But the most piercing thing about Heavenly Creatures is Jackson's refusal to forgive the girls. He indeed understands them and empathizes with them. But when he has to, he exposes the horrid squalor and ugliness of the crime, which, after all, was a blood-soaked execution, crude as anything done in Rwanda. [9 Dec 1994]

It's hardly great, but it's completely mesmerizing. [02 Feb 1996]

Offers a welcome continuation of what has proven a fascinating journey both for the film's 11 subjects (three of the 14 opted out of the project this go-round) and its audience.

In a boxing soap-opera way, Eastwood is trying to do for himself as a performer what Sergio Leone did for him in a spaghetti-western way: douse his rough-hewn banality with reflected emotional coloration.

A grand, sweeping nostalgia trip that evokes the sickness of an era even as it tries to find its essential humanity.

An engaging yarn and a moving character study, but it's also a sweet, sad glimpse of everyone's future.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

It's every bit as thrilling and engrossing as the best spy thriller or cop flick.

The movie's cinematography is sumptuous, in its own intimate way. But all that's glorious about this film is the flesh tones. There isn't enough flesh and blood.

Too sketchy about her protagonist's interior life, and too fast and loose with the details of this story, to make much of an impact beyond its initial shock.

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

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

Best of all, Ponyo never ceases to be a genuine odyssey in short pants.

A thoughtful, bittersweet film biography of the Cuban writer that captures both his irrepressible spirit and his sometimes overwhelming melancholy.

A beautiful display of celluloid bungee-jumping.

Few films combine a dense and tingling atmosphere with the headlong pacing and adventure of The Bourne Ultimatum.

Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia.

Though I love McCarthy's movie, The Edge of Heaven - with its virtuoso narrative and frames packed to bursting with unruly life - has the potency of "The Visitor" squared.

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

A great adventure.

Builds slowly but passionately, not dancing to some Hollywood tune, but finding its characters where they are and letting them be who they are.

The story line meanders and too many scenes drone on; Knocked Up is in serious need of a good editor. But the laughs are plentiful, and it's the rare movie these days where one doesn't feel guilty about finding the whole thing funny.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

Spring, Summer values life, beauty and even human fallibility, ascribing to humanity a nobility we neglect at our own peril.

The real attraction is watching all these guys and gals on the train, so young, so dedicated to their music, so unconcerned about almost everything else.

The movie lives in its small details.

Tells an important story about a story that might never have been told at all.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

Hero is a movie that lives up to all the nobility of its title, a gift to movie audiences who cherish the opportunity to be transported to a heretofore unimagined world and absorbed totally into what happens there.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

This is Mitchell's show, and his performance lives up to his triple billing as writer, director and star.

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.

You may feel like you need a drink and a shower when you come out of "Naked," but at least you'll know you've been somewhere new.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

Hathaway carries you on an emotional whirligig that can be horrifying and funny, hopeful and devastating.

A terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a pleader.

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

Whatever its flaws, Get on the Bus is fairly electric with hope and anger. [16 Oct 1996]

As great as the film looks, the story, adapted from a novel by P.D. James, never quite comes into focus.

A revealing, intimate, quirky and generous portrait of nothing less than the American Dream.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.

Voluptuous dance about love, pain and the whole damn thing.

A movie that will endure.

No Man's Land is a 98-minute wonder: this story of three men in a trench renews the meaning of the word "trenchant."

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, Blood Simple is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way.

A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.

It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.

Penelope Cruz is sensational in Volver - she's its lifeblood, its raison d'etre and its meaning.

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

This thoroughly modern movie pulls off a classical feat. It elicits the searing combination of pity and terror that leaves a viewer feeling purged.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

A friendly movie, as scruffy and cozy as a woolen watch cap.

Wastes amusing beginnings.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

Isn't a noble story, or even a cautionary one: It just feels pretty painfully real.

A headlong pastiche of lower-depth melodrama and absurd black comedy.

A harrowing depiction of a woman's plight under the Taliban.

It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud.

There's a good heart beating at the core of Victor Vargas, one that belies its R-rating.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

Inspirational, heart-rending and the movie that made Taylor a star - what more do you want? [19 May 2007, p.9S]

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

Quick and lowdown-delightful. It's also a graveyard or two up in class from the torture films that, in recent years, have redefined horror for the worse.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

As the film opens with, predictably, "Vertigo" and its "Hello, Hello" refrain, it's his steady presence and unforced charisma that anchors each performance, allowing Bono to emote for all he's worth.

If Kill Bill Vol. 1 was bloody exhilarating, Vol. 2 is bloody great. And, as a bonus, not nearly so bloody.

In the end, this is a movie that doesn't respect its own power. Less of a stacked deck would have left Vera Drake to play a far more effective hand.

Helped immensely by a lush and poignant musical score by Joe Hisaishi, Fireworks makes a quietly powerful impact. [22 May 1998]

The picture has immediacy, force and humanity. It's a muckraking work of art.

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive.

The impact is hypnotic.

Winchester '73 has a little bit of everything, including a central conflict straight out of the Old Testament, and Mann's highly visual direction -- dialogue is sparse, and the movie looks gorgeous, filmed largely on location in Arizona -- shows that John Ford and Howard Hawks weren't the only directors able to translate their love of the Old West and its mythical figures to film. [05 Jun 2003]

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.

In its own quiet, voluptuous way, Rivers and Tides, an unpretentiously brilliant documentary, uses the work of Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to open up the hidden drama of the natural universe.

The title Tell No One recalls the days when ads proclaimed, "No one will be seated after the first 15 minutes" and "Be considerate of your neighbors: Don't give away the ending of this picture." Both rules apply to this canny, refreshingly emotional and intuitive thriller.

The movie grows richer as it goes along and contrasting pieces click together.

A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.

A History of Violence is a hollow story from an empty graphic novel.

Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.

Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.