Stephen Holden

At its best, Cast Away, like "Titanic," awes us with its sheer oceanic sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance.

This is civilized human behavior captured with a clinical precision and accuracy.

When it comes to actual historical details, Farewell crams too many notions into expositional blips of dialogue. And the scenes of conferences in the corridors of power, whether in Moscow, Paris or Washington, are strained and abrupt.

Frustratingly sketchy partly because it is not finally a survival tale but a mystical evocation of the power of Inuit mythology, and how the passing down of ancient wisdom can sustain the human spirit in the direst circumstances. But the unanswered questions still nag.

As End of the Century reveals even more starkly than the recent Metallica documentary, "Some Kind of Monster," harmony among band members becomes harder to sustain as the years gather, youthful enthusiasm wanes, and personalities define themselves.

Settles for being an atmospheric scenes-in-the-life biography of someone's most unforgettable character. It could have been so much more.

The brilliant, sinister French thriller Red Lights is a twisty road movie in which every sign points toward catastrophe.

A gripping and important documentary.

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.

More glaringly than most sports documentaries, The Armstrong Lie reinforces the sad truth that the adage “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” doesn’t apply to professional sports. Maybe it never did. Winning is everything.

It's all very beautiful, not to mentioned high-minded. But the loftiness comes at a sacrifice.

[An] exquisite, beautifully shot meditation on love clouded by fear and doubt.

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

A breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.

For its courage to address a ticklish subject with warmhearted humor, Breakfast With Scot, adapted from a novel by Michael Downing, deserves a light round of applause.

Methodically ticks off the forms of oppression visited on gays and lesbians in the days before the gay rights movement.

The characters' faces reveal more about them than any words that come out of their mouths.

The New Girlfriend never pretends to be more than what it is, a delicious and frothy fantasia with a teasing erotic frisson.

Maintains a tone that remains as light and easygoing as the Australians living in the area.

More skin is shown in Spread than in most Hollywood movies. But despite twitches of insight into its characters and their world, Spread refuses go more than skin deep.

If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.

Washington leans into an otherwise schlocky movie and slams it out of the ballpark.

The kind of movie that seduces you into becoming putty in its manipulative card-sharking hands and making you enjoy being taken in by its shameless contrivance.

Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]

Above all How I Ended This Summer is a merciless contemplation of the fragile human psyche under siege.

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 wispy pubescent comedy.

Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.