the actors seem to have been issued one facial expression at the beginning of the film, along with pain-of-death instructions not to change it under any circumstance.

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.

In context, it's utterly, dismayingly typical.

It's almost as enjoyable watching these august septuagenarians jumping from trains, cruising with Harley-riding dykes, and exchanging pubescent screw-you/blow me repartee as it must have been for them to do it. And fun, sometimes, is its own best rationale.

The splendid performance by Sobieski, who ends her long run as industry-mag buzz princess and arrives as a full-fledged star.

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

A sketchy, half-baked, stylistically inconsistent movie that scarcely even pretends to care whether it makes sense or not.

As with so many recent films, this innocuous little romantic comedy suffers far more from the effects of art-by-committee than the ruinous domination of any one person.

It's just a little too ironic (to quote Okay Pop Singer Alanis Morrisette) that a movie with the word "magic" in its title should be such a perfect example of the difference between competence and inspiration.

Highly recommended for graduate psychology students in aberrant sexuality, but others can probably skip sans regret.

A gleefully overplotted crime yarn that channels in sanitized form the perverse subtropical-noir sensibilities of Carl Hiassen.

Given a choice between the puerile but essentially innocent whimsy of Dr. Dolittle and the dimwitted nastiness of, say, "Dirty Work," parents should be grateful for the Eddie Murphys and Jim Carreys of the world for at least providing a kinder, gentler option.

It's diverting enough, and intermittently suspenseful, but also strangely empty and decadent in a way that truly merits that overused term.

It delivers commendable entertainment value.

There's plenty of solid, intelligent content here to stir the mind and heart, assuming you're able to overlook the distinctly patronizing presentation.

This is a gutsy, oddly inspiring film that embodies both the risks and rewards of artistic boldness.

Thanks to this relentlessly likable film's playful sexuality and utter lack of pretension it's surprisingly easy to let all of one's objections float away on a fragrant cloud of kitchen sweat, pheromones, and sweet lime zest.

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

This is one of those rare cop/action movies driven by character, not spectacle. Murphy helps the cause with the most focused, persuasive acting of his career. As a young phenom, he got by on charisma, which he promptly commodified and cheapened with Hollywood’s enthusiastic collusion. Now there’s a calm, unfakeable assurance behind his eyes that only comes with life experience. It’s something he can and should build on.

Lack of imagination or subtlety.