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.

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle.

Fraulein works by an accumulation of details.

An intriguing portrait of an insular community, but its recounting of the seduction of a bright young man by the surrounding culture is heavy-handed.

Gripping.

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

This is the heart-rending true story of a man with a seemingly benign preoccupation that turned into something close to madness and brought him to a terrible end.

It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

Mesmerizing documentary.

The silence captured in this documentary -- a meditative look at life in the Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps -- may be the most eloquent you'll ever hear.

You need not be a believer to appreciate its humor and humanity.

There's more than a touch of whimsy in A Touch of Spice, a sentimental Greek offering that's been immensely popular in its home country but doesn't translate well.

The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.

In general the film is so impressive that we can't leave the theater without wanting more.

Beguiling.

A loose, amiable documentary tracking several decades in the life of this most unusual farmer.

Overall, it's pretty elementary stuff, along the lines of a Disney Channel TV movie. It's uplifting, and it's in a good cause.

You can't help cheering for Selena, but the good feeling is diminished by the sense that her story's been simplified and sanitized.

Has more in common with a horror movie than with a genuine political work.

Two hours of senselessness and overkill, decked out in lurid, bad-trip colors.

Though short on subtlety, A Walk on the Moon does offer the consolation of some decent performances.

Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.

Two points save "Lousy 2" from the absolute abyss. One is a couple of imaginative touches in the art design: Cori drives an old Citroen, and a couple of Vespa-like motor scooters are briefly glanced. The other is the performance of Frewer, who played the lead in TV's "Max Headroom." He endows the character with more sardonic humor than we have a right to expect from the junky script by TV-oriented director Farhad Mann.

The ending is a disappointment, a perfunctory upbeat gesture.

The film is dazzling and bewildering in equal measure.

A misfire.

Brower's legacy, however, is beyond question. Historian Starr calls him "an American hero," and though Brower was a prickly sort and a zealot, that judgment sounds right.

Breaking Upwards has its amusing and touching moments, but we're left wondering just what we're supposed to make of it all. In the end, the relationship at the film's core is less absorbing than the filmmakers imagine.

Modestly better than last year's awful "End of Days," though it falls well short of Arnold's "Terminator" peak period.

Nicholson squeezes every wretched drop of buffoonery from this character, and it's distressing to watch him play an easy role for easy laughs.

Much of what we see is revealing, but I was unable to quell an occasional sense that the dice were being loaded, that the subjects were being given just enough rope to hang themselves.

A giddy French comedy.

The veteran Baker anchors the proceedings, and you would like to see more of her character.

Maybe the film works best as nostalgia for Baby Boomers who recall the picture from their childhood.

Not up to Ozon's standards.

Marshall has an astounding instinct for popular entertainment. He's done it again with The Other Sister.

Depending on your tolerance for talking Chihuahuas, this could make for a fun family night out.

In the end, all the bitterness seems like window-dressing to disguise a trite story.

Defamation tries to give all sides a full airing, but it's not hard to guess the director's own feeling. At the end, he says, "Putting too much emphasis on the past, as horrific as it has been, is holding us back."

Parents should note the PG rating. There's little bloodshed, but several fight scenes, lots of loud roaring and some overwhelming special effects sequences could vex younger viewers.

Lacks the spark of the best recent Disney spectaculars, like "Beauty and the Beast."

There's a sense of genuineness throughout Girlfight.

There so much entertaining information in Art & Copy, a documentary about modern advertising, that it takes a while to realize we are being sold something

This flawed drama about a self-destructive young actress and her reclusive novelist father has its rewards, mainly in some good performances.

So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.

Living in Emergency is sobering, in part because it powerfully conveys that, despite the group's heroic efforts, its impact is "a drop in a sea of oceans." There's never enough time, supplies or volunteers, but, as one of the doctors notes, "the demand is pretty much infinite."

You can take it straight as an example of a bygone day of outsize filmmaking or enjoy it as kitsch, but it's exhilarating either way.

It's a celebration of a shady landmark, but also a lament.

A dimwitted, fill-in-the-blanks horror opus that slanders a fine and useful mammal.

Lacks the finesse of other puzzle films.

Francis Ford Coppola's Jack has its affecting moments, but in the end illustrates the pitfalls of the "concept" movie, the kind you can boil down to a one-line hook.

At 126 minutes the movie is excruciatingly long, but it is still too short to pack in all the subtle changes in character he means but fails miserably to convey.

Has compelling stretches, but the film's formal concerns overwhelm the storytelling.

Lane, with his extensive stage experience, is acerbic, profoundly cynical and endlessly disgruntled. As the foil, Evans strike the right comic nice-guy note; he has fun with the character's sweetness and refuses to degrade him.

Overall, it's a nice melding of sci-fi and a crime story.

While recognizably Ceylan's work, is more of a genre piece - a noirish suspense film - and less successful.

Godawful.

Tired comedy.

Throughout, Croghan knows where she wants to go, but has no fresh ideas for getting there. The characters are reasonably appealing, but the jokes are mostly weak.

William H. Macy is fine as the detective Arbogast, wearing a hat he could have borrowed from Martin Balsam in the original role.

It's funny in spots if you can tune out the Farrellys' ultra-crass jokes - along with any memory of the first movie.

Adams does offer quite a turn: Portraying a version of Disney's Snow White, she owns the character, down to every warble and twirl.

Surprisingly pedestrian.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on.

Painfully sincere but tired.

A remarkable cast for a small, non-mainstream effort.

An hour into the picture, Spade offers a pretty funny imitation of belter Neil Diamond, but it's a long 60 minutes for such a pitiful payoff.

It seems like another misstep - the story just doesn't hold up to Ritchie's treatment.

The film's grungy, ultra-low-budget look, thanks to the Safdie's handheld camera, is just right for catching the crummy, hardscrabble, rat-infested milieu.

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

A superior adventure film with a poetic heart.

The author calls the movie "perfect" - reassurance that the director hasn't tried to pull any fast ones.

No-one's-home acting by Bierko and Mol doesn't help, while the talented D'Onofrio ("The End of the World") and Mueller-Stahl (a veteran of European pictures) are better than the material.

Its examination of identity and loneliness begins to feel like a soap opera season boiled down into one very long episode with too much happening.

As good as the film is in conveying the feeling of the walls closing in, it has to be said that the script won't win any prizes for subtlety - the director seems to relish ham-fisted ironies.

Though the material might lend itself to heavy-handedness, director Ole Christian Madsen is steady, and he gets fine performances from the two leads and Stengade.

A way-below-par golfing comedy.

The stories are harrowing, and because they are delivered by living, breathing witnesses, they move us in deep ways that the archival footage, for all its horror, cannot.

That's the real problem with this melodrama. Whether or not you agree with the pacifist message, the presentation is often overwrought and maudlin.

Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.

A provocative character study and portrait of the times.

An enjoyable example of this extraordinary director's documentary work.

The comedy-drama is worth seeing for Christie's performance as a former B-actress married to a philandering handyman. She radiates a mature sexuality that's a rare treat on screen these days, and when the camera strays from her, you want to reach over and turn it back.

This documentary has no bells and whistles; Bill Haney, the director and co-writer (with Peter Rhodes), sticks to the facts.

Stagecoach both revived and elevated the Western.

The idea is intriguing - an inflatable sex doll comes alive and experiences the world with wide-eyed innocence - but Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Air Doll" is only partly successful. The film's poignant depiction of human loneliness is undercut by saccharine notes and a drifting tone.

These pictures need a light touch and a lot of attitude, but this time you can hear heavy breathing in the background.

Hawke has created a standard-issue, Sundance-friendly indie film that's full of the predictable angst suffered by Manhattan artistic types, but unfortunately the lead characters are both so callow that you finally don't care much about them.

Aimed directly at your inner 8-year-old, and it strikes home.

It's an impressive achievement: The film reveals things about each person's inner world, and how it looks to the other, without making us feel as if we're lost in a house of mirrors.

It's tear-jerker material but ends up being quite touching, and it's a good choice for family viewing.

Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.

The film's simplicity and intensity are aided by the crisp black-and-white photography of Tariel Meliava. Director Babluani's greenness shows itself in the ending, which is weak, but the film nevertheless stays with you.

It's an apocalyptic ghost story with some eerie images and a surprising turn toward the end, but it bogs down considerably between the good scenes.

Somehow, the funny stuff gets sucked into a kind of black hole in the center of the satire, along with all the comic debris. What should have been a surreal flight to the planet Lucas crumbles into a harmless collection of cosmic dustballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.52]

Some scenes are mild fun, but the mishaps that befall our hero aren't especially inventive, and although the South African setting provides a bit of interest, it's never really used incisively.

This affecting documentary focuses on their 2004 production, a play whose themes of forgiveness and redemption certainly ought to have some resonance for the inmates.

This is contemplative moviemaking, with its deliberate pace, often static scenes and emphasis on direct sound. The director keeps the dialogue pared to the bone.

This easygoing movie fully captures the couple's charm and offers a unique look at the '60s and '70s New York art scene.

A moving but flawed premiere feature.

Grumpier Old Men certainly isn't relying on its mawkish and hokey story to put warm bodies in the seats. There's no reason to see the picture - a sequel to their 1993 hit, “Grumpy Old Men" - other than to relish the talents of these two veterans, plus Sophia Loren, a newcomer to the series.

The stuntwomen are also subject to the unbreakable law of Hollywood, that the advantage is always to the young and beautiful.

A well-made culture-shock documentary.

Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."

An edifying and forthright drama that aims to create a lump in the throat, and succeeds.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

Never gets the mixture right, lurching between bullet-happy shootouts and overwrought domestic content.

A potent drama from Yang Li, one of China's Sixth Generation filmmakers noted for the stark realism and documentary feeling of their work.

Will probably pass muster with very young viewers, but their parents may grit their teeth at its saccharine quality.

There's no objectivity in this film -- Greenwald's goal is not to offer balanced coverage but to roil the waters.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.

This is a timeless, and nearly plotless, look at the day-to-day life of a nomadic Mongolian shepherding family. Yes, it moves deliberately, and impatient viewers will find it intolerably slow. But those who can get in track with its serene rhythm will be rewarded.

Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

Succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its director and star, the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni.

Has an impressive cast and captures some of that era's fuzzy rebelliousness and humanism, but taken on its own the picture is finally thin stuff.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

Though not flawless, this is a compelling study, in Dogme style, of a wounded young woman who spends her working life spying on others.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

The most compelling footage was taken during the uprising of August and September 2007, which put a bad scare into the government because a large number of Buddhist monks played a prominent role.

Not sure we need to know this much about his family life.

It's a bleak, fatalistic tale about rootlessness and the changing moral order in the machine age, but the wondrous details of the film trump any grand thematic concerns.

Standard-issue slasher pic.

From Juan Ruiz-Anchia's florid, eruptive photography to the pinpoint editing by Howard E. Smith that enhances it, everyone involved with The Corruptor understands that action is the bottom line - except Chow.

Director Paul Morrison ("Wondrous Oblivion") nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.

The picture seems to have been intended as a political satire, but only a Hollywood executive could mistake it for the real thing.

What's unforeseen in Unforeseen, a superior documentary by Laura Dunn, are the consequences of a certain mind-set about mankind's relationship to the world and, finally, to itself.

A potboiler but entertaining enough to rise above its flaws.

This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.

A gentle comedy.

The performers don't really seem at the top of their game here.

This Belgian crime thriller makes compelling viewing out of a "you can't be serious" plotline.

Doesn't allow the story's considerable nostalgia and sentimentality to overwhelm it.

It is stark, realistic and resolutely downbeat. Yates' work is lean, and he has a nice way with action sequences. [17 May 2009, p.R28]

The acting is good, particularly by Faour, who plays the naive, zaftig heroine as warm and appealing despite her troubles. It's also nice to see veteran Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass ("Lemon Tree"), who plays Muna's sister.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.

Intriguing and educational. For partisans of Bertolt Brecht, it's mandatory.

Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

The talented Murphy is appealing here, performing with sincerity and restraint - a wise choice, since his co-stars are a menagerie of wisecracking animals.

A romantic sitcom that never transcends its gimmicky plot, but offers enough screen time to Gwyneth Paltrow to satisfy even her most rabid fans.

Nothing groundbreaking, but there's an easy charm in the movie.

Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.

Speaking of bangs, the special effects include one of the better mega-blasts in recent memory: vast fireballs tear through the busy tunnel at dizzying speed and with devastating results. This is the money shot, what the Stallone audience is paying for. It remains to be seen if they'll buy a Stallone who's been downsized and reformulated - about a teaspoon's worth of added complexity.

Writer-director Mark Herman seems genuinely moved by the plight of the mining communities, but his attempt to translate those feelings into a story shows the effects of hard labor.

Well-made and modestly enjoyable.

Stupid.

If you want lots of Will Smith and industrial-strength special effects, the movie delivers.

A lightweight and sentimental exercise that succeeds at little except maybe inspiring the viewer to go out and find a decent curry.

I'll stick out my neck and say that Park Chan Wook's wildly gruesome Thirst is the most whacked-out version of an Emile Zola novel ever to reach the screen.

This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.

That's not to say the entertaining Antz" was made by Woody, just that it's full of his personality.

I could have done without the clips from the old "Superman" TV show - strictly sugar to make the medicine go down, and a sign that the director doesn't fully trust his audience.

It's an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow.

Freed from the demands of adapting an established and complex literary piece, the filmmakers seem to have relaxed - and so can their audience.

A frantic, epic-sized blowout of campy, "Indiana Jones" -style derring-do mixed with lots of computer-generated gee-whizzes.

It's a handsome and entertaining small-scale picture with nice acting, some crisp (and some crude) dialogue and effective direction.

You can see this Danish offering as a sardonic update of familiar noir material, or simply as the story of the midlife crisis of a guy who wishes - or dreams, or dreads - that he's living out a grand drama. There are pleasures to be had either way.

The effort is undermined with crass humor, mugging and slapstick.

It's back in a handsome new black-and-white print, and it's still powerful stuff -- you can see why Pauline Kael wrote that it was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."

The bloodshed is somewhat less gory than in many slasher films -- with stress on the "somewhat." [26 Sep 2004]

With his caustic humor, director de la Iglesia is being billed as "the next Almodovar."

Good-looking and empty.

At first, the technique seems gimmicky, but finally it's as compelling a perspective as any to understand how these men passed through agony to some sort of peace.

An old-fashioned and family-friendly comedy.

Perhaps Patten is trying to do to us what Rinpoche does to his followers, but the film's meandering structure and intrusive narration detract from the focus on the master.