Stephen Holden

Has an episodic rhythm and little dramatic tension.

Cartlidge's beautifully still performance, mournful one moment, defiant the next, lets you see into Claire's soul without editorializing or begging for our empathy.

The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s popular novel, conveys a palpable sense of people as living, breathing creatures who are far more complex than their words might indicate.

As it lurches between mush and farce, Very Annie Mary churns up a few genuinely funny bits.

Like "The Sixth Sense," He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not reaches for a crowning final twist, but in this case it falls flat.

Were it a farce instead of an earnest, paranoid thriller with pretensions to historicity, An American Affair might not seem so offensively exploitative. The fact that it is quite well acted, especially by Ms. Mol, who has the air of a sophisticated 1960s party animal down pat, only compounds the insult.

Not especially innovative in its look or subject matter.

Take the Lead, despite its nifty concept and fiery leading man, feels sloppy and rushed.

Mr. Brodsky's final screen performance in one of his richest roles finds overlapping layers of humor and pathos.

Reminds you that marital discord knows no geographic boundaries.

It is the unusual film comedy in which the humor springs as much from character as from situation.

The lesson of this story: if enough money is involved, greed trumps morality.

As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.

Solemn, sentimental bore of a movie that suffocates in its own predictability and watered-down psychobabble.

If this version of The Jungle Book makes for a fable that is thinner than it might have been, the film is splendidly picturesque and moves along briskly.

It has the tone and texture of a well-made but forgettable television movie.

Presents itself as an anguished brief against capital punishment, especially the execution of people who are legally insane...But the timing of its release smacks of the very exploitation that Mr. Bloomfield condemns.

Not everyone will be thrilled by the movie, which is one long dirty (and occasionally very funny) joke.

An interminable mess of a film that juggles more characters and undeveloped subplots than it can handle and even manages to bungle the setup.

Reel Paradise is a deliberately untidy, open-ended, thoroughly absorbing chronicle that lets the lives of its characters spill across the screen without editorializing.

At heart a Frank Capra-style social fable for the '90s.

The question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it's absorbing in a sick way.

A high-minded, lethally dull biography of the legendary golfer Bobby Jones.

By treating the genre as a joke, this satire, whose title plays off George A. Romero's 1979 golden oldie, "Dawn of the Dead," yields ironic dramatic dividends.

The film is a requiem for the living as well as for the dead.

The author's fantastical world of wonders and the director's tender-hearted compassion mesh into what is easily the finest film realization of an Irving novel.

When a poetically inclined film fixates on the same image too often, it is a sign that the movie may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic. That is one of the problems of The Neon Bible, the English director Terence Davies's hallucinatory portrait of the American South half a century ago.

Does an impressive job of relating the complicated history of the war and of filling in the background.

Miss Beals's performance sinks this already muddled mess of a movie like a stone.

So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.

Mr. Wang and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (“Farewell My Concubine”), portray a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being and the same demons — greed, lust, jealousy and despair -- that drive everybody.

The movie...tries to juggle too many characters at once (its title means "story plot" in Hebrew), and in several cases their connections aren't adequately explained.

The role of Jimmy is one of Mr. Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare.

Ends up stranded in the wilderness between comedy and rushed, halfhearted melodrama.

Overly schematic, not always believable in its crude sexual mechanics and ultimately unsensual. But it lays out the laws of erotic attraction with a brutal directness that is downright scary.

The movie isn't entirely despairing. Near the end, it suggests that contemporary Tunisian women with enough fighting spirit can achieve a measure of autonomy, although the personal cost may be bitter. And the movie's sun-drenched views of life on the southern Tunisian island of Jerba are beautiful.

A beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young.

Even if it doesn't add up to more than a fitfully amusing collection of comic sketches, Color Me Kubrick is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame.

The movie has a frantic staccato style that is more game-oriented than cinematic.

An ingenious contraption that holds your attention for as long as it whirs and clicks like a mechanized Rubik’s Cube. After it’s over, however, you may find yourself scratching your head and wondering if there was any purpose to this sleek little gizmo.

If the Yes Men’s antics have a lot in common with the stunts of Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Moore, they are executed more in the spirit of dry amusement than as showboating, gotcha moments.

For all its sloppiness, this satiric morality tale still has a sharp comic bite.

In juxtaposing two extraordinary personal histories, it ponders in a refreshingly original way unanswerable questions about memory, imagination, history and that elusive thing we call truth.

In exalting the very worst of humanity, Bones displays a special glee and an unusual density of scary imagery.

Terminally whimsical, it generates a steady current of humor, much of it off-color.

Jesus Camp doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive survey of the charismatic-evangelical phenomenon. It offers no history or sociology and only scattered statistics about its growth. It analyzes the political agenda only glancingly, centering on abortion but not on homosexuality or other items.

If you love to hate the superrich, The Valet, a delectable comedy in which the great French actor Daniel Auteuil portrays a piggy billionaire industrialist facing his comeuppance, is a sinfully delicious bonbon.

Gigantic has the informal tone and structure of an illustrated scrapbook with excerpts from concert and television performances interwoven with lighthearted testimonials by friends, supporters, collaborators and admirers and augmented by witty animated segments.

Besides Ms. Linney’s excellent performance and Mr. Hopkins’s good one, the best things about the movie are its sensuous cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe (“Talk to Her,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and a gorgeous soundtrack.

Ultimately, A Silent Love transcends its problem-play situation to ponder how the best laid plans for an arranged marriage are no match against the vicissitudes of passion in a romantically besotted culture.

Almost a textbook example of what can go wrong when an artistic bad boy decides to be good.

Bomb the System, which rides on a subtle hip-hop soundtrack, might be described as soulful pulp; cult recognition awaits it.

Sustains a lovely balance between enchantment and playfulness.

Much more effective at evoking a paranoid mood than at telling a coherent story, and the jerky action sequences are among the film's weaker visual elements.

The movie, which is crudely dubbed into English, lacks the raucous, anything-for-a-shock carnival humor of its American prototypes. After it's over, the only question worth asking is whether dear, cozy old Heidelberg can survive the slander.

As this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters.

A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.

These characters are fully alive. But the movie attaches them to a conventional, not to say creaky, hip-meets-square drama.

Watching the first half-hour of Tooth Fairy is like reaching into a grab bag of novelties, as the movie unveils its tricks... After that, the wit more or less evaporates, replaced by bloated sentimentality and clumsy plot exposition.

For all the earth shaking that goes on, “Percy Jackson” is agreeably tame and unthreatening.

May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.

Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.

So lazy and slipshod it confuses the mere flashing of kinky soft-core imagery with naughty fun.

Best approached as an admiring portrait of a likable, creative powerhouse at midcareer. No disapproving voices interrupt the stream of praise for his politics and his art. Mr. Kushner’s place in the history of American theater and in American culture, in general, is left unexamined. These are subjects well worth exploring in another, deeper film.

Leaky PT boat of a comedy, descended from the television series.

Far from a future cult classic, it turns out to be smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning.

The moment the movie loses its lighthearted spirit is the moment it loses touch with reality

Slick and treacherous.

Impenetrable mess of a movie.

Here, as in so many other documentaries about troubled musicians, the word genius is casually tossed around. But does every unstable, self-destructive artist defiantly living on the edge qualify for that description? In Van Zandt's case, maybe yes.

My Fellow Americans, doesn't get to the heart of any issue, constitutional, legislative or otherwise. But it has a fine time imagining our leaders as bumbling, thin-skinned, ultimately likable misfits who are as lost on the American highway as everybody else.

A mechanically efficient chase-by-numbers movie.

Offering few laughs and a climactic scene of breathtaking cruelty, this plot-heavy movie, directed by Nick Hurran from a screenplay by Melissa Carter and Elisa Bell, draws you into its malignant force field against your will.

It all makes for a poignant mix, the boy inside the man, pressing his nose against the glass, longing for the journalistic authenticity of someone like Burrows while still believing in Lassie and the unconditional love of True.

Certainly not the first film to show how a crushing urban environment can make a sensible-sounding antidrug slogan like "just say no" seem like so much nonsense, but it's one of the strongest.

Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through Arenas's life, reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright, feverish illuminations.

An admiring portrait of the Silver Belles, a troupe of veteran Harlem tap dancers between the ages of 84 and 96, is a valuable historical document and a useful how-to movie about making the most of old age.

Though it includes some moderately funny snippets of actual performances, Wild West Comedy Show is not a concert film. We never see a complete performance or even a quarter of one.

Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.

As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.

Stylistically brash, pulsing with life.

Think of it as a kind of “Twilight Zone 2007” in which the paranoia endemic to an industry that runs on illusion, hype and extravagant grandiosity comes home to roost.

The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.

However persuasively acted, this mélange of cinéma vérité, slapstick and murder - whose story has a lot in common with the recent Australian gangster film "Animal Kingdom" - has too many narrative gaps for its pieces to cohere satisfactorily.

As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.

With such plodding dialogue, there's little the actors can do to surmount the falsity, although Ms. Shaw, in her brief appearances, almost succeeds.

Such an accomplished piece of filmmaking that it interweaves enough characters and themes to fill three movies.

Its message is quite simple and all too familiar: when it comes to sex, all men are little boys.

This multigenerational family history has enough gripping moments to hold your attention, but ultimately it leaves you frustrated by its failure to braid subplots and characters into a gripping narrative.

An illustrated civics lesson that strains to make its complicated, shadowy subject - electoral redistricting - a political hot topic.

Too lazy and too loosely structured to accomplish much besides conveying some vivid physical impressions. There is no narrator, and the structure that exists is clouded by the new-age mumbo-jumbo of eight principal commentators.

A witty, sociologically astute reflection on the attraction between opposites.

Ultimately as sycophantic as it is needling.

So sensitively acted you can almost buy its premise that love (in this case, neighborly affection and dependence) might rewire sexuality.

Delicate, bittersweet comedy.

Where most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma.

A werewolf movie masquerading as a thriller, it looks like a canny attempt by Bruce A. Evans, its director and screenwriter (with Raynold Gideon), to establish a "Saw"-like franchise using the names of fading ’80s stars to lend the project a semblance of respectability.

The movie should have been a steadily escalating rampage that results in outrageous property damage. Instead, it wastes too much of its time developing the cardboard characters of the hotel manager, Robert (Jason Alexander), and his two mischievous sons, Kyle (Eric Lloyd) and Brian (Graham Sack).

The elegantly structured documentary weaves extensive footage of Mr. Bachardy rummaging through their house and reminiscing with readings from Isherwood's diaries by Michael York, old interviews with Isherwood, home movies of their travels and glamorous social life, and commentary by friends, including Leslie Caron and the British filmmaker John Boorman.

As a female vocal duo, their performances are passable, if a little dull and lacking in any sense of camp exaggeration.

The movie may be a conventional story of police corruption, temptation and conflicting loyalties, but it never loses its smarts.

Acted with enough zest by its cast to give these not especially endearing people a poignant human dimension.

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.

With its tentative pace, fussy, pieced-together structure and stuffy emotional climate, The White Countess never develops any narrative stamina.

More acutely than any movie before, it gives cinematic expression to the hot-tempered, defiantly nihilistic ethos that ignites gangster rap.

You are left with the feeling that its excesses notwithstanding, it knows its chosen terrain.

Begins with such a flurry of promise that it comes as a sharp disappointment when this drug-rehab comedy skids out of control.

A mildly diverting period heist movie.

Vanity Fair has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream.

Had it had the concision and symmetry of a classic French farce, Après Vous could have been an irresistible laugh machine.

Only twice does the film give a tantalizing glimpse at the personality behind the voice.

The movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate.

As a personality study Imelda is a devastating portrait of how power begets self-delusion. It must be said, however, that through it all Mrs. Marcos exudes considerable charm and even a flickering sense of humor.

The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell."

Throughout Happy Hour, observations that mean next to nothing are presented as nuggets of profound enlightenment.

It strings along its joke just long enough to keep from wearing out its welcome.

Although the early scenes hold out some promise...the movie quickly runs out of ideas.

Mistress abounds with sharp comic performances that never stray into caricature or sentimentality.

Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.

The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.

In the filmmaker's nightmarish view, the heartland is a decaying citadel of ignorance, boorishness and xenophobia, smugly rotting away in the twilight of the American empire.

No doubt there are those who will deem Simon Birch ''heartwarming.'' It is exactly the kind of movie that has given that hackneyed superlative a bad name.

One of the most accomplished recent films about a non-European immigrant coming to the United States.

Although the odds are against them, Mr. Gazzara and Ms. Moreno succeed in cutting through the forced sitcom banter to create a credible and touching portrait of a marriage of two proud individuals who respect each other even in moments of strife.

Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise.

It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush.

Too leisurely paced and visually drab for its own good, it succeeds in being only sporadically amusing.

A historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society.

The story has enough nasty twists and tantalizing clues for its ingenious mechanics to remain engaging.

This opulent movie, with gorgeous rainbow animation, is heavy on message but light on humor.

The film's most weirdly beautiful moments are its excerpts from Bowery's collaborations with the Michael Clark Dance Company.

A good-natured screwball road film.

A film that desperately wants to be a music video circa 1983.

Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that.

The screwball aging diva genre isn't the only formula guiding this stubbornly old-fashioned movie. Driving Lessons belongs to the silly feel-good mode of "The Full Monty," "Calendar Girls," "Billy Elliot," "Kinky Boots" and dozens of other celebrations of Britons defying convention to become "free," whatever that means.

A noirish thriller that revels in ominous visual moods, deepened by Cliff Martinez's spare, shivering guitar score, this heartland "Appointment in Samarra" is a mind-teaser that speaks the flat, evasive language of its seedy characters.

Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.

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.

Sustains a perfect balance of pathos, humor and a clear-headed realism. One tiny misstep, and it could have tumbled into an abyss of tears.

May be humorless, paranoid nonsense, but its biggest failure is its inability to scare.

As anyone who remembers "JFK," his 1991 film about the Kennedy assassination, can attest, Mr. Stone has his own paranoid tendencies, but they are muted in this provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism.

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.

This contemporary sex farce, directed by Jeff Pollack, has the attention span of a hyperactive child, but its bawdy sexual humor rarely flags.

A magnificent conjuring act, an eerie historical mirage.

A movie that rings emotionally true, despite structural contrivances and dim, washed-out color.

The schmaltzy sports movie Legendary is a kind of contemporary answer to the old Charles Atlas ad in which a 97-pound weakling develops muscles and triumphantly punches out the bully at the beach.

If the title "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" didn’' already belong to Hunter S. Thompson, it would perfectly fit Peter Tolan's viciously funny satire, Finding Amanda.

What hip means in this uneven comic suspense film is maintaining the ironically distanced tone of a deadpan ''Married to the Mob'' or a tongue-in-cheek Coen Brothers caper.

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

The product is so synthetic it has only attitude where its heart ought to be.

Much more than a perfectly realized vignette about seduction. It is the latest and most powerful dispatch yet from Ms. Breillat, France's most impassioned correspondent covering the war between the sexes.

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.

The other alumni, played by Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Rebecca Lawrence, are given such short shrift that they come across more as sarcastic commentators than as characters.

The movie’s confident performances and its eye and ear for detail make The Good Guy a satisfying insider’s snapshot of a shark tank.

If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality.

The characters never transcend the clichés embedded in the culture since "The Godfather."

The movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making Ezra even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English. Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting.

An agreeable show business satire with a warm heart.

Gathers riveting, rarely seen news clips from the era into a chronology that plays like a suspenseful police drama.

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.

Why Mr. Foxx, who was so impressive in "Any Given Sunday," chose to make a movie so boring and idiotic that it barely meets minimal standards of lowest- common-denominator entertainment.

Thoroughly incoherent... A dreary fizzle. [12 Jan 1996, p.C12]

At the end, Bear Cub does have a brush with sentimentality. But by then, its integrity and low-key truthfulness has been certified in a dozen different ways.

One reason the film version of Terrence McNally's play Love! Valour! Compassion! is so moving is that this complicated group portrait never loses its slippery emotional footing.

Draws a curtain over her intimate personal life.

The film can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy, a fantasy or an adventure film. Mr. Kingsley's villain gnashes his teeth and snorts, I love being the bad guy. Those who displease him are threatened with the tearing out of a heart or liver. The character ends up being neither scary nor funny, while the boys are so busy demonstrating their superhuman skills that no personalities emerge.

Once the movie throws in a jolting, late-in-the-gameplot twist that could have been borrowed from "City of Angels," it never regains its balance.

If there's one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is The Fog of War, Errol Morris's sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.

Expressive touches are finally inadequate. Ms. Huppert's hard work notwithstanding, they don't take the place of psychological texture and narrative weight.

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

Recovery time is recommended after seeing Gardens of the Night, a harrowing, obliquely told story of kidnapping and forced child prostitution that conjures a world entirely populated by predators and prey.

Keeps its claws carefully retracted. That's probably for the best, since the documentary still leaves a bitter aftertaste.

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

A fake documentary that barely lets on that its fiction, this devilishly clever film tells the story of conjoined twins who create a minor sensation in Britain on the eve of punk rock.

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.

A leaden, skimpily plotted space-age Outward Bound adventure with vague allegorical aspirations that remain entirely unrealized.

It's enough to say that the bland romantic comedy Life as We Know It, in which there is not a single deviation from formula, is well made for its corporate type.

A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.

The deeper Ricky plunges into allegory, the shakier its grasp of the material.

Think of Death at a Funeral as a comic quickie. As it presses buttons, a few laughs come out, but that’s all there is to it.

The movie is filled with felines. It seems that the only things that Sleepwalkers fear are cats, which would like to tear them to pieces. That's why the Brady front yard teems with them. They are waiting for a denouement that, when it arrives, is anticlimactic.

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

Perhaps not since "Steel Magnolias" has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women.

Proving once again that skillful performances can't create something out of almost nothing - the best they can do is make it palatable.

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."

Avoids succumbing to the preachiness that is the bane of so many family films, and for a movie like this, that's no small feat.

The end product suggests tepid, bottom-drawer Merchant-Ivory in which the emotions rarely catch fire.

No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.

Some of the pieces in its jigsaw puzzle are too fragmentary, and there's a sense of racing against time to fill in the blanks. Yet the movie's even-handed portrayal of two cultures uneasily transacting the most personal business resonates with truth.

Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen in waves whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.

The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.

Occasionally, this richly lyrical movie passes over the line separating sympathetic exploration from freak-show condescension.

The film uses the situation to evoke a sense of the absurd, sometimes with dry, deadpan humor.

A gaudy thriller saturated in sex and violence, is an extravagance that leaves you with your mouth hanging open - partly in admiration of its audacity and partly in disbelief at its preposterousness.

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."

Has no interest in exploring Mr. Frank's family background or love life. This frustrating lack of context leaves you wanting a lot more in the way of texture.

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]

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.

Even with its tepid lead performance, Criminal is a clever and diverting caper film. At least, it is as long as you don't think too hard about it.

Has a strained, unconvincing screenplay whose failure to connect the dots of its story suggests that it might have been largely improvised.

A cinematic tasting menu consisting entirely of amuse-bouches. After two hours of such tidbits the palate is sated. But if there is no need for a main course, you still leave feeling vaguely disappointed at not being served one.

Breezing along on gusts of stale air and perky inanities, Two Weeks Notice is a romantic comedy so vague and sadly undernourished that it makes one of Nora Ephron's low-cal strawberry sodas seem as tempting as a Philip Barry feast.

When My Neighbor Totoro, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is dispensing enchantment, it can be very charming. Too much of the film, however, is taken up with stiff, mechanical chitchat.

As much as these wonderful actors invest their performances with psychological nuance, their efforts go mostly for naught in a movie that gives character development a distant back seat to the grinding mechanics of its formulaic plot.

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

The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.

A cinematic game that might be called Urban Creep Show, New York-style.

Although The Grace Lee Project is ostensibly about a name, it's really about cultural assimilation and a stereotype of virtue and subservience that has deep roots on both sides of the Pacific. As oppressive as her name may be, Ms. Lee also knows full well that there are worse fates than being a 16-year-old Harvard freshman.

A toned-down cinematic equivalent of the music: fast and loud, but not too loud. The movie scrambles to cover so much territory that there is room only for musical shards and slivers; few complete songs are heard, and no signature anthems stand out.

In what has been called the Year of the Documentary, "My Flesh and Blood" stands beside "Capturing the Friedmans" and "The Fog of War" as an unforgettable experience.

A trashily entertaining reptilian version of ''Jaws'' set in the steaming heart of the Amazon rain forest.

The film, adapted from a novel by James Hadley Chase, aspires to out-noir every other film noir that has been lumped under that popular term, including "The Big Sleep" (which it resembles), in plot trickery and steaminess.

Rebecca Miller’s fourth film is a wry, acutely observant drama.

This pulpy, sex-drenched wartime epic seems frivolous, quaint and foolishly prurient.

The core of the movie is a satirical political thriller that juxtaposes dual points of view that could be described in cinematic terms as "It's a Wonderful Life" versus "Chinatown." The digressions should have been pared away.

As Janice, Eileen Walsh, an engaging, wide-eyed actress whose teeth are a little too big for her mouth, infuses the movie with much of its slender, glinting charm.

A good deal of anger washes through this acerbic portrait of the movie business in histrionically high gear. But so does a lot of sentimentality, and as the sentimentality quotient rises, it erodes the film's credibility.

But after 15 minutes, this yellow-orange vision of spiraling circles of hell, snorting devils and demonic shapes continually morphing out of one another, begins to seem redundant and conceptually impoverished.

Bland, unrevealing.

Turns into an impenetrable essay on guilt, memory and the fear of death that even Mr. Langella's gravity cannot salvage.

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

Scene by scene, The Rookie does a better job of capturing the rhythms and rituals of the playing field and the electricity that flows between a team and its fans than well-regarded baseball films like "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural."

Atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama.

Dramatically as well as visually, The Musketeer conflicts with itself by trying to blend grand old- school costume drama and MTV- style rhythm and attitude into the same movie. The juxtapositions are often preposterous.

What it does offer, however, are the pleasures of watching its seasoned stars expertly go through their familiar paces.

For all its attention to detail, Yonkers Joe isn't half as tough as it pretends to be. The real story of these bottom-feeders and the sad young man they exploit is a lot uglier than the movie even begins to let on.

Creepily riveting.

The full explanation for the movie's graphically depicted horrors is preposterous even by the almost-anything- goes standards of the action-thriller conspiracy genre.

Off the Black is so much Mr. Nolte’s movie that it couldn’t exist without him. His character is the latest in a long line of Hemingway-esque ruins, marinated in beer and testosterone, who have become Mr. Nolte’s specialty.

Feels a like smooth, exciting whoosh down a ski slope.

Ultimately, Come Undone isn't a movie about homosexuality, depression or family dynamics. For a gay coming-out story, its sexual politics are extremely muted.

What Slam possesses is real passion, and that is in short supply in movies these days.

The action is so frenetic that the ominous mood isn't allowed to penetrate, and this time the human factor is all but erased.

Despite being edited in a style that jarringly blurs the past and the present by switching from one to the other without preparation, Almost Brothers is strong stuff.

Certainly begins with its heart in the right place. But the movie eventually snaps under the strain of its plot contrivances and its need to reassure.

A wholesome self-help fable about the unlocking of shame and its magical transformation into pleasure and personal liberation.

One thing you can say for Ed, a chimpanzee whose baseball-playing expertise propels the Rockets, a minor-league team, to glory: his behavior is a lot more human than any of the other characters in this flimsy, laugh-free family comedy

Much of Mr. Maher's film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers -- at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith -- may even be amused. But most will not.

A formulaic sports romance with the texture of a strawberry smoothie.

Like its would-be lovers, Wild Grass chases itself in circles as it scrambles genres, examining seeing, thinking, remembering and imagining with a zany awareness. In Georges's words: "After the cinema nothing surprises you. Everything is possible."

Extremely well acted. But as frequently as The Farewell touches on politics, it is essentially an excoriating (and sometimes grimly amusing) domestic drama of a latter-day king and his concubines.

It is the kind of film that only a certain breed of cinematic cultist could tolerate. Its grade-school-level acting, for instance, is so rudimentary that it makes the cast of "The Blair Witch Project" (which Ice From the Sun seems to be consciously parodying at times) appear Stanislavskian.

A free-for-all comic spoof that brings the "hood" genre of Hollywood films full circle. Crude and chaotic, the movie stridently stands every serious theme and anguished emotion from those two groundbreaking films on its ear. [13 Jan 1996, p.21]

Too light-headed to qualify as satire, too poker-faced to register as comedy, Fay Grim belongs in its own stylistic niche: the Hal Hartley film.

A sour portrait of Gen X yuppies who settle for adult lives that appear at once soulless and overprivileged.

The remarkable if overlong Korean film Oasis strips away much of the sentimentality and goody-two-shoes attitudes that the movies traditionally display toward disabled people.

Brassed Off is shamelessly manipulative and sentimental, but in an agreeably familiar way.

The movie equivalent of a box of Froot Loops followed by a half-gallon Pepsi chaser.

Godzilla is so clumsily structured it feels as if it's two different movies stuck together with an absurd stomping finale glued onto the end.

True to Saturday-morning cartoon tradition, GoBots is a jerky, semi coherent series of chases, laser-gun battles and explosions, with an allegorical plot about how no one can handle too much power.

Rambling, occasionally very funny reflection on the meaning of family in contemporary Japan.

Rudy shamelessly manipulates the heartstrings and pumps the adrenaline. There are many moments in which it seems like nothing more than a promotional film for Notre Dame...For all its patness, the movie also has a gritty realism that is not found in many higher-priced versions of the same thing, and its happy ending is not the typical Hollywood leap into fantasy...Most important, it has a tough, persuasive performance by Mr. Astin that keeps the role firmly in perspective.

As Mark Li Ping-bing's beautiful cinematography observes the change of season, the movie becomes a broader meditation on rebirth, and how, in the language of T. S. Eliot, April, the month that stirs such hopes for the future, is also "the cruellest month" for awakening such keen desire.

The surest sign of the movie’s integrity is that it resists any temptation to build the story to a climactic debate.

It makes for continuously riveting, visceral entertainment that evokes a Gallic "Scarface" without the drugs.

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.

This hilarious fake documentary -- deserves a place beside the comedies of Christopher Guest in the hall of fame of semi-deadpan spoofs.