Stephen Hunter

Certainly no feel-good flick of the summer. But it's always tough and honest.

Although nowhere near the class of its equine hero, is quite a satisfying ride.

Color Me Kubrick is like a nice, deep, clear cocktail of ammonia on the rocks: bracing, comic, astonishing, all of which hide its poison center.

The psychological darkness that underpins this film doesn't seem inappropriate to its wit and charm, but rather amplifies it, makes it more real.

Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.

What you get for your entertainment dollar in Lady Vengeance is Korean director Chan-wook Park's brilliantly orchestrated story of how Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae ) got her groove back.

There've been dozens of shotgun movies, most of them directed by Sam Peckinpah ("The Wild Bunch," "The Getaway") but Berg is inventive...All this, and Christopher Walken too? What more could a fella ask for?

With its sophisticated psychology, its brilliant story structure and its riveting performances, The Duchess of Langeais feels very new, even if everything about it is old.

Its images of the destruction of the cities is far more powerful than in American films, where the cities are trashed for the pure pleasure of destruction, without any real sense of human loss.

So the film has this weird postmodernist taint: It has a self-aware script that cleverly plays off the reality of its own cast and their famous real-life contretemps. It's smart and knowing.

Something fresh, clever and confident.

It makes a great point: Love, honor and respect your father, but then get the hell out of town.

Like the bitter cold in which it's set, Affliction bites hard and true.

Hanson delivers something ever rarer in film culture, not a new film noir but an old-fashioned total movie, somehow of a single piece.

Its magnificence is that it takes itself dead serious. It's not entertainment, but it's sure a piece of toughness.

In its way, the film is a piercing indictment, though it makes its point without much screaming, hectoring or preening. It's quietly terrific.

This is, after all, the kind of movie in which traffic accidents not only mess up getaways but also liberate goats to wander through the airport. We need more of that stuff.

Its palette isn't primary at all: It's full of secondary shadings.

The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.

John Waters may not be a great filmmaker, but he's usually onto something, and A Dirty Shame is onto something big.

The last word you'd expect for it is "sweet," yet it is exactly the right one. That may come as no surprise to some, since the director is Jan Sverak, who brought sweetness to his breakthrough film "Koyla," but it caught me by total surprise.

In its quiet way, Ride With the Devil is terrific.

The movie, while no fun, faces hard truths and asks hard questions.

I can't remember a film that sees the here and now more precisely, one that offers total believability in the tone and motive of its characters and then goes further, showing us a whole and completely recognizable world.

It's a document that suggests that the road to hell is paved with bad communication skills.