Sam Adams

There's something grating about the way The Last Mountain keeps returning to picket-line confrontations between environmental activists.

Like a well-crafted garment, it's seamless. There's plenty of amour, but not enough fou.

Wexler breaks the cardinal rule of first-person documentaries: Don't make yourself the subject unless you're worth paying attention to.

The character's miraculous gift never plays as more than a melodramatic contrivance-it's a gimmick, not an outgrowth of faith. The movie reaches for the heart, but only comes back with a balloon filled with fake blood and chicken livers.

Bal mingles the bitter and the sweet, but it gets mired in its own stickiness.

Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.

It's to the film's credit that its inescapable conclusion seems in doubt until the very end.

If anyone's likely to have trouble with Carancho, it's fans of Trapero's previous films, who won't be able to help noticing the sizeable step he's taken toward conventionality.

Rather than peering into the heart of darkness, North just slaps a coat of Art atop her true-crime subject, and the upshot is akin to an especially pretentious episode of "Law & Order."

Zandvliet's direction lacks Steen's gradations. The handheld, rubbed-raw style wears thin after a while, growing monotonous and wearying.

For Washington, the wounds of the past are just beneath the surface, as close as the bullet holes under her kitchen wallpaper.

For the most part, Neshoba is content to treat progress as a matter of reconciling with the past rather than dealing with the present.

A defiant, mad gesture of a film that features some of the most exhilarating sequences in movie history.

There are moments when Big Wednesday strains under the weight of Milius’ ambition, but they’re balanced with lively authenticity and a brisk lack of sentiment.

Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.

While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.

The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man.

The visual scheme of Leone’s movie leaves no doubt as to his familiarity with Kurosawa’s movie. Plopping Eastwood’s roving gunman down in the middle of a dusty street with opposing gangs lodged at either end, Fistful replicates Yojimbo’s visual plan to an almost distracting extent. The bigger problem with Fistful is that Leone is still attempting to work with a conventional plot, which never plays to his strengths.

Miyazaki so effectively captures the feeling of a child’s life, inside as well as out, that little ones are often mesmerized by the movie, and adults are returned to a time when they could enjoy mystery for its own sake.

The movie's exterior is solid, but it's hollow inside, like a safe filled with air.

What redeems the movie, and then some, is the soulful weariness of Clooney's performance, which is in some ways an earthier and less glib version of the go-go axeman from "Up In The Air."