Walter Addiego

The movie's mixture of romance and noir, its air of menace and a certain occasional playfulness suggest the filmmakers have been thinking about Polanski and Hitchcock.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

Art history lessons don't get much better: Cave of Forgotten Dreams presents the world's oldest paintings captured by one of film's great visionaries.

His affable, regular-guy shtick works well here, and he scatters the movie with such gleeful ads for his sponsors' products that, if his documentary work ever dries up, his next career choice is obvious.

The most amazing act in the Gran Circo Mexico doesn't take place in the ring - it's the grind between performances.

Cunningham's work is about seeing and teaching us how to see, and that should be plenty for us.

Wilson is basically playing an even more feckless version of his "Office" character, Dwight, another intense and self-deluded doofus. It's a character that works better in smaller doses.

There are odd comic moments, but this is a bleak, nighttime, nightmare world, where the couple seem to have about the same chance at a happy outcome as the accident victims.

It serves up a broad humanistic lesson with absurdism and black comedy more sad than barbed.

Carbon Nation serves us a full portion of scary statistics, but overall tries to accentuate the positive.

For some, this sort of thinking is a much-needed revolution in human consciousness. For others, it's little more than New Age platitudes and questionable science.

A doleful melodrama. There are some intense, moving sequences, but too much emotional badgering and a general shortage of finesse.

What stays with the viewer is a sense of a man unraveling from his own mistakes and weaknesses.

It's hard to decide what's worse about this feral clan residing in Brighton, England: their unspecified criminal enterprises, their penchant for bloody vengeance or their twisted family dynamic.

This was obviously a labor of love for Soderbergh, and a fitting memorial to the artist.

Aims to make epic drama of Algeria's battle for independence, but there are moments when you would swear you're watching a "Godfather" knockoff.

Some of the movie probably will mystify viewers not steeped in Middle Eastern history and culture, but a good deal of the humor can be appreciated by anybody.

Rao avoids high drama, and while there is humor, the film's tone is one of melancholy.

A captivating mix of formality, ambiguity and offbeat humor. On the surface a simple fable, it's actually much more.

The entertaining work by Spacey and Pepper is a good thing because the film has problems, including an utter lack of subtlety.

It's dark fun, in the spirit of "Gremlins."

Waste Land is a film about recycling, but it's far more intriguing than the average eco-documentary.

Overall, this is a nice introduction to an amiably dour tunesmith who once wrote that "all art aspires to the condition of Top 40 bubblegum pop."

This is compelling stuff, but Lilien is less successful in trying to link Pale Male's story to his own.

Mocking Tinseltown is a pretty exhausted subject, and even Jaglom, a genuine insider, has a hard time making it fresh.

If you have even a passing interest in outsider art, you owe it to yourself to see Marwencol.

While the film adopts a sometimes jaunty tone, the fact is that gerrymandering is bad news, assuming you believe that elections should mean something.

Director Troy Miller, making his feature debut, does a decent job with schmaltzy material.

It's no great shakes as a film, but its combination of mild comedy, slapstick, pathos, many photogenic canines and a positive message will make it irresistible to families.

As French crime thrillers go, this is about as good as it gets.

It's an intriguing portrait, but it makes no pretense at objectivity, erring on the side of hero worship.

There's an Impressionistic feeling to all this, and sometimes it plays like a travelogue -- Bush is trying to do an awful lot at once. But the material is so compelling that we keep watching.

The title comes from Indian legend in which Lord Rama tests the purity of his wife by a flaming ordeal (which we see enacted in an open-air pageant with comic overtones of Bunuel). This bit of mythology too handily prefigures a major element in the film's conclusion.

Richly inventive.

Neatly, and often humorously, summarizes a very unhealthy situation.

This was probably Warren Oates' finest hour, and certainly one of director Sam Peckinpah's greatest achievements. [06 Mar 2005]

A compelling documentary.

A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.

Turns into a pedestrian slice 'n' dice feature.

A mediocre college comedy that blends bits of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Mean Girls" and "Legally Blonde" and doesn't have much to show for it.

Requires us to repress any thoughts about stale material and keep Caine's heartfelt performance front and center.

The director has said that, though the story was inspired by the deaths of his parents, he hoped to make a film "brimming with life." He's succeeded.

Most of the time the audience is two steps ahead of the characters.

This is an unabashedly pro-democracy message movie. Judged strictly as drama, it's pretty routine.

No film could convey all the complexities of the case - what Crude does is air the plaintiffs' claims and show the lawyers at work.

Nil by Mouth is slow to get going, and meanders before its impact scenes in the second half. Still, its final intensity can leave you exhausted. If you stay with the picture, it's a powerful experience you're unlikely to forget.

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward.

Oristrell's comedic sense only seems to succeed in spurts, and he often burdens the proceedings with a theatrical and contrived air that undermines the humor.

This Paramount-DreamWorks collaboration, with Stephen Spielberg credited as executive producer, is competently made, strongly focused on its characters' relationships and surprisingly light on special effects.

Amenta was deeply moved by Rita's story, but his prosaic direction can't do it justice.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

A documentary with a keen eye, a playful sense of timing and an inquisitive soul.

In the hands of visionary filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, this simple material makes for a haunting drama about war, generational relationships and the human condition.

This documentary about men and women performing brutal work tasks for next to no money is full of arresting and eloquent images. It has little dialogue, and little is needed.

The particulars of the plot don't make a great deal of sense, but Hartley's films have much more to do with style, or rather a philosophical refusal to show emotional involvement.

Something of an elegy to modernism.

Director Anthony Fabian lets the story sell itself, and it does so partly on the strength of the lead performance by Sophie Okonedo.

Quiet, moving and beautifully shot.

Spiritually it's a John Woo-George Romero-Jim Thompson picture, outrageously bloody and weird.

Too raw for kids and too simplistic for adults.

By casting model-turned-actress (and his now-estranged wife) Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans, Besson gives us an over-amped spectacle with an annoying, sometimes ridiculous cipher at its heart.

The story, based on a real incident, may be simplistic, but that's the nature of fables.

Director Corneliu Porumboiu ("12:08 East to Bucharest"), with his deadpan style and probing intelligence, is someone to keep an eye on. Using a minimalist style, and possessing the courage to risk alienating his viewers, he has created a movie full of resonance.

The glory of the picture is the eye-popping, surreal backgrounds that blast the conventional characters off the screen.

It's full of visual flash, and can be enjoyed as a giddy ride, but you would waste your time trying to puzzle out the nuances of the story.

The character isn't just shtick, though. As Billy, Talen has staged many protests in Times Square and anti-shopping "interventions" at retailers, where the managers, to say nothing of the New York police, often have failed to see the humor - he's been arrested dozens of times.

Strel is one strange duck, and you can only wonder that Werner Herzog, with his fondness for captivating weirdos, didn't get to him first.

The real trouble is that it's supposed to be an outrageous comedy, but in fact it's fairly tame and not all that funny.

Ronin shows the mark of a veteran hand and is entertaining in fits and starts.

It could have been something substantial.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

A heartfelt effort, if at times a bit heavy-handed.

Metroland is a provocative rumination on how relationships are warped by two people's inability to be truthful with each other.

An austere rural landscape, festering hatred, class tensions, terse dialogue - these are common currency in indie movies these days. Shotgun Stories uses them all, but manages to stand out from the crowd.

Belongs in the holiday hall of shame.

Capably made but simplistic story.

Some nice performances and modest laughs highlight this amiable British comedy.

Mike Cahill's King of California reminds me of those '70s-era pictures beloved of the counterculture about appealing rebels who go down in flames of moral victory.

I can't help thinking, though, that maybe Thornton was too ambitious in trying to wear three hats.

A counterfeit of a Woo movie, even though Woo himself co-produced it.

Doesn't add up to much, but it's fast and funny and lets a bunch of top-drawer actors exercise their comic muscles.

The Honeymooners isn't the worst of the endless spate of TV rehashes, but it still feels perfunctory.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

Excess Baggage aims to broaden her appeal beyond her established, youthful audience. It won't, because it's a messy mixture of so-so comedy and unmoving drama; its inconsistent tone suggests a production where no one was fully in charge.

A droll, deadpan film, deliberately paced and told.

Truly a winter's tale.

The film finally seems to stagger under the weight of its own significance.

A film that can be enjoyed by all ages and that insults no one's intelligence.

At its best, Gordon's work is bracing and pointed, though it's not for the queasy.

Will wring some laughs out of anyone but the most humor-impaired.

Its brazen mixture of the comic and dramatic, the high and low and the emotional and intellectual is positively Shakespearean.

You may find yourself weeping toward the end, and, later, you may also find yourself wondering why. The revelations are staggeringly obvious.

Except for Patekar, the main actors are nonprofessionals, which works nicely here.

The new version has been speeded up and dumbed down, which does not reflect well on the mouse factory's view of its audience these days.

Tries too hard to be even-handed.

Entertainment made well enough that you can overlook its absurdities.

A potent social allegory told with humor and mystery.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.