Sean Axmaker

Aoyama's monochrome images are filled with a simple shadowy beauty and his scenes are rich in tender sensitivity and empathy.

Plays in spots something like a stage play smartly brought to screen.

The insistent crosscutting suggests there is something powerful between the two stories, but apart from vague connections of jealousy, emotional tension and conversations that constantly dance around the real issues, they don't resonate across the years.

While Look at Me at times falls into familiar plotting, it never offers false hope or false characters.

It all feels like a performance for the camera: von Trier as madman producer taunting the elder filmmaker.

This bracing portrait of a woman who painfully accepts her responsibility as a citizen is a revelation.

Affliction has rarely been so sensitively explored.

What gives the story resonance is the tenderness and sacrifice and even innocence del Toro reveals amid the savagery.

Highly entertaining.

Despite the cat-and-mouse games between cop and criminal, this is less a battle of wills than one man's battle for his own soul. Nolan bravely treads where few American films dare to delve -- into the world of ambivalence and ambiguity -- and emerges with a compelling portrait.

Behind the narrative twists and contrived dramatic complications is a searing and scary look at dysfunction.

Andrew Bujalski's refreshingly modest look at life in the directionless netherworld between college and career is the rare film that finds its story in the minor contradictions and simple conflicts of ordinary people doing, well, not exactly nothing, but nothing important.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

The film walks a fine line between contempt for Polanski's crimes and sympathy for his trials and his screwed-up psyche, and it manages both while showing us why he fled the U.S. rather than face the corrupted judicial circus.

It's just the kind of film that you'd expect a jury led by Quentin Tarantino to choose, a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity.

Vital and alive. Frustration and malaise rumble through every richly textured frame, but behind it all is a restlessness and a desire for something better.

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

So stuffed with Maddin-ess that it never manages to get past the glorious surfaces. McKinney strides through his role with a knowing wink, and the sheer volume of creative imagery is as distracting as it is entertaining.

It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity.

The result is rich, lush -- simply exquisite.

Emitai (1971) remains Sembene's masterpiece and his most important achievement. [03 Aug 2001]

In a farce like this, where the story is merely a string of martial-arts movie cliches lined up to be parodied, that has its own rewards.

This is full of talk in the European art cinema tradition: intellectual conversations (often in multiple languages at once), gentile dinner conversation with an international all-star guest list.

A date film with a hook for men.

It's more admirable than enjoyable, beautifully crafted and artfully unpleasant.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

Ashton Kutcher wants to be taken seriously so badly it hurts. So does this metaphysical mess of a movie, a pseudo time-travel drama so complicated it takes more than half an hour just to establish the gimmick. And a gimmick it is.

The three stars communicate the fears and dreams and frustrations of teenage girls with subtlety, sensitivity and dignity.