Stephen Holden

For the most part, Paul Laverty's screenplay and the strong, naturalistic performances lend it a specificity that sets it apart.

Transcendently dumb but very funny comedy.

The movie is truly a tree-hugger's delight (I confess to being one such hugger) that makes the most of its metaphors without straining toward supernatural schmaltz.

Ms. Benoit’s screenplay is unapologetically schematic in its depiction of a cross-section of Haitian exiles, but each story forcefully registers.

Two Days in the Valley lacks the humanity of ''Short Cuts'' or the edgy hipness of ''Pulp Fiction,'' but it is still a sleek, amusingly nasty screen debut by a film maker whose television credits include an Amy Fisher docudrama.

The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.

Eddie Miller (Robert Forster), the stolid protagonist of Diamond Men, a small, finely acted slice of American life, is the sort of character the movies normally shun like the plague for lack of glamour.

Junebug envelops us in texture of a world the movies rarely visit.

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.

Because federal indictments for conspiracy to murder have yet to be handed down, the documentary is necessarily discreet about naming names and detailing its evidence. A sequel would go a long way toward solving the documentary's many unanswered questions.

No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.

The movie gets the music, the clothes and the tone of the teen-age culture of that era exactly right.

Love & Air Sex has a spontaneity and cheeky attitude... along with spirited naturalistic performances that infuse the standard rom-com formula with a zany vitality.

This sentimental but riveting film has no qualms about playing on our emotions.

Sparked by the actors' powerful performances, Arnold's moral absolutism and Furtwängler's lofty aestheticism make for a dramatically compelling clash.

Without standing on a soapbox Stephanie Daley suggests a tragic gender gap between men who judge and women who feel.

The rainbow connection is a smooth, unbroken arch.

Filmed in the unadorned Dogme style and acted with a ferocious intensity.

Almost forbiddingly austere.

This attenuated two-and-a-half-hour reflection on marriage, adultery, parenthood and the casualties of sexual warfare unfolds like a brooding autobiographical epilogue to Mr. Bergman's much stormier 1973 masterpiece, "Scenes From a Marriage."

A small gem of bleak, neorealist portraiture.

Until its final moments this almost great movie feels as if it's racing against itself in a neck-and-neck battle between its troubled heart and its egg-shaped head. The heart wins by a nose.

Shot in just two weeks with a hand-held digital camera, the movie often looks frayed around the edges. Yet it has a soulful heart and a clear grasp of its rarefied milieu (Manhattan upper-level moneyed academia).

As unrelenting an exploration of isolation and dissociation as Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."

The most powerful and disturbing personal documentary since Crumb, Sick examines the life of the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who died of cystic fibrosis. [14 Nov 1997, p.E24]

In its cold-eyed assessment of the English aristocracy Easy Virtue has none of the lurking Anglophilia found in Merchant-Ivory movies.

With its thunderous drama and larger-than-life characters, which lend it a brawling energy, 12 is never dull.