Russell Smith

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.

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.

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

[A] distinctive, thought-provoking film.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.