Russian Dolls never resorts to sitcom moments as it explores the transformation of friendship into love. All the characters here are believably appealing and refreshingly three-dimensional, and the situations they find themselves in have the ring of truth. You leave this film wanting to know these people, wanting the best for them.

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

It's the whole constellation of relationships that Winick and company create in and around the barn that brings the movie its kaleidoscopic charm.

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry.

It's a courageous, moving, organically funny picture.

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

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

Despite its haphazard rhythms and longueurs, The New World achieves an emotional payoff unlike anything else in Malick's work. It's all you think his movies are, and more.

Thanks to Hallstrom's slaphappy artistry and a sparkling ensemble, Hoax is a hoot.

It's one nutty holiday fruitcake that is appetizing and tasty.

Much of the film's virtue lies in its straight-ahead narrative and uncomplicated morality. That and the undeniable charisma and virtuosity of its star.

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." When Woody Allen published his second collection, he called it Without Feathers. Guest is as sharp and original as Allen, but he hasn't lost hope. For Your Consideration -- disillusioned but also fresh and ticklish -- is a thing with feathers, too.

It sheds the series' famous and influential pastel look and plunges its cast of villains and warriors into the 21st century.

Bitterly funny about divorce, it's even sharper and more original about intellectuals and their discontent.

So far in this year's cartoon feature sweepstakes, Shrek the Third rules.

Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment.

The impact is hypnotic.

A Big Sleep with underage bozos, a Maltese Falcon where the stuff that dreams are made of rests in the lockers of a well-worn high school, Brick is a remarkable oddity, audacious and engaging.

There's not a false moment within the film's 88-minute running time, nor many that could be done any better.

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

Infuriating and funny, the film forges a disturbing diagram from the avarice and chaos of a slapdash, heartless system.

In a stroke of voice-casting genius, the voices of Marjane and her mother are provided by real-life mother and daughter Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, respectively, both of whom bring heft and measured emotion to the characters.

Stays true to the spirit and characters of the book while embellishing it to overflowing.

For 45 minutes, it zings along on perfectly pitched overstatement.

The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch.

Fresh, funny and unfailingly observant, Rocket Science is a mood-swinging movie about adolescence that lifts audiences' spirits even when its hero is down in the dumps.

Near letter-perfect.

The movie is impressive both as a celebration of the Old West and a tough, ambivalent depiction of a ruthless pioneer. [04 Jun 2004]

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.

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 first-class entertainment for bookish lads and lasses of all ages - and for those who never have or never will crack a paperback's spine. And it might inspire today's nascent artists to open up their sketch-pads as well as their hearts and minds.

Thanks to a combination of fluid camerawork and careful pacing, the Belgian writer-directors have produced a compelling narrative that sounds, if not a cautionary note, a worried one.

The movie lives in its small details.

The gritty heist picture The Bank Job has everything adult action fans could want, starting with a grand, fact-inspired gimmick.

The movie has been compared, with some reason, to the French New Wave. But it's like "Jules and Jim" or "Band of Outsiders" blended with "A Hard Day's Night."

As a filmmaker, Brewer doesn't just yank your chain: He forges a bond with his characters and his audience that produces ecstasy and healing.

Standard Operating Procedure says that human nature abhors moral vacuums - but sometimes humans get sucked into them.

It's a summery idyll: his most entertaining picture since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) or maybe "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999).

The movie is an inspired comedy-drama about artistic temperament.

The film stays true to its characters and keeps the laughs coming in what may be the closest thing in spirit to the old Warner Bros. Looney Tunes to hit the screen in years. And when it comes to animation designed primarily for laughs, praise doesn't come any higher than that.

The union of thought and feeling becomes flesh and blood thanks to four brilliant performers in Iris.

The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

Garden State is filled with characters you long to know more about, in situations to which almost anyone can relate. And that's as near a can't-miss movie formula as one can get.

The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

Offers plenty of honest, good-natured laughs in the process. That's something young and old can appreciate equally.

Soars on the strength of strong acting and a script that stubbornly refuses to go all sappy and preachy.

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

Unsparing and uplifting - a wickedly difficult combination to pull off, but one that gives the film an emotional weight that's impossible to dismiss.

The potential for action never lets up; you never know what's coming around the next corner.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

Paints a vivid and darkly humorous picture of a world where directors are all-powerful and vampires are real; whether you want to buy into either fantasy is up to you. I did, and had a grand old time.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

It's the rare film that trusts both its audience's intelligence and its emotions.

An unrelentingly dark vision that's as hard to watch as it is impossible to walk away from.

Bolt proves a refreshing throwback to the animated classics of yore.

It's a top-notch action film, albeit on the bloody side, complete with decisive action, mysterious characters and a nobility and sense of purpose that allows its excesses to be forgiven.

Alien, even with some scene tinkering that has left this "director's cut" one minute shorter than its original release, is still one of the creepiest, scariest, most shocking films ever.

It's a zombie flick that moves -- no stumbling, staggering living dead here -- in an atmosphere that feels like a Gothic docudrama, and it's freaky beyond all reason.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.

Probably the most sweet-spirited sex comedy ever made. It's pretty funny, too.

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

The images here are graphic and disturbing. But Miike somehow manages to stop just short of disgusting.

A remarkable film about a remarkable man who's lived the kind of life usually reserved for adventure novels and pulp fiction.

Sure, this movie is proudly profane, but it's also funny.

The perfect film for anyone who finds the Keystone Cops a little too understated and I mean that as a compliment.

This is a marvelous film, a look at the strange, exasperatingly labyrinthine process of adolescence and the diverse ways people find to deal with it.

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

Viewers impressed by the fairly standard martial-arts action of "Crouching Tiger" will really be wowed after seeing this film.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

As close to a perfect piece of satire as filmmakers have seen in quite some time.

Offers a welcome perspective, reminding us that extremism in the name of a values system is nothing new -- not even on these shores.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

The whole plot is a shambles. And yet none of this matters much when you're laughing as hard as this film makes you laugh.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

The film -- florid, excessive, brash -- owes its success to bravura performances by Sean Penn as Eddie, Robin Wright Penn as Maureen and John Travolta as Joey, the third leg of a triangle. The three play their parts with an abandon that keeps the film buoyant and luminous. Most of all, these three superb actors give us permission to enjoy the film's terribly flawed characters rather than to judge them. [29 Aug 1997]

Well worth the wait.

The conventional and the cliche are slam-dunked in favor of a fresh, authentic take on passion, ambition and coming of age.

One of the year's most unsettling -- and perhaps most illuminating -- films.

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

The true heartbreak of Maria Full of Grace is that it never comes.

The Cockettes is a grand place to visit, even for those who wouldn't want to live there.

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

Replete with so many wisecracks, puns, double entendres and visual jokes that you almost need a flow chart to keep up with them all. But try; the effort is definitely worthwhile, and the results are hilarious.

Monsieur Ibrahim is about people interacting as people, not symbols (one reason, Sharif has said, he took the role was to help his grandchildren's generation understand that idea).

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.

Le Samourai's take on complicity, betrayal and love is thoroughly original and as tough as a film can be. [06 Jun 1997]

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

The coincidences pile up in Career Girls, but by then Leigh has involved us so fully in the emotional lives of his characters that the contrivances are easily dismissed.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.