Steven Rea

Saving Mr. Banks, set in 1961, is smart, delightful.

Laceratingly funny Hollywood comedy.

The mostly British ensemble can do this stuff in their sleep, but Macfadyen and Donovan and Graves, especially, work up the necessary antic angst and silliness.

Cooper, who steered Jeff Bridges through his Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart, gets fiercely committed performances from just about everyone in Out of the Furnace.

McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones bring a spirit of spontaneity to their interactions; it's not exactly seat-of-the-pants improv, but it doesn't feel blocked-out and belabored, either.

Apart from its anthropomorphic, allegorical angle, Zootopia is also a tale of female empowerment and a classic noir, too.

Somehow, this rollicking day in the life of a band of skateboarding Latino punk-rockers doesn't exude the voyeuristic smarm of previous Clark forays.

Inspired by the grand Technicolor epics of Hollywood yesteryears, First Knight, despite its flaws, is engaging fun. [07 Jul 1995, p.03]

A handsomely staged and craftily constructed tearjerker.

If we now take a woman's right to vote and to hold public office for granted, Suffragette reminds us that it wasn't that long ago when things were different.

Throw in some business with the CIA, add a small army of Serbian thugs and a mysterious Croatian beauty, and The Hunting Party picks up speed, careening through the forests where the Fox may or may not be hiding out. Whatever fate awaits, it can't be good. But it can be fun.

Has an odd magic about it - the magic of Darger's singularly peculiar dreamworld.

The Chamber of Secrets -- darker, scarier and somewhat better than "Sorcerer's Stone."

Aimed at tweenage girls and mushy romantics of all age and stripe, Penelope has a quick gait and a nice comic tone.

A wild, wacky, wide-screen reimagining of the vintage radio serial and TV series, the film - with Armie Hammer in the hat and mask, galloping across Texas righting wrongs, and Depp as his trusty Indian sidekick, Tonto - is an epic good time.

An effectively unsettling mix of Southern gothic and Old Testament hugger-mugger, with shades of "The Exorcist" and even "Rosemary's Baby" thrown in.

It's the cars, and the mega-horsepowered action, that matter most. With its driver-POV spinouts, wrong-way chases, and multilane median jumps, the movie is a roaring revel of an automotive fantasy.

Still stands as a gloriously silly and twisted send-up.

No great shakes, The Baxter nonetheless has a quiet loopiness going for it. And it has the absence of a laugh track going for it, too.

It's a good story, a sad story, a story of triumph and prejudice and terrible hypocrisy. And Cumberbatch aces it all - another smartly realized but deeply soulful performance from an actor who seemingly can do no wrong.

No manner of bizarre distraction can keep Anchorman's hapless hero from his mission: "I'm going to do what God put Ron Burgundy on this earth to do," he declares. "Have salon-quality hair and read the news!"

"Rebel Without a Cause" with a debate club, Better Luck Tomorrow is a sharp, smart slice of suburban angst among the high school overachiever set.

May not be great cinema, but it nonetheless deserves attention.

Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

Like "Tremors," only ickier, Slither is a tongue-in-cheek horror flick that skewers the genre while delivering seat-squirming scares.

Foxx makes what he does look effortless. He's the reason to see Collateral, as he walks into the frame and walks off with the picture.

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

All about the wacky borderlands where reality and invention intersect. But there are no safe demarcations -- no demilitarized zone, no Berlin Wall -- to cue us to which side we're operating in, or that Barris is operating in.

Both the leads are scarily good, and Ozon imbues his troubling tale with jarring blasts of light and the sun-dappled beauty of the natural world.

The film - despite being a half-hour too long - is a rocking, rolling supernatural spectacle.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

Fever Pitch works. At times, it works brilliantly.

It is a fever dream of a movie, tracking its subject as she tries to maintain control, maintain her composure and her sanity, and as she tries — shellshocked, quaking with grief, but also fiercely determined — to shape and secure her husband’s legacy.

It's a tale of survival and kitsch that will win you over.

My Best Friend, not surprisingly, is about what it means to have friends - and not to have them, to be alone. It's about connection, about trust and vulnerability. That Leconte's little film is a mild-mannered farce, makes the heartache funny, but really, this is serious stuff.

As funny as it is sick (and it's plenty of both).

Delightfully creepy suspenser.

It's human drama, high and mighty.

Manages to pull off a couple of startling surprises.

Slower and talkier than the five Potters that came before - but not necessarily in a bad way - Half-Blood Prince is a bubbling cauldron of hormonal angst, rife with romance and heartbreak, jealousy and longing.

It's one of the great have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too performances of the year.

Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who oversaw the elegant title sequences from the first film, likewise gives Kung Fu Panda 2's series of flashbacks a different look, harking back to Chinese shadow puppetry and delicate watercolors. With its mix of vibrant CG and classical elements, the movie dazzles.

Don Jon is about a man's unwitting search for intimacy, for real connection in a world where everyone is connected - by social media, by the Internet, by TV and computer and smartphone screens. That's not exactly an original idea. But Gordon-Levitt goes at it with gusto, and style. Give the guy some props.

Skyfall is certainly the most cultured Bond film to come along in some time. It's also the first of the three Craig endeavors to seriously (and wittily) acknowledge its pedigree.

Let the Fire Burn does not glorify MOVE. What it does do is force us to consider why and how this surreal event - a city bombing its own citizens, leaving innocent children dead - occurred. And ask, could something like it ever happen again?

Mixes the intimate, indie vibe of "Daytrippers" with the absurdist screwball streak of "Superbad," to winning effect.

Some tacky animated sequences notwithstanding, Youth in Revolt is smart, cool and frequently hysterical.

The Cartel does what good reporters are supposed to do: follow the money.

The Next Three Days is genre fare - no pretensions, no nonsense.

Blending facts, anecdotes, and no little conjecture, Elvis & Nixon finally finds the two American icons face to face, sharing M&M's and Dr Peppers.

Cusack is especially good in a role that's got more (and less) going on under the surface, while Peet offers up another coltish, trash-mouthed vamp.

Scary Movie 3 is a veritable time capsule of of-this-moment kitsch, schlock and bad taste. And it's funny, too.

Loose, eminently likable stuff.

Casey's big brother has made a tough, taut mystery.

At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end, a ferry ride across the Missouri River, it will take your heart.

The effectively creepy Stir of Echoes, is enough to make your blood chill.

Beefed up and twanging like a true cowboy, Cooper nonetheless carries the full weight of his character's achievements - and the questions that come with them - as he tries to find his footing back on Texas soil. If American Sniper fails at being a truly great film, it is no fault of its star.

JCVD juggles humor with whomping martial-arts moves and a kind of melancholy star turn from the melancholy, muscular star.

A satisfyingly moody, melancholy, madcap live-action romp.

Theron proves the master of operatic hissy fits, Blunt lets the pain show beneath the glacial cool, Chastain brings her usual Juilliard-schooled commitment to the occasion, and Hemsworth is Hemsworthian, if oft-times incomprehensible, delivering his lines in a gorse-y whorl of vowels and consonants.

It's a wise and endearing little film.

In a sense, Everyone Else traces, over a stretch of days on the sunny Mediterranean, the whole trajectory of a relationship. It's a marriage in miniature: courtship, consummation, conflict; love and hate; the longing for freedom vs. the need for companionship.

A deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.

Winner of a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the quiet, solemn Climates is a bit like those towering ancient columns that Isa photographs to show his class. The fragmented architecture is beautiful and striking, but also extremely dated.

The plain, reportorial style of Lost Boys -- which simply records its subjects in various settings and situations -- results in a film that doesn't preach, doesn't politicize.

The music is symphonic, the cinematography spectacular, the narration — ay, there's the rub. In Oceans, the latest Disney nature documentary, the voice-over almost manages to turn the majestic into the mundane. Almost.

Frost/Nixon is not the epic gladiatorial face-off, the ricocheting verbal shoot-out that writer Morgan and filmmaker Howard imagined.

What this slow-moving but fascinating two-part portrait does do is hunker down in the jungles and mountains of Cuba and (in the second part) Bolivia, capturing in keen, almost Zen-like detail the trudging and trekking, the recruiting and strategizing, the fighting and the philosophizing.

The title Brooklyn's Finest is drowning in irony, of course, but Fuqua's moves are less obvious: His film is classical and gritty, his violence makes you want to duck and run.

Engagingly odd and full of sad, funny moments.

Kinnear does what he's done in the past: You underestimate the guy's acting chops, and suddenly, strikingly, he floors you.

Monster brings the horror stories of everyday life down to a recognizable level -- even as the actress inhabiting that story remains startlingly unrecognizable.

Undefeated is undeniably inspirational stuff.

It's not just the grainy stock and bad sound - technically, we've come a long way. It's the cheesy sex, the awkward edits, the hammy symbolism, the mix of art-house aesthetics and exploitation cliché. Strange creature, this is.

The filmmaker, whose career took off with a very different sort of Holocaust film, 1990's Oscar-nominated "Europa Europa," understands that most of these stories arrive at a point of unspeakable, incomprehensible horror.

Johnny Depp, who portrayed Thompson's alter-ego in Gilliam's film, provides the narration. If there's hagiography here, it's counterbalanced by biographical truth.

In short, This Is 40, in tried and true Apatowian style, mixes weighty issues about intimacy and cohabitation with astute and smart-alecky pop culture references, crude bathroom jokes, stoner riffs, boob ogling, and existential angst.

An unflashy but fascinating meditation on addiction and greed. The junkie was clearly Mahowny, but the greed, in a way, was everybody else's: the bankers', their flush clientele's, and the casinos', all busy feeding his habit.

Cartel Land offers a chilling glimpse into a world of violence and vigilantism.

A lot of dark, Orwellian fun.

Pinpointing the era - lovingly - is very much what Dark Shadows' has on its mind. While there's a tangle of romance and vengeance and all sorts of family matters to deal with, Burton's film is really about hippies in bell-bottoms, stoned out in their VW micro-buses.

All nutty, all nonsensical, all aboard.

It's not as good, nor as complex, as "The Lost Boys," but that doesn't make the story of mass annihilation, sprawling refugee camps, the generosity of Americans, and the resilience of a handful of Sudanese survivors any less worthy of telling - again.

It's a wondrous mix of the momentous and mundane, the profound and the perverse, with Cave blues-talking his way through the goofy juxtapositions, the darkness, and the light.

Mommy is too long for its own good, its sense of hysteria too relentless. But the headlong energy is intoxicating more than exhausting, and Freud would have a field day with Die and Steve. A mother and child, so sweet, so tender, so terrifying.

There'd be a lot less strife and starvation, disease and dread, if Nancy Meyers ruled the world.

A wonderfully crafted, smartly acted study of a complex old coot.

In Bruges, at its best, works like "Pulp Fiction" with Irish (and Belgian) accents, digressing into weird discourse and giving a bunch of actors the occasion to shine in small, peculiar roles.

This gory horror romp is a goofball medley of "Dawn of the Dead," "28 Days Later" . . . , and Monty Python-style severed-limbs/blood-spurting sicko comedy.

Amusing, compelling and technologically fascinating tale.

Before Trollhunter is done with, the truth about these fairy-tale creatures - they gnaw on trees and truck tires, can be turned to stone by exposure to light, and have something against people who believe in Christ - is revealed.

In the end (and it's a happy end, to be sure), Catch Me if You Can is as crisp and trim as a new suit. Well, a new old suit - say, circa the 1960s.

For all its flaws, offers an enjoyable look at the machinations of moviedom and fame, and a look into a future where what is real and what isn't becomes scarily blurred.

The real-life career criminal Jacques Mesrine is seen in all his wild, scary, violent glory.

In much the same way that the smash "Zootopia" demonstrated that creatures of different culture and class and species are better off when they come together, The Secret Life of Pets is a testament to teamwork and friendship and fixing the rifts that divide us. Let the fur - and the warm, fuzzy feelings - fly.

Too long (and it sure ain't taut), but it brims with passion.

Beauty in Trouble offers a meditation on the legacies of communism and the lure of capitalism, but also on the human need for love, connection and family.

Whether or not the story makes any sense, The Promise promises to transport - and does.

A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies.

This modest drama is the art-house equivalent of comfort food: satisfying in its familiarity.

That's something else Ridley and his actors do: make you appreciate what a life it was - impossibly short, impossibly brilliant.

Simplistic and corny, this adaptation by director (and co-writer) Stephen Sommers nonetheless delivers the goods: exciting animal stunts, breathtaking subtropical scenery (India and a jungle-ized Tennessee and South Carolina) and a likable if not exactly three-dimensional cast of characters. [23 Dec 1994, p.03]

In key ways, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is like Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth": a child, caught in the waking nightmare of one of history's ugliest times, confronting the horrors of a grown-up world, and dealing with them as best he, or she, can.

This world feels studied in its "authenticity": the rusted GMC pickup, the tumbledown shack, the boozy brothel, and angry Joe Ransom guttin' deer and tending to his own gunshot wounds with a grimace and a bottle of alcohol.

Potter explores midlife ennui, (middle-)East-West tension, theology, biology and the irrational nature of romance in this ambitious, if ultimately sketchy, drama.

Although Mal is ostensibly the movie's hero, and River its heroine, Whedon does a good job of giving all onboard their own story arc, their tragedies and triumphs. The cast, to a man (and woman), is solid, although it's the ballet-trained Glau, who gets to mope in high angst and go Zhang Ziyi-crazy in a couple of martial-arts scenes, who steals the show.

Without editorializing, Mermin raises fascinating questions about the cultural impact of globalization, the allure of the West, and the troubled history of an ancient land.

Kiss of the Dragon is a straight-ahead star vehicle for the trim and terse Li, whose steady gaze and fist-flying ways are tempered by a gentlemanly mien.

What about the kids and families who have no connection to Méliès, little familiarity with Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton? Will Hugo keep them in their seats? I'm not sure.

A deadpan, dead-on comedy.

Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.

The film's conceit - mopey strangers meet, form a band, and take to the dance halls - has a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let's-put-on-a-show innocence, and exuberance.

What If boasts a couple of near-classic comic moments, one involving jalapeno peppers and a precipitous fall.

'As long as there are Muppets," muses a little felt guy named Walter, "there is still hope." And indeed, there is something hopeful about The Muppets - Disney's rollicking reboot of the late Jim Henson's furball franchise.

It's a scary tale.

Bacon's portrait chills to the bone.

Hip, stylish, funny.

Intelligent, scary (scorpions! lots of scorpions!) and full of the possibilities of scientific fact taken to far-reaching (but credible) extremes, The Arrival delivers more bang for the buck than its high-profile multiplex-mates. [31 May 1996, p.3]

The Core is unabashed Hollywood spectacle, but with a cast of up-from-indie actors that makes the cataclysmic kitsch all the more fun to behold.

A polished piece of advocacy filmmaking, He Named Me Malala begins - and is intercut with - beautiful animated sequences featuring Malala's 19th-century namesake, Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghani Pashtun poet who inspired her countrymen to rally against an onslaught of British troops.

Twilight - directed with savvy humor by Catherine Hardwicke - turns vampirism into a metaphor for teen lust.

Watts gives a deep and Oscar-worthy performance here, displaying the steely composure that made Plame a valued NOC (non-official cover operative).

Even the Rain strikes a deep and resonant chord.

A genre pastiche that's fun to watch, although it's also frustrating.

If a movie with suicide as a central theme can be deemed funny, then writer/director Craig Johnson has pulled it off, mixing heartache and humor and giving Wiig, especially, the opportunity to shine.

As it is, most of X2's action is restricted to the Northeast Corridor, with a climactic face-off in the western Rockies, where, in typical blockbuster fashion, everything goes kablooey and ka-bam.

Works the basics with style and intelligence.

Loaded with Hitchcockian hugger-mugger, this is a genre Polanski clearly revels in.

Among the slew of recent futuristic hell-in-a-handbasket spectacles, Elysium takes the cake.

This is a smart, spirited spoof that will leave you with a smile on your face - and an appetite for some serious '70s funk to play on the eight-track in your solid gold Cadillac convertible.

Doesn't match up against the new millennium martial artistry of "The Matrix," nor do the special effects - but he knows how to establish characters and relationships.

An enjoyably trippy Japanese animated feature.

A comedy about friendship, faith and the acting life, Le Grand Role is unabashedly corny and tear-jerking - and still quite likable.

It's all head-spinning and lovely - and a little exhausting, too.

A sad and funny examination of issues of racial subjugation, cultural stereotypes and sexual mores. Although some of its filmmaking techniques seem naive and anachronistic now, there is much that is bold, inventive and poignant about Van Peebles' feature debut. [09 Nov 1994, p.E01]

"Lousy times make lousy people," someone opines, and maybe that's the point Romero's trying to drive home.

Although its origin-story machinations get the better of it, Ant-Man isn't a bust.

It's not exactly high art, but it's certainly high.

Deeply personal and filled with love, Maya Forbes' Infinitely Polar Bear is nonetheless a hard movie to watch - hard to watch comfortably.

Owing a debt to Scarface (the DePalma remake more than the Hawks original) and to the gangland opuses of Scorsese, Belly gets inside the gangsta culture with a wired authenticity. [04 Nov 1998, p.E04]

Throw in the music -- a wall-to-wall whorl of Eastern modal dirges, thumping rock and Celtic-y skirl -- and you've got a veritable cinematic rhapsody of war.

Jazzy and colorful, full of men and women in swell clothes driving cool cars, The Rum Diary has a bit of a seedily exotic Graham Greene vibe, and Robinson moves things along at a nice, casual clip, even in the film's more overheated moments.

It's the dynamic between the three leads, Rawlins, Sives and Henderson - and the young McKinlay, who's like a miniature Shirley Henderson - that is this oddball and bittersweet story's pulsing heart.

Marley celebrates the fact that its subject is still among us in the way that perhaps matters most: His music not only survives, it thrives.

One of the great things about this unpredictable, exhilaratingly goofy fable is how it shows that even the clueless - and the tragically morose - have a shot at redemption.

A conventional biopic made anything but conventional by the magnitude of its subject's life and accomplishments, and by Idris Elba's imposing performance in the title role.

Just misses being great. The dark shaman mysticism doesn't entirely mesh with the earthbound quest across the wild and glorious Southwest. And the ending, with its shoot-outs and sacrifices, has a choppy, unneccessarily complicated feel.

Tunney, brimming with coltish, neurotic energy, holds the screen like a true star. She brings the role, and the movie, to life.

What the three pairs of actors lack in semblance (or resemblance), they make up for to a great extent in their performances.

The spike-heeled, postfeminist pajama-party sisterhood that is Charlie's Angels is back, and it's serious dress-up time.

The momentum Stiller has built up - his character's globe-trotting derring-do, the care and consideration on display in his directing - carries the movie a long way. Falling short of fantastic, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is still a fantasy to enjoy.

The Warlords, ultimately, tries to speak to the futility of war - but it does so by staging one gargantuan dustup after another.

A goofy combination of screwball farce and Dogma-style verite grit and gloom.

Signs is about God and family, too, but it's also about scaring the bejesus out of you -- and on that level it works like a miracle.

Gorgeous work, and its imagery and themes dovetail perfectly: a story about creating art, artfully created.

For all its faults - and there are many, from shameless compression of events to milk the drama for all it's worth, to the gimmicky miscasting of several commanders-in-chief (Robin Williams as Eisenhower is especially egregious) - The Butler is an inspiring and important summation of the black struggle.

The movie isn't as deep as it pretends to be, but it does have several nicely unexpected twists going for it. And it has Williams - memorably creepy, chillingly sad.

There's a xenophobic element to Taken's premise, to be sure - the idea that travel, even to Western Europe, isn't safe for Americans, and that foreigners (Albanians, Arabs) are by nature shifty and sinister.

The film turns into a story of corruption on many levels, and it moves fast, without a scrap of fat in the telling.

Moon is a deceptively simple study of alienation, paranoia, and loneliness.

Rodriguez manages to work in some nicely cornball messages (family togetherness and forgiveness is good, Stallone doing comedy is bad) and theatergoers get to walk out with their very own way-cool cardboard anaglyphic eyeglasses.

"March of the Penguins" - phooey! Those smelly little birds are built to survive in the frozen tundra, and nobody's asking them to pull a sled.

A shamelessly fun B-movie with A-movie effects.

Entertainingly creepy.

Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi is going for a quiet, thoughtful character study: a modern woman, sure of herself, but still trying to come to terms with her place in the world.

A goofy conflation of Coenian elements: the numbskull huggermugger of "The Big Lebowski", the La La Land surrealness of "Barton Fink", the Old Testament overlay of "A Serious Man."

Satisfying and spirited and laced with humor.

Boy begins with an epigram from E.T.: "You could be happy here . . . . We could grow up together." That's what the film is about - finding happiness, growing up, feeling like a stranger in a strange world.

A disconcerting experience.

Wahlberg does what Wahlberg does, bringing muscular conviction to his troubled, tough-guy role. The city may be broken, but the movie star's formula is working fine.

Croupier, immersed in a world of gambling, gamesmanship and crime, is a solid, seductive entertainment.

Blitz captures the melancholy, the rage, the wackiness and drama of adolescence, and he gets winning performances out of his young stars.

Bloody, bone-chilling fun.

Succeeds royally at building a sense of apocalyptic dread. It isn't quite so successful at sustaining that mood, and Fessenden resorts to blurry images of totemic spirit forces and stampeding moose specters to get where he's going. And where exactly is that? To a place designed to scare the bejesus out of us planet-pillaging consumers.

Although it often feels like a company-bankrolled promo film, A Lego Brickumentary answers all the questions both Lego novices and Lego nerds would want to know.

An epicurean dream where the dishes conjured up by the characters are as essential to the experience as the characters themselves.

An effectively spooky ghost story with Guillermo del Toro's imprimatur (he's executive producer), Mama is every adoptive parent's nightmare: What if the children you bring home start eating moths and toilet paper, and won't come out from under the bed? And when they do, it's only to do something hurtful?

Filmmaker Dabis based Amreeka on her own family's experiences in the rural Midwest during the first Gulf War. Although the drama heads on a predictable course, Faour brings intelligence and humor to her performance and Muallem, as the smart adolescent turned surly and scared, is likewise sharp.

Dark Blue World is "Pearl Harbor" without the product placements, without the Hollywood bombast, and certainly without the $100-million-plus budget.

Belle, with its country manors and its city slums, its snooty nobles and its fiery idealists, its ballroom dances and barroom conspiracies, brings these themes to a dramatic head: romance and race, privilege and justice.

At its best, Edge of Tomorrow plays like a tripwire time-travel thriller. As it progresses, though, the built-in repetition can, and does, grow tedious.

The Spectacular Now feels genuine in almost every respect, from the unflashy cinematography and the sparingly deployed music cues to the natural, unhurried performances of its two stars. They will get to you, truly.

With its polished mix of traditional and computer-generated cartooning, Treasure Planet doesn't exude the same suspense as the Disney original. You could say it's lighter on its feet -- but then there's less gravity in outer space, anyway.

It's riveting stuff, but unlike Tarantino's work - layered with casual irony, deadpan dialogue and encyclopedic pop-cult references - Killing Zoe is what it is and nothing more: a nihilistic crime film, steeped in carnage and chaos. [14 Sep 1994, p.E02]

Catfish, made on the cheap with digital video, cell-phone cams, and hidden mikes, raises all sorts of questions - about the imaginary realms that open when you click on your computer screen, about cyber-stalking, but also about journalistic ethics.

Although the story has more than a little Lion King deja vu-doo going for it, Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is likable as both a man, and then a bear.

For the most part, the film stays steady-on, celebrating one man's crusade - and one family's heartbreak.

Maybe it's generational: In a movie about teens, it's the teens who should rule. And they do. With certainty. With laughter. And with tears - buckets and buckets.

They're all dressed up to kill, with no place to go.

Is Final Fantasy decent sci-fi? Yes, more than decent.

Linklater, drawing from his own experiences as a baseball player at Sam Houston State University, looks back with affection, a knowing wink, and maybe the beginnings of an apologetic shrug at the jerk behavior, the locker-room pranks. These guys smell freedom in the air - and maybe some pot smoke, too.

On the Road is an honorable homage to the bennies-and-booze-and-bebop-driven hegiras undertaken by the fiercely dedicated anti-establishment duo. But in Salles, screenwriter Jose Rivera and company's effort to get the details right, they only get so far. And it's not quite far enough.

As for the scary business - it is, indeed, scary, delivered with an intensity that will make you think twice the next time you find yourself driving alone, or opening a closet door when no one else happens to be around.

Damon, starring in his first full-fledged action pic, brings a determined bearing and believability to the proceedings.

This movie will shake your windows and rattle your walls.

In the end, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban offers what neither of its predecessors, for all their wand-waving and witch-brooms, had: real magic.

Safe House rockets along, taking a familiar formula and making it work - hard.

Casa de Mi Padre is at its best (a relative term, mind you) when it's at its silliest and most surreal.

Bakri, a newcomer to acting, has presence and power. His intensity and determination become Omar's.

Ultimately, Somewhere may be too static, too minimalist a tale. But there's grace here.

Michael Elliot, the Philadelphia native who wrote Just Wright as a vehicle for Latifah - and who was on set for most of the shoot - says that Common's earnestness, and eagerness, and his sense of responsibility in carrying the movie, were palpable.

May not plumb the depths of the female psyche, but it's stylish and frivolous in the most profound ways.

The real drama -- and poetry -- in 8 Mile are in those fiery face-offs, the hip-hop battles, as Jimmy rat-tat-tats his rap in deft flashes of spontaneous combustion.

Johnny Depp, in bushy eyebrows, sinister mustache, and a suit and hat of fur, may be too cartoonishly lascivious for his own good as the wolf who pursues the girl in the scarlet cape to Grandmother's house. But then he gets to croon the couplet, "There's no way to describe what you feel / When you're talking to your meal." Delicious.

Nothing in this quiet, quirky comedy from the brothers Duplass comes close to Jeff's inspired, bong-fueled deconstruction of "Signs," but it gives us a good idea of where this guy is coming from.

Its dabs of dark comedy and stabs of gore, still rings with a sense of the real. It's electric-charged.

It's hard not to get caught up in this improbable but true follow-your-dream tale.

Has a certain cartoonish vibe. That's OK, because Brad Bird's brand of toonage (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) owes much to the rigors and traditions of live action, not only in the way he references other films, but also in his visual approach - sweeping, swooping camera pans, wide vistas, jolting perspective.

By detailing the allegiance between Tutsi Muslims and Christian Hutus, and the fatwa issued by a Muslim leader forbidding his followers to participate in the massacres, the film is hopeful rather than horrific, even as it describes events of impossible savagery and hate.

Seydoux, no doubt best known for her kickboxing catfight with Paula Patton in "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," gives a quiet, watchful performance, suggesting fealty for her lady but also a strong independent streak.

A pitch-black comedy steeped in bitterness and regret.

Compared to "Ray," which takes Ray Charles' unique life story and manages to make it feel like a cliche, Kinsey is total sophistication and nuance.

Labaki, who studied filmmaking in Lebanon and France, has a deft touch and nice instincts.

If you love Les Mis the stage musical, my guess is you will love what Hooper and his bustling company have done. But when you hear "Master of the House" and you think of the Seinfeld episode with Elaine's gruff dad belting the tune before you think of those shifty innkeepers the Thénardiers, then you may want to steer clear of this grand endeavor.

Bier knows what she's doing, and the performances are expert and affecting. But this meditation on love -- and love's bad timing -- is also improbably accommodating to its characters' respective longings.

It's a lush, lovely dreamscape of a movie, steeped in familiar vernacular (film noir), yet capable of shooting off in totally unfamiliar, surreal directions.

Spielberg and his team - composer John Williams, as always, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, screenwriter Richard Curtis - never forget their mission: to pull at heart strings, jerk some tears.

Diaz works that trademark mix of ditziness, sexiness, and brassiness.

Pulls off a neat trick: It's a poignant, sweet-natured love story in which what most of us would call kinky sex - domination, submission, some enthusiastic spanking - is featured prominently, but not pruriently.

It has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids - and probably more than a few parents, too.

2 Days in the Valley has a real sense of place, and a pace that allows time to discover its characters' twisted troubles and fears. They may be a mess, but the movie, happily, isn't. [27 Sept 1996, p.03]

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

Tautou, who looks even smaller and more fragile alongside her towering leading man, conveys the hurt and hesitancy that are pulling at her character's heart - and does so with seeming effortlessness. It's as though she knows this woman, deep down.

lLght and likable - a low-budget "Steel Magnolias" without pretense.

An exotic throwback to the kind of movies that John Huston used to make, where on-the-lam expatriates, tubby guys with tinny accents, and sinister locals convene in a ramshackle but seductive foreign burg -- and corruption, conflict and come-ons from a sultry female or two ensue.

With every new installment of the comic book franchise, the scale gets bigger, relationships get trickier, new forces enter the fray.

Smart and gripping - at least until the third act.

Even if you get lost - in the spyspeak, in the codes, in the comings and goings of grim-faced men with satchels full of documents they should not have - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is worth getting lost in.

Bittersweet and funny.

Offers a fascinating chronicle of the birth, glory days and waning years of a motorcycle-jacketed, bowl-haircutted quartet of middle-class geeks who unwittingly spawned the punk movement.

The scene when she's (Blanchette) babysitting Ginger's boys and takes them to a diner - and confides about her electric shock treatments ("Edison's medicine"), her breakdowns, about the side effects of Prozac and Lithium . . .. it's genius.

There's enough here to entertain - and gross out - the kiddie crowd, and parental units, too

With a moody overlay of songs supplied by Okkervil River and Shearwater, In Search of a Midnight Kiss also serves as a millennial's answer to Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

Polley's performance is pitch-perfect.

Caouette's fractured history is imbued with heart-crushing sincerity.

If Running Scared had come out in 1994, before "Pulp Fiction," it - and Kramer - would be hailed as blazingly original. But questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here.

This pleasant but predictable affair does one thing very well: showcasing the versatility of Chiwetel Ejiofor. The London actor can be seen as Denzel Washington's detective sidekick in "Inside Man." Watch him chomp down on a New York accent with Washington, and then watch him as Lola (a.k.a. Simon), a cabaret performer in makeup, wig and wild gowns. That's acting.

It's quite a celebration.

For a movie about community and forgiveness, family and grace, Pieces of April is refreshingly unsappy.

Joy's entry into the world of entrepreneurship has the crazy trajectory of a rocket gone haywire, and Russell's movie is kind of haywire, too.

At the heart of the film, Polley - with her wary, unsure stares, her open smile and beguiling intelligence - is terrific.

A spare and moving study of regret and redemption, marked with chilling truths about a life behind bars.

Pacific Rim shares much with the Mexican filmmaker's "Hellboy" franchise - jokey and comic book-y, full of muscular tableaus with huge squads of people coming and going (and running for their lives).

Intriguing, provocative stuff.

Never less than engaging.

Both a concert film and a more intimate thing: a fascinating, fly-on-the-wall (or fly-in-the-dining-car) glimpse of some clearly blotto rock legends talking, singing, hanging out. The fact that a good number of them are now dead makes it doubly memorable.

Fiennes does this sort of inner pain thing exceedingly well, Tyler is beguiling and believable, and there is an edge of wit and grace to the proceedings.

Zooms along with confidence, smarts, and some of the coolest car chases this side of the Indy 500.

It's quite a lot of fun.

An enjoyably clever and cartoonishly gory rom-zom-com.

Affleck is more interested in the people in the midst of the action than he is in the action itself, and that gives this accomplished genre piece considerable and compelling depth.

That's what Blue Crush is getting at: girls going for the gold in a sport that's traditionally been the domain of men.

Undertow has the plain, stark, disturbing quality that marked the original "Cape Fear" and "In Cold Blood."

Isn't as strong a film as it could have been: Only teasing slices of these people's lives are offered.

Deftly filmed and directed by Jean-François Richet.

An examination of loneliness and the need to connect in an increasingly disconnected world, What Happened Was . . . is disturbing, funny and unpredictable in the way people themselves are disturbing, funny and unpredictable. [07 Oct 1994, p.05]

Rohmer pulls off a wonderful feat: celebrating the elegance, and artifice, of another era at the same time he brings this tale of social upheaval boldly into the present.

Smart, funny, and gross (often at the same time).

A smart comedy that serves as both bittersweet coming-of-age tale and '90s nostalgia piece, The Wackness has the feel of authenticity about it, even if some of its details (the ice cream cart, and the therapist's bong, for two) seem a bit much.

Patric and Liotta get the chance to do some heavy riffing on themes of honor, sacrifice, selling out and self-destructing, and the bleak, smeared world of drugs and violence is brought to the fore with feverish style.

A sleek little meditation on beauty, desire, love and time. Now and then, it's fairly sophisticated stuff.

Zany screwball farce.

Relationships - between men and women, fathers and sons - are more complicated in real life, and The Boys Are Back deftly acknowledges that fact.

The Signal is a road movie turned upside down and inside out.

Despite its familiar formula, feels fresh.

Serrill has shot and edited The Heart of the Game in straightforward documentary style, with a narration by the rapper and actor Ludacris. But the dramas going on here, on and off the court, more than make up for any lack of flash.

The country goes unnamed, the warring factions aren't always clear, but the nightmarish exploitation of children is made specific in the most vivid, visceral ways.

Has two or three booming and intense action sequences that may leave the littlest audience members more quaking than charmed. But the notion of having a pet dragon - just like a pet whale, or a pet lion - is a scenario that should appeal to children of all ages.

The contrast in lifestyles is striking, and I suppose one of the themes that Babies is trying to get at is that despite chasm-wide economic and societal differences, infants are really all the same.

It's a character study, nicely realized.