Steven Rea

Mongol is great cinema, great fun.

If Munich raises disturbing issues about Jewish-Arab relations, past and present - and how can it not? - it is also an absolutely riveting tale of the hunt and the hunted.

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

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.

The Golden Door feels, at points, like a silent film - a silent film with CinemaScope vistas and dazzling, saturated color.

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.

While there are similarities to the hardscrabble saga of "Angela's Ashes," Frears' film avoids the mawkish pitfalls of Alan Parker's screen adaptation.

Rife with dark humor, Little Otik presents a cautionary variation of the creation myth, and a warning that tampering with the natural order of things may not be such a wise idea.

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

The movie is a winner. One of the commuter ferry men declares, as he starts plucking people out of the water, "No one dies today." And no one does. If that isn't hopeful, I don't know what is.

Into the Abyss is a true-crime drama, to be sure, but in Herzog's hands it becomes something much more: an inquiry into fundamental moral, philosophical, and religious issues, and an examination of humankind's capacity for violence - individual and institutional.

Einsteinian, Kubrickian, Malickian, Steinbeckian - Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's epically ambitious space opera, is all that. And more. And, alas, less.

Bridge to Terabithia the movie, like the book, is buckets-of-tears sad. Director Csupo and company manage to get that - the simple power of a story about kindred souls, about loss, about the limitless possibilities of a lively mind - just right.

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.

Amusing, compelling and technologically fascinating tale.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

One of those movies where it's impossible not to find yourself cheering for the scruffy underdog hero.

A riveting documentary.

A slow and knotted-up film, but one imbued with a keen sense of what motivates people beyond mere avarice.