Stephen Hunter

It's an astonishing movie, with a real-life feel.

If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.

After Life is really a celebration of before-death: It's a complete rarity, for movies in general, for Washington in specific--pure sweetness of spirt. [8 Sept 1999, p.C9]

Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout.

Great American movies are, these days especially, few and far between, so let's everybody take a deep breath and mark the moment: Hoop Dreams, all three hours' worth, is a great American movie. It's got the sting of drama and the ache of truth; it's even got the sting of truth and the ache of drama.

A terrific piece of filmmaking. It's taut, believable as it unspools. It's charismatic, with a slow buildup of tension in near-real time that finally explodes into a blast of violence.

A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.

It's wondrous, it's fabulous, it's -- all but unprecedented.

It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's scary, it's exhilarating. It's got love stuff and lots of laughs and cool gunfights. It's really long and it feels like it's over in 15 minutes. It does something so few movies do these days: It satisfies.

Misanthropic, cruel, hostile, corrupt, blasphemous and basically pretty evil. I loved it.

In some ways Soderbergh does a much better job than Tarantino. He handles the time shifts more adroitly, always keeping us on track; he goes easy on the violence, and when he does unleash it, it's short, fast and ugly.

It is the most dynamic animated film ever made, and the prance of its camera, the sense of penetration into its action, the brilliantly paced editing pyrotechnics give it a crackle of life far more abundant than any feature that's come before.

It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work."

It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.

This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.

Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies.

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

A superior adaptation that bypasses the Ann Reinking version now on Broadway.

It's that rarest of all films, the one that can unify, not divide, the generations, as both jaded teen-agers and their more innocent parents can connect with it. And of course for the kids, it's pure balm from heaven.

Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic.

It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made.

It's a terrific movie.

It remains one of the best-written and best-performed American films of all time.

A wonderful, piercing and hilarious examination of high school politics and how bitter and ruinous it can become.

Delivered with such high panache and brio, it's mesmerizing.

It's a strange enough film, yet weirdly great. No movie has quite gotten the clammy weight of fear, the sense of hopelessness that would necessarily haunt underground workers. To see it is to sweat through your underclothes. It'll melt the pep out of your weekend.

The results are as riveting as any action movie ever made.

The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up.

A brilliant film--vivid, haunting, intelligent and in good taste, wonderfully acted, wonderfully written and directed.

But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.

Gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters -– I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" -– The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little.

Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.

It never disconnects from two values: its honesty and its intensity.

The story is told so passionately that it demands as much of you as it does of its performers, all of whom are up there, giving everything.

Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction.

The Third Man is so elegant, tiny and perfect that it feels more like a watch than a movie: It should have been directed by Patek Phillipe. [9 July 1999, p.C01]

The sheer joy of letting go as a tale overwhelms your senses and drives the known world away -- that's the story.

This is an absolutely brilliant film but in a quiet way.

The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

Superb.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

The acting is superb, particularly from the three principals.

The summer's most rousing action picture.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

All in all, A Good Woman retains ye olde Wilde's zing, his sense of pace and place, but most of all his snappy one-liners, and it finds a new way to showcase them brilliantly.

Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place.

From the very first seconds a viewer believes totally in Downfall.

You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.

And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy.

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

Down in the Valley is exactly what we don't have enough of: It's singular, unusual, unexpected, fresh and familiar at once.

Quintessential film noir. [20 Mar 2005, p.N03]

That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.

I love the unsettling details.

To see seemingly reg'lar guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta.

Sad and lovely.

The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.

About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.

I don't think "Queimada" is as great a movie as "Battle of Algiers," but it retains its vitality, its outrage, its savagery and its spirit.

In the end, we're about a third of the way through the great Khan's life; he hasn't even begun to take down the cities of Cathay or spread his seed. That suggests two sequels. I, for one, can't wait.

As an example of the art of casting, the movie is brilliantly engineered. It allows two major stars to each play the showy villain for a time, and also for each to do an imitation of the other.

A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond.

The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.

What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.

Well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

An exuberance, a celebration, a hoot, a kick and a half.

Brilliantly played by Denzel Washington

Water, set in 1930s India, is something pretty rare in the world of movies: an artistic muckraker. It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.

Friendship matters to those of us who still claim membership in the human race, and Goldbacher's merciless autopsy on it is both illuminating and dispiriting.

Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.

It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.

Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

Mamet loves two things: scams and dialogue. This movie is rich with both.

The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once.

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

It conforms to that twisted French genius's typical opus: grisly, ironic but minuscule and sordid.

The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.

It has the aspirations of an epic of crime and punishment, a superb feel for time and milieu, and an almost subliminal feel for myth.

The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life.

The movie is -- how can I say this? -- funny as hell. It's like an old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like to See" put together by someone on crystal meth, with a vicious streak, an existentialist streak and no mercy anywhere in his soul and only the tiniest flinch at the end, which is probably, sigh, the best way to end.

The best kind of genre filmmaking: It plays by the rules, obeys the traditions and is both familiar and fresh at once.

Sumptuous, warm, continually amazing, it's a completely enjoyable couple of hours at the flickers.

One of the year's best films.

He gives these characters the time to develop, to display their nuances, to establish their relationships with each other, to talk out their destinies.

Huge, sprawling, and utterly absorbing.

Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented.

Laurent's crime is really the crime of being European and conquering people of color. That understood, Cache is brilliant.

It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

Witherspoon's simply terrific, and it's amazing how quickly and easily she sheds speculation that she was too modern for the role.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller. Apocalypto turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Nuanced, exquisite and predictable.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance.

It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.

A brilliantly amusing couple of hours.

The trick of this movie is that it's so changeable: You think you've got it nailed and it slithers away to become some other new, fabulous thing.

Anyhow, either as history at its most inspiring or moviemaking at its most exciting, The Tunnel is a trip.

For my generation, Revenge of the Sith is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.

May be too much suspense for some, but it's vividly powerful.

It's a new new thing, classic myth from both literature and the movies, commingled, set to great folk music, and untrammeled by any sense of predictability, urgency, realism or believability but hypnotic, graceful and seductive.

It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining.

Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.

Delightful, delicious, de-lovely.

The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it.

What is so impressive about Welcome to Sarajevo is its cool restraint: Like the best of journalism, it never stoops to sensationalize or sermonize, but merely observes. It's about the facts rather than something called The Truth. [9Jan1998 Pg. D.01]

What emerges is quite extraordinary.

The movie offers one of the great lost pleasures, one we so seldom encounter at the bijou anymore. You watch this monster unreeling in its splendid vitality, its absurd ambition, its wobbly tone, its beauty, its stupidity, its immaturity, its tragedy, its grandeur, and before you know it, close to four hours has blasted by. And when you leave, you seize whoever is up close to you -- friend or foe, stranger or lover -- and begin to talk. You have opinions. You must express yourself. You must be heard. [5 Aug 2001, p.G1]

It's shallow as a puddle, but lots o' fun.

Jungle Fever is so many graceful things, so many angry things, so many truly moving things that its occasional faults are the faults of excess passion, not failure of imagination. Most importantly, it seethes with life, unlike nearly every other movie out of Hollywood these days.

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

No American film this year can touch it. [28 Feb 1992, p.10]

Imagine "The Godfather" through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy just in from the hinterlands of rural Jersey and his dad's pepper farm, and you have an idea of the originality, and the oddity, of the film. [16 Feb 1996]

What makes Lynn Littman's film so devastating -- beyond, that is, the power of Jane Alexander's brilliant performance as the surviving mother -- is its icy control and its complete disavowal of sentimentality and sensationalism. It's a small monument to the principle of understatement. [02 Dec 1983, p.B1]

Lung-bloatingly funny.

The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is both soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning.

Generally quite amusing, with a brilliant cast.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.

A lot of bigger movies won't provoke you half as much.

It gets frenetic, in the French way, but it never stops getting amusing. This is what happens when you let grown-ups make movies.

Stunningly acted by Liam Cunningham and Orla Brady as the Cloneys.

A greatly ambitious undertaking, but from the commercial point of view quite insane. The movie is ridiculously fragile: It's like a Faberge egg, and even a twitch of foreknowledge will destroy the magic of the movie utterly.

In noir, everybody's guilty, and that's one of the pleasures of Joy Ride. The three youngsters aren't exactly innocent.

It never smirks or condescends as does, say, a Michael Moore; it never seems smug and superior, only committed and compassionate.

This movie gives it to you, as no movie has in some years. Okay, if that's not your part of the swamp, don't go into it.

As a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.

The audience is treated to one extraordinary vision after another; the sense of a world literally being destroyed around the principal actors, the sense of their flight through panic and destruction, the sense of concussion, collapse, rubble and ruin.

Blondes may or may not have more fun, but in this one case, they certainly provide more fun.

So childish it seems to arrive in diapers, and that's not bad; it's good.

You have to see this to believe it.

This curious documentary is something rare, evincing opposites: It's both delightful and powerful.

It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.

The chronological looseness is part of the pleasure of the piece, which magically reassembles in the last reel into something strong, lucid and compellingly powerful.

If you view it passively, as a well-crafted melodrama set in danger among passionate antagonists, The Boxer is rewarding enough. If you attack it intellectually, you see the degree to which it is informed by ideas and realize the power of its argument.

He (Tobias) had a life, however, that was way off the charts in its unpredictability, and sharing it with him is fascinating.

Nicely done, sweet, delicately comic and a complete delight.

Let it swindle you; it's part of the fun. In fact, it's all of the fun.

Like nothing else that's played in months.

Endlessly interesting. It's about people who thought ideas and art mattered, which makes it a rarity today.

What makes the film so affecting, however, is its matter-of-fact evocation of character. Each person in the four-character cast is vivid and specific and believable.

You don't really watch the film; you survive it.

First and best, it's got a rip-roaring story. It sweeps you along, borne effortlessly by believable if flawed characters, as it flows toward the inevitable tragedy. But it's also got a heart: It watches as a child harsh of judgment learns that judgment is too easy a posture for the world, and it's best to love with compassion. [07Nov1997 Pg G.01]

Bleak and post-industrial, this is no easy film to watch. It hasn't a conventional image of beauty anywhere within its grim 93 minutes, being shot in harsh natural light that somehow plays up the grime and chill of back-alley life. But by the end, it's suffused with something utterly rare: moral beauty. [27 June 1997, p.D6]

Phone Booth is 82 New York minutes long, all of them exciting.

The original was about social manipulation as blood sport. Amazing how easily it transports, themes intact, to our blighted decade, and to our children.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

This is postmodern folk art, a tricky transaction in which the work isn't just a story, it's a genre survey, a homage, a meditation, a parody and, oh yeah, while it's at it, still a pretty good story.

Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.

So closely observed, so funny and so true to the junk that is everybody's real--as opposed to movie--life that it comes to feel like some kind of a miracle.

The documentary is fascinating, but hardly enjoyable. It's like watching ants eat an elephant.

It is kept watchable and empathetic by the energy of the superb performances and the sense of complete freshness.

It's clean and transparent, with no movie director tricks. The characters, not the montages, speak the loudest.

The film occasionally drags -- a money transfer scene set in a department store lasts longer than several geologic epochs -- but it's so funny and the plot twists are so sudden and violent it's great fun.

Full of astonishments, not the least of which are its ideas.

A deft, tense, pure thriller, the movie has great star turns and is brilliantly directed, but it began as an extremely well-crated screenplay by Russell Gewirtz. It's professionally entertaining.

There's a kind of liberating, almost transforming energy in this film; it lights you up and sends you out all giddy with silliness.

It's good fun for bad boys.

It may stir you, it may make you laugh. I am of the stirred variety. I do not want to meet this guy in the dark, though I've been meeting him in my dreams for years. We all have.

Delightful, delicious and destructive.

Great picture? No. Cool picture? Oui. Not as good, I must say, as the sort of thing we moron yanks were doing on our own over here – "D.O.A." is much better.

Stars Audrey Tautou, gaminelike, waiflike, vivid and completely adorable.

Yes, it's a hyped, hip "Sting" for our times, with goatees, mousse and attitude as part of the update package. It's also Burns's best film since "Saving Private Ryan."

Macdonald has a fetching feel for the continent, and the movie has a powerful sense of what Africa looks and feels like; you can almost smell it.

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

The two women relate brilliantly, and the movie has lots of fun creating an erotic subtext between them.

Takes its absurd premise and keeps itself narrowly focused, pushing its heroic cast through obstacle after obstacle.

Still, the movie -- as beautifully drawn, as sleek and engaging as it is -- has the annoyance of incredible smugness.

The film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.

It's a very funny movie in that sniffy Brit way.

This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated "Advise & Consent" in 1962. It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely.

It's so gritty it'll get under your fingernails. And it harks back to one of Hill's greatest films from the '70s, "Hard Times."

If you're the sort of person who laughs at funerals, train wrecks, earnest political documentaries and stories about the rape of nature, you'll love Closer.

The movie, though quite funny in parts, turns organically dark, and it refuses to paint a picture of a cotton-candy world. It prefers the real one.

This is a movie that understands the larger-than-life appeal of the old-fashioned movie star and one of the movies' most primal appeals: beautiful people doing amusing things while talking about it cleverly.

These are great, primal stories that pull you in, make you care and put you on the edge of madness and violence.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

It's a terrific film because each of the characters is so fiercely felt.

Tried hard to honor the spirit of the franchise, not exploit it, and take it to a new level and a surprising destination.

The movie is powerful, if numbing. What movie about a massacre isn't?

Janet McTeer doesn't imitate Mary Jo Walker, and she doesn't act her. She becomes her. It's almost spooky.

Its pleasures aren't so much in the inevitable plot complications, but in the passion of the performances and the spare beauty of the elegant framing and photography.

A well-acted first effort written and directed by Jamie Thraves.

A sturdily entertaining vehicle, easily the little guy's best American-made film.

This isn't a movie where story matters that much: It's a movie of character and milieu, both of which it evokes brilliantly.

Writer-director Kirk Jones III keeps the movie resolutely brisk and light, twisting mildly this way and that but never detouring for long.

Fun, if you're inclined toward cynicism, contempt, nihilism and cool stuff like that.

It stays in character, small, human, bitter and sad.

An Irish lark that blows in, trailing daffodils and the sniff of spring, from that adventurous releasing company Shooting Gallery Films.

Memo to left-wing anti-Bushies: Stories like this work. Don't lecture. Tell stories! Much better!

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

This unpretentious little bit of superior craftsmanship will be utterly mesmerizing to two kinds of people in particular: those who love cell phones and those who hate them.

What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.

Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.

While it's no good time at the movies, Wonderland is an excruciatingly authentic experience.

Has a gritty authenticity to it … captures the spectacularly crazed quality of urban violence.

Grant is casually fabulous and very amusing, but all power to Firth the actor. He's the compleat Darcy, and he never wavers.

It's the latest and one of the best entries in a genre whose highest philosophical expression is the whiplash realization that the universe doesn't play fair.

A caper film of such postmodernist pretense that it's almost a parody of itself.

What's important is that Major Dundee, not a great movie but a great star-driven, big budget 1965 studio western, is back in all its fractured glory and confidence.

The director Vaughn has a flair not merely for action and ambiance but also for character.

Even the digressions are funny.

Like the best horror movies, it doesn't beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.

Lord God, can she take control of a scene, dominate a movie, project to the last seat, radiate power and personality unto the rafters. It's a great performance. I love the way Knightley's eyes light with furious intelligence when she cuts the pompous Darcy a new something or other.

Frank (Ben Kingsley) meets Laurel (Tea Leoni), a woman who has been around the block a time or 200, and she likes Frank's directness, while he likes her unflappability. This is one of the greatest screwball relationships in years.

Simple, earnest and workmanlike, it sings of Olof, glad and big, and how he lost his -- well, we can't say what he lost.

The creation of teen-girl culture seems almost pitch-perfect. The flaw is the flaw of most works of muckraking when they are held to artistic standards: It's a question of proportion.

In its brisk way, it's a devastating piece of work, and very brave too.

A picture that is surely one of the oddest ever made.

Like the best of poems, it doesn't lend itself to easy understanding. But, like the best of poems, it's extremely provocative, to both imagination and intellect.

The moral purity of After Innocence is so overwhelming that it simply leaves you with nothing to say or do. It's kind of beyond criticism.

It denotes a minor movie miracle: how with intelligence, imagination and craft a small film can work in really large ways.

A portrait of a hero.

An eensy-weensy movie sustained by two utterly gigantic performances.

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.