Stephen Holden

Near the beginning of the movie, the younger Wexler admits that the film is his attempt to get closer to his father. This sense of personal mission helps make Tell Them Who You Are the richest documentary of its kind since Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb."

It's when The Deal leaves the corporate offices behind that the story turns into a bogus, convoluted mess. Once the Russian mafia, personified by Angie Harmon playing an evil seductress with a terrible Russian accent, rears its head, the ballgame is over.

The profound pleasures they offer derive not only from their deft metaphysical playfulness but also from their storytelling genius.

As the movie jumps back and forth in time, it displays an impressive cut-and-paste agility, skillfully interweaving humor and drama without tipping over into farce or soap opera.

Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.

Whether you like or loathe Mr. Dumont’s movies, his unsettling vision of humanity stripped of cultural finery feels profoundly truthful.

Soon after that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks, as though the money had run out and the project had been called off in the middle of a scene that makes no psychological or dramatic sense. It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.

It may not go anywhere in particular, but it is as exciting as a trip through a well-equipped, scary fun house.

Funny Games observes the family's excruciating terror and suffering with the patient delight of a cat luxuriantly toying with a mouse that it is in the process of slowly killing. Posing as a morally challenging work of art, the movie is a really a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism. You go to it at your own risk.

The belated sentimentality of the movie is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Never disrespectful. It leaves you liking and even admiring the people of Massillon for their spunk and their passionate commitment to carrying on a hallowed tradition.

Stagedoor is like leafing through a collection of snapshots assembled with few captions and no text.

Although there is the germ of a very sharp comedy in the intersection of real mobsters and make-believe thugs in a Hollywood mob comedy, Analyze That is far too lazy to do much with it.

The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor.

A crude but stirring video documentary filmed over last year and this by Amos Poe, while Mr. Earle and his band were on tour.

The cinematic equivalent of a visit from a cherished but increasingly dithery maiden aunt.

Dense, exhilarating.

Captures the vulnerability and aimlessness of its unfortunate characters with a heart-in-your-throat rawness that recalls some of the more poignant moments of Italian neo-realist cinema.

Even by the crude standards of teenage horror, Final Destination is dramatically flat.

Tries to do too much in too little time. It would be a stronger film if it devoted more detailed attention to the plight of the returning veteran. As it stands, it is a scattershot antiwar polemic that doesn't bolster its arguments with any historical perspective or statistical evidence. No one from the government or the military is trotted out to give an opposing view. This is not to say that The Ground Truth, on its own terms, isn't devastating.

Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Ms. Johansson’s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor.

War/Dance, in spite of its slickness, is an honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance in an African tribal culture.

The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument.

The major miscalculation in Wonderful World is the presence of a dream figure, known as the Man (Philip Baker Hall)...he throws this delicate, intelligent film, which at its best suggests a muted hybrid of “The Visitor” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” off balance.

Had it exhibited a modicum of restraint, The Forsaken could have been twice as scary.

With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.

This version of The Mummy has no pretenses to be anything other than a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen.

With its many unsolved mysteries, WXIII joins a long list of film-noir projects that end up stranded in the maze of their own invention.

The low-key realism is so meticulously maintained that Summer in Berlin feels somewhat trivial. There is nothing larger here than meets the eye. It is "Sex and the City" on a stringent budget with fewer characters.

Jessica Yu’s enthralling documentary exploration of people with obsessive needs for control and self-mastery.

You might blame Nora Ephron, whose screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” established the formula that I Hate Valentine’s Day runs into the ground. Compared with this, Ms. Ephron is Chekhov.

In Ms. Mirren's first film to be directed by her husband, Taylor Hackford, since "White Nights" in 1985, her formidable dramatic resources can't camouflage flat writing that eventually veers into gloppy sentimentality. At times even Ms. Mirren, who adopts a regionless American accent, seems uncomfortable.

Probably the first romantic drama ever narrated by a smelly dead fish.

This movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society.

Mr. Bana's Chopper is so scarily convincing that he makes you feel the eruptive force of each mood swing and the way his character's paranoia, egomania and conscience- stricken apologies are part of a volatile emotional cycle.

The vital signs in Love Happens, a movie that feels likes a laboriously padded outline, are faint.

A lip-synching hall of mirrors, it is essentially a piece of highbrow karaoke.

The uninitiated viewer can admire it simply for the majesty of its visual poetry.

Rob Schneider runs an obstacle course of taste and emerges remarkably unsullied, considering the choices he faces.

Extraordinary labor of love.

Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage.

In its quiet, literate way, the film is almost as subversive as its central character.

The movie has only the most tenuous connection with reality. But the same could be said of classic 30's screwball comedies in which the treacherous feints and ploys of the mating game are transmuted into witty, romantically charged repartee.

By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with Mulholland Drive.

With its off-center dialogue and upscale industrial settings, Gigantic strains to be original. But beneath its indie affectations it is really another contemplation of generational misunderstanding.

As with the 70's films of Terrence Malick, one of Undertow's producers, the more intoxicated it becomes with rural desolation and fecundity, the more deeply in touch it puts you with its characters' souls.

Dramatically skimpy, even though the movie stirs together themes of love, sex, death and war.

This season's answer to "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it's an overstuffed grab bag in which lumps of coal are glued together with melted candy.

Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.

Superbly acted, without a trace of coyness and with considerable heat.

Transfixing in the way that well-told life-and-death adventure tales inevitably are. It is the film’s more mundane elements -- an awkward, under-nourished love story and half-baked politics -- that are problematic.

Has only the most tangential relation to reality, and therein lies its slender charm.

What's really so appealing about the characters is their resemblance to everyday children. They're wildly energetic, competitive and (sometimes dangerously) impulsive. But they also learn from their mistakes, and their instincts are good. More power to them.

The sweet, solemn music of George Harrison, who died two years ago, has rarely sounded more majestic than in the sweeping performances of the enlarged star-studded band that gathered in London at Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 29 to commemorate his legacy.

In "Going All the Way," a flashy movie adaptation of Dan Wakefield's popular 1970 novel about growing up in the heartland in the repressed 1950s, Mark Pellington, a director from the world of music video, has inflated a realistic memoir into a garish, hyperkinetic social satire.

Not likely to spur much tourism to Greece. The sights, though impressive, are not photographed interestingly, and the citizens of the host country are less than welcoming.

Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.

The film, which Mr. Rodger directed, wrote, produced and photographed on location in nearly two dozen countries, is the documentary equivalent of a spiritually angled coffee-table book of world travels

Larry (Wild Man) Fischer, the psychotic songwriter and performer (found to be both paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar) is sympathetically profiled in Josh Rubin's documentary.

A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy Ghost Town, they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory.

A 1950's movie magazine fantasy dressed up just enough to pass for contemporary.

So clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys "R" Us during the Christmas rush.

The movie is so busy applying cute touches to everything and everybody that it forgets to devote enough attention to the souls Michael has come down to save.

Although there's plenty of opportunity for low comedy in the notion of an emperor and an oaf exchanging roles, The Emperor's New Clothes, much to its detriment, doesn't pursue them.

For all its energy and fine acting, Tycoon has a frustrating lack of narrative coherence.

What Darfur Now offers is a collective vision of actions, small and large, taken on many fronts, to end the crisis. The movie is a quiet, methodical call to action.

A cream puff with a melted marshmallow inside it. As the temperature rises, the whole gooey thing starts to melt.

With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media's cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death.

The Last New Yorker would like to think of itself as a comic fairy tale, but Lenny’s pride and self-delusion are too pathetic to be amusing.

Milk and Honey is the kind of nightmare-in-a-box you might expect if Neil LaBute remade Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" on a shoestring.

This is a hiss-the-villain, cheer-the-hero kind of movie.

Morris, instead of evoking the solemnity that surrounds most films that touch on the Holocaust, has directed Mr. Death as the blackest of comedies.

An uproariously dizzy satire...Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature.

If Ms. Bynes keeps going in this direction, she can conceivably develop a gallery of characters as rich and varied as Tracey Ullman's.

Mendelsohn's fusion of science fiction and Chekhovian melancholy finds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.

The jocular screen adaptation of the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is a shallow but diverting alternative to the book.

More than an indelible portrait of a sociopath with the soul of a zombie, Tony Manero is an extremely dark meditation on borrowed cultural identity.

Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.

If Dot the i, the directorial debut of Matthew Parkhill, has a crass visual flash, it fails to give its characters any credible substance. Even after it purports to eviscerate their psyches, they remain diagrammatic contrivances.

A smart, sardonic satire.

The movie's unhurried rhythm eventually works a quiet spell, and after a while you find yourself settling back, adjusting to the film's bucolic metabolism and appreciating its eye and ear for detail.

However authentic and heartfelt this film's depiction of life on the meaner streets of the Northeast corridor may be, it doesn't begin to match "The Sopranos'" epic vision of violence, class struggle and upward mobility in a barbarous culture.

An amiably klutzy affair whose warm, fuzzy heart emits intermittent bleats from the sleeve of its gleaming spacesuit.

Pressure Cooker belongs to the honorable if overpopulated genre of inspirational films (both documentaries and features) dedicated to the proposition that one committed, passionate teacher can make all the difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.

Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.

Dark Days illustrates even the worst nightmare can have descending levels of horror.

All it wants is to divert you for about 100 minutes and leave you with the glow of vicarious comradeship, as blue-collar blokes and drag queens pull together to save the day. Foot fetishists will drool.

One of the most disquieting (and challenging) statistics is left for last: if Africa's share of world trade increased by only one percentage point, it would generate $70 billion a year, five times what the continent receives in aid. Who wouldn't want that?

Most of the meager charms of the chaotic romantic farce A Guy Thing spring from the deft comic contortions of Hollywood's ultimate nerdy sidekick, Jason Lee.

Not since "Y Tu Mamá También" has a movie so palpably captured the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood reality of high-spirited people living their lives without self-consciousness.

An undeniably impressive visual spectacle that follows the sport of extreme skiing.

Watching Ms. Zellweger’s joyless performance, you have to wonder what happened to this formerly charming actress who not so long ago seemed on the verge of becoming a softer, more vulnerable Shirley MacLaine.

The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.

Neither funny nor sexy, nor leavened by the wistful laissez-faire wisdom of the typical sophisticated Gallic comedy, it is less than a trifle.

An unusually pure example of American kitchen-sink realism.

Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece Before the Rains may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy.

Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.

A peppy romantic trifle from France that rises above the mundane on the strength of its beautifully detailed lead performances.

The wonder of Mr. Hata's anthropomorphic fairy tale, which opens today at Cinema 3 and other theaters, is that it is cast with real animals who seem to share deep affection. And the mixture of realism and fantasy lends this children's film a poignancy that cuts much deeper than might a similar story featuring animated characters. [25 Aug 1989, p.10]

It adds up to an entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado.

A convoluted, hysterical mess of a movie with grandiose spiritual airs and not a drop of humor.

Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.”

Beautifully written and acted, Tell No One is a labyrinth in which to get deliriously lost.

A bland, well-meaning mishmash that never coheres into a dramatic whole.

Until the end, when it begins to go soft, the movie takes two strands of soap opera convention -- a life-changing accident and an adulterous affair -- and spins their suds into gold.

One of the most insightful and wrenching portraits of the joys and tribulations of being a classical musician ever filmed.

Even though its characters tote cellular phones and live in ultramodern high-rise apartments, the film still has a sleazy 1970's ambiance. And while Mr. Bronson goes through the motions of revenge with his characteristic deliberation, he looks puffy and sounds terminally bored.

What the movie lacks is contrast. The sped-up ribbons of traffic in a city look as pretty as the interior of a redwood grove. As for the perils of logging, one brief shot of a clear-cut forest flashes by so quickly it is almost subliminal.

If Ms. Smith's and Mr. Hoffman's mopey, sheepish performances are quite convincing and ultimately sad, the movie constructed around them doesn't really know what it wants to say or how to say it.

In trying to be both bold and nonthreatening, the movie ends up seeming tame and mildly offensive.

If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."

A gripping and important documentary.

By the time it reaches a weak, ambiguous conclusion, the movie has gone everywhere and nowhere, much like its psychotic main character, Bob Maconel (Christian Slater).

Everything she (Spears) does seems diluted and secondhand and is never transformed into something original or indelibly self-expressive.

The saving graces of the film, written and directed by Chris Kennedy, are its performances, especially Mr. Roxburgh's portrayal of a floundering lost soul with little to show for an itinerant life, and Ms. Otto's ditsy, mercurial and ultimately touching country singer.

Clockwatchers gets many of the details of office life eerily right: the arrogant, smarmy male executives who affect a patronizing jocularity with secretaries whose names they can never remember; the iron-fisted boss who huffs windily about everyone in the company being a "family"; the petty tyrant who doles out pencils as though they were gold bullion.

There is enough discomfort on display to reinforce the cynical adage that sex is God's joke.

Death in Love hasn't a drop of humor or hope. Its dull, smudged look makes every environment appear joyless and claustrophobic.

The performances are so skillful that the actors almost carry it off. But as the shocks come thicker and faster, the credibility of The Intended, wears away.

Its satire is too broad to carry much of a sting.

So intent on pushing its virtuous agenda that its characters often sound like mouthpieces parroting predigested attitudes.

Never regains that initial blast of energy and the final scenes wobble toward a wishy-washy ending.

Feels too cramped, indoorsy and bloodless to catch romantic fire.

Plays as an enthralling but implausible Asian soap opera.

A facile exercise in nihilism posing as an indie "Training Day" with street cred. Don't believe it.

A textbook example of seat-of-the-pants guerrilla filmmaking.

Ms. Lane has the role of her career in Connie, and her indelible (and ultimately sympathetic) performance is both archetypal and minutely detailed.

A movie so profoundly in touch with its own feelings that it transcends its formulaic tics.

If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn’t wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne’s “Election.” But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought.

The real message: Life's ultimate pleasure lies in extreme fighting - to the death.

A suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them.

After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters' feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.

Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.

Despite its moments of pathos and its expressions of homesickness, A Room and a Half, is an uplifting comedy. Like Fellini’s screen reminiscences, it is suffused with a hearty appreciation of the world’s absurdity, along with a hungry appreciation of its beauty.

The Jackal, like most expensive thrillers nowadays, knows how to do gadgets, pyrotechnics, underground subway chases and panicked crowd scenes. But except for Mr. Gere's uphill battle, it has only the vaguest idea of how to do people.

This zippy Disney adventure-comedy, crammed with special effects, asks that age-old rhetorical question, "Is there life after high school?," and answers it with a cheerful "Not really."

Has the rambling pace of an episodic 1950s costume drama.

Ms. Khoury, often filmed in close-up, gives a deeply sensitive, unsentimental performance, and the feelings that crowd on her face (sometimes more than one at a time) run the gamut from despair to ambivalence to hysterical frustration to tenderness and joy.

As this taut, viscerally propulsive insider's history of the sport in its early years skids and leaps forward with a jaunty visual panache, it is impossible not to be seduced by its hard-edged vision of an endless teenage summer.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich “are different from you and me,” he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.

If the situation has all the ingredients of a shrill, tearful melodrama, the filmmaker, working from a taut screenplay by Avner Bernheimer that doesn't waste a word or a gesture, keeps the emotional lid firmly in place.

A crude but scathing portrait of suburban life.

Stirringly romantic...a gripping period thriller that clicks along without resorting to hyped-up shock effects or gimmicky suspense.

The upbeat ending can't erase the lingering aura of being trapped in an insane asylum with the Manson family.

If the new film doesn't exude quite as much fairy-tale magic as the original, it is still a thoroughly entertaining family romp.

The fact that her story of triumph over unimaginable odds doesn't come freighted with mystical and religious bromides makes it all the more inspiring.

This much sweetness and light in a movie is all very well. But there's a reason that recipes for cake and cookies call for a pinch of salt. In Miss Potter, there is only a grain or two -- not enough to dilute the sugary overload. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing.

That Flipped isn't insufferably cute is a measure of its integrity. But it still strains to view the world through the eyes of children without a filter of grown-up cynicism. It is plodding and awkwardly paced.

If XXY is imagistically too programmatic (a scene of carrots being sliced is typical of its Freudian heavy-handedness) and devoid of humor, it never seems pruriently exploitative. It sustains an unsettling mood of ambiguity that lingers long after the final credits.

This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?

The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale.

Brilliant, over-the-edge concert film Notorious C.H.O. carries candid sexual humor into previously uncharted territory.

Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic.

Although the movie follows the standard Hollywood formula of pictures dealing with athletic competition, it is snappily paced and unusually well acted.

Crackles dangerously to life whenever Constance (who narrates the film) is on the screen with her father Hank (Terry Kinney).

Celtic Pride has ingredients that could have made for a tough knockabout farce. Unfortunately, the film, directed by Tom De Cerchio from a screenplay by Judd Apatow, doesn't know the meaning of the term "light touch.

Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.

A thuddingly blunt contemporary morality tale devoid of wit and only minimally suspenseful.

The scenes of gore and destruction are even more spectacular than Hong Kong's fog-shrouded skyline. The director repeatedly places the viewer at the center of the crossfire and turns the gyrating camera into the next best thing to a lethal weapon.

Everything that happens in the last half-hour betrays the canny, hardheaded perspective of what came before.

A chilly machine-tooled comedy.

A largely incoherent movie that generates little suspense and relies for the majority of its thrills on close-up gore.

As this smart, hard-bitten woman with an eighth-grade education pursues her quest, the documentary portrays the debate between connoisseurship and science as a culture war.

If Invincible is soft at the center, its visual grandeur and mostly full-blooded performances make it gripping, for this eminent German director has pulled off the tricky feat of elevating a true story into a larger-than-life allegory.

What distinguishes Raja from every other movie to contemplate the treacherous intersection of passion, avarice and power is its unsettling emotional honesty. The two central performances are so spontaneous and mercurial that the reckless flirtation seems to be unfolding before your eyes.

Michael Kang's small, perfectly observed portrait of Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), a Chinese-American boy who lives and works in a dingy downscale motel operated by his mother, captures the glum desperation of inhabiting the biological limbo of early adolescence.

Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.

The novelty of hearing Ms. Bonham Carter spew four-letter words fades quickly. So does the sight of Mr. Branagh elaborately rehearsing how to rob a bank. This versatile actor has many strengths, but as his wooden turn in ''Celebrity'' has already demonstrated, comedy isn't one of them.

But long before the last car has been flipped, this flurry of flying metal has lost its edge. The vehicular pirouettes and ski jumps are so exaggerated that they correspond neither to the urban geography nor to the laws of physics. And the jiggling camera can't blur the careless mechanical stitching in a sequence that tries to make up for in length what it lacks in inventiveness.

It is a strange piece of work.

A cast that chews the scenery with such obvious enjoyment that you're happy to put up with its tin-eared oratory and preposterous plot turns for the sake of a good ride.

A tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand.

For Ms. Watts, it is a small, brave acting tour de force.

If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?

The movie's disparate voices coalesce here as an emotionally charged microcosm of the conflict.

Much of the film is a nearly wordless tone poem that sustains an intense emotional gravity and sexual tension through its mixture of music, beautiful outdoor cinematography and somber, silent acting.

With the dog days of August upon us, think of this dog of a movie as the cinematic equivalent of high humidity.

A piercingly poignant then-and-now portrait of five friends.

The role, one of the meatiest of Mr. Rush's career, is equal in flash and complexity to his turns as the pianist David Helfgott in "Shine" and the Marquis de Sade in "Quills."

An emotionally and politically loaded allegory.

Filmed in less than three weeks, Man Push Cart is an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring. Mr. Razvi’s convincing performance is a muted portrait of desolation bordering on despair.

Because Stevie has none of the glamour of "Hoop Dreams," with its portrait of gifted teenage athletes struggling for glory, it is not nearly as likable a film; but in its earnest, plodding way it is every bit as deep.

Although Under Siege 2 isn't credible for a single moment, its director, Geoff Murphy, has done a smoothly efficient job of coordinating the action sequences.

Dark Matter, with its view of cutthroat politics and competing egos inside a university, is also laudable in its refusal to soft-pedal the viciously petty side of the academic fishbowl.

With some staggeringly beautiful photography of cherry blossoms and scarlet autumn leaves, Dolls is so enthralled with its own cinematography that it can't bear to edit itself, and during the autumn and winter segments of the bound beggars' journey, it almost reaches a standstill.

All you really need to know about Say It Isn't So,the latest flatulent noisemaker from the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy factory, is that late in the movie, Chris Klein punches a cow from behind and finds his arm stuck inside.

Because The Matador sustains a tone of screwball insouciance and keeps its trump card hidden up its sleeve, it must be counted as a well-made comic thriller. That doesn't mean it has any depth, credibility or artistic value beyond its capacity to divert.

A Good Year is a three-P movie: pleasant, pretty and predictable. One might add piddling.

The upshot is a whopper of an ending that is as silly as it is satisfying.

Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch.

An occasionally savvy farce that suffers from attention deficit disorder.

Far from being a typical Hollywood desecration of a difficult play, it stays true to the work's quirky, renegade spirit.

The lives of Olivia, Tomo, Milot and Joey converge in a climactic chase sequence as frantic as a Keystone Cops movie. By this time, grim realism has curdled into bleakly absurdist farce.

Not a pleasant film, but it is deeply, scarily rewarding.

You probably won't feel comfortable when Humanité is over, but as you leave the theater you will feel more alive than when you entered.

The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.

Bulletproof, directed by Ernest Dickerson from a screenplay by Joe Gayton and Lewis Colick, is really a screwball love story disguised as a macho action film.

Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening.

For all its spikiness, there are hurdles that La Petite Lili cannot overcome. Abridged and abbreviated, Chekhov's leisurely philosophic reflections evoke a musty aroma of pressed flowers in a scrapbook that is out of tune with the times.

Going Shopping, like Mr. Jaglom's other movies, has enough smart, knowing touches and enough easy spontaneity among its well-chosen actors to make you wish it added up to more than what it turns out to be: a flighty, motor-mouthed cinematic divertissement.

One long, 1980s-style inspirational cliche.

For all its faults, Fortress has an unusually energetic imagination. At its best, it blends "Robocop," "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Brave New World" into something scary, original and grimly amusing.

Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.

A cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.

Seems refreshing, even mildly subversive.

Where the director Paul Verhoeven infused the original Robocop with an attitude of mock solemnity, Robocop 3 has the energy and style of a cartoon free-for-all. [05 Nov 1993, p.C29]

A dense biographical collage.

The film, to its credit, never tries to pluck your heartstrings. As it follows the Geldharts around New York, they are figures in a meditative dialogue on human values that reaches no easy conclusions.

The movie's dramatic climax is a father-son confrontation of stunning cruelty. Although the movie stops short of outright tragedy, it is suffused with a grief born of rifts that may never be mended.

Although these scene-setting futuristic details have some humorous promise, "Double Dragon," the movie they embellish, is an incoherent children's adventure based on a popular video game.

An inspiring demonstration of that old saw about necessity being the mother of (in this case, artistic) invention.

Ms. Hunt's eye for detail has the precision of a short story writer's. She misses nothing.

The spectacle of two mature stars forced to grovel in the bathroom for cheap laughs is pathetic.

It mocks the absurdity of war, but between the chuckles, and especially near the end, it plucks the heartstrings.

Belongs to a school of Central European surrealism that marries nightmarish horror with formal beauty.

There are enough intersecting characters from different classes and backgrounds in Paris to evoke the city as a complex, healthy organism, whose parts are all connected. If it is too lighthearted to show the actual political and economic machinery behind it, its celebration of how well that machinery works produces a pleasant afterglow.

A powerfully acted but strident road movie.

Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career. Save perhaps for Sean Penn's outbursts in "Dead Man Walking" and "Mystic River," no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.

This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.

Because Chutney Popcorn knows its characters deeply enough to let them determine events, it rises above formula. It is also unusually well acted.

This is the exceedingly rare film that understands how lonely, insecure preadolescent children can become so consumed by their feelings that they lose sight of ordinary boundaries and unconsciously act out their parents' darkest fantasies of passion and revenge.

Turns into a meticulously choreographed bang-by-the-numbers action fantasy that I would accuse of peddling evil if the film weren't so dumb and incoherent.

As gamely as the movie tries to make sense of its title character, there remains a huge gap between the film's creepy, clean-cut Dahmer (Jeremy Renner) and fiendish acts that no amount of earnest textbook psychologizing can bridge.

It would be foolish for a middle-class do-gooder confronting homeless children on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to expect conventional morality to have any meaning to them at all. That's one of the blunt, no-nonsense observations of Yvonne Bezarra de Mello, the Brazilian human rights activist profiled in Monika Treut's hard-headed documentary.

By the end of this reflective, wise, often hilarious movie, you feel as though he (McElwee) has slapped a huge chunk of raw, palpitating life onto the screen.

A preposterous, prurient whodunit.

The Perfect Storm is no "Titanic."

Mildly engaging, formulaic.

Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles, might have been to the AIDS epidemic what "Traffic" was to the drug trade.

Teenage horror-movie spoof, John Waters parody, No Nukes protest movie, twisted sex-education film, quasi-feminist fable, outrageous stunt: Mitchell Lichtenstein’s clever, crude comedy, Teeth, is all these and more.

A supernatural thriller so mechanically inept and lacking in suspense that it doesn't even pass muster as lowbrow Halloween-ready entertainment.

For all its visual zaniness and its aura of psychic imbalance, the movie, which won the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, stays on the surface and never locates its own heart of darkness.

The movie never recovers from its jarring turn into a rushed, unconvincing caper movie with a blasé, Robin Hood attitude.

It is best appreciated as an immersion in a three-dimensional toyland outfitted with enough whimsical gadgetry to fill a thousand playrooms.

A lean and mean horror comedy classic.

For Mr. Lurie, who specializes in political subjects, Resurrecting the Champ is an encouraging return to film following the rise and fall of his television series "Commander in Chief."

A business course on cutthroat capitalism disguised as a slacker comedy: That’s the kindest way to describe Michael Lehmann’s Flakes.

Not a horror movie but a witty, expertly constructed psychological thriller.

An incoherent mess.

A big dripping scoop of marshmallow sentiment topped with whipped-cream spirituality. [15 July 1994, p.C10]

Watching Paul Cox's impressionistic film based on the diaries of that legendary dancer and choreographer, it is impossible not to contemplate with a shudder the shadowy line between art, ecstasy and psychosis.

The current of intellectual energy snapping through the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play feels like electrical brain stimulation.

A movie that knows its audience. Its underlying philosophy might be: why try harder when this is all they expect?

Mary Lambert, who directed the original Pet Sematary, has returned for the sequel, which, like its forerunner, is much better at special effects than at creating characters or telling a coherent story.

If Down Periscope, directed by David S. Ward, has the ingredients for a lively spoof of everything from Mutiny on the Bounty to Crimson Tide, they are slapped together so crudely that nothing gels, including any sense of a coherent ensemble. The tone of the acting, which is set by Mr. Grammer's blandly laid-back performance, is all wrong for a genre that demands over-the-top hamming.

It may sound facetious, but Winged Migration provides such an intense vicarious experience of being a flapping airborne creature with the wind in its ears that you leave the theater feeling like an honorary member of another species.

The movie's staunchly liberal point of view extends to the 2000 presidential election, which is shown unfolding in the background. Al Gore's concession speech is used to suggest that the systemic racism in Melody is a symptom of a broader climate of injustice.

Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance (every Rudolph film has them), this unsavory stew never comes to a boil.

What saves Train of Life from sinking into sudsy Holocaust kitsch is its sustained comic buoyancy.

If the central performances in Careful approached the earnest intensity of some of its early-1930's inspirations, the movie would probably be twice as funny.

Because Kids in America can't decide whether it wants to be a stock teenage comedy or something more, it ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The gay, independent comedy Adam & Steve is as crude and nonsensical as any number of B-list studio equivalents, with the added disadvantages of a low budget and shaky direction by Craig Chester, who wrote and also stars.

In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.

As Shadows vacillates between the historical and the occult, you may snicker at the way hackneyed horror movie conventions are redeployed for more serious ends. But you won't be bored. The movie is well acted (especially by Ms. Stanojevska) and very sexy.

Too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.

A fascinating double-edged portrait of 1950s Los Angeles.

What prevents "The Secret of Roan Inish" from evaporating into cuteness or from being smothered in mystical overkill is the director's firmly human perspective.

As in all her screen performances, Ms. Blanchett immerses herself completely in her character, a damaged, high-strung woman determined to live the straight life while surrounded by temptation.

Has a lavish ceremonial gloss. It is also a very erotic movie.

It all feels utterly real and banal. You could describe The Trouble With Men and Women as a comfortable armchair to come back to: too comfortable.

In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination.