It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

(Penn)'s is a lovely, soulful performance in a movie that manages to imbue tragedy with just the right grace note of insouciance -- a movie worthy of Woody Allen himself.

A passionate, heart-wrenching film that is a must-see for any romantic.

This movie is about the survival of the open-minded. As far as current American independents go, it's the fastest and the funniest.

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

This documentary could have been a simple downer. Instead, it's a giddy, manic-depressive roller coaster - because it brings us eye to eye with Gilliam.

Few directors are able to showcase actors with fast-cutting techniques. Hill is an ace at it because everything about his action is organic.

It's a deft sleight-of-story Aniston, White and Arteta pull off, giving us a character who seems more than she is, but is really less than she appears.

Whereas the TV series rarely flinched when it came to showing the animal world as it is, Earth always pulls back at the last second. It shows a cheetah pulling down a gazelle, but not the feast that follows.

Brosnan turns his typical talent on its head. So does director Boorman, who forsakes his usual tingling virtuosity.

A first-rate sail into Adventureland.

A delirious surprise .

McTeer delivers a messily cheerful performance as a woman who thinks nothing of brushing her teeth with beer.

Like the coolest train set a kid ever had. It's not real and the faces on the toy people don't look human, but it has bells and whistles galore and will take you as far as your imagination allows.

A joyful celebration of spirit and endurance.

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

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

Hard to take in its particulars.

This is a movie that's really about how much fun Glenn Milstead had being Divine, and how he — perhaps unexpectedly — found so many fans willing to go along for the ride. That's an American success story worth celebrating.

Although it's in the same genre as "The English Patient," it's a vastly better movie --more surprising and original, more rigorous and sympathetic. This film is oddly shaped. It is also heartbreaking and exhilarating.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

It flows like fast-moving lava to a climax filled with pyrotechnics. And for once in a summer blockbuster, the fireworks are both emotional and physical. The movie leaves you sated, yet wanting more -- just what you want from a series with two entries left to go.

Jungle Fever is so many graceful things, so many angry things, so many truly moving things that its occasional faults are the faults of excess passion, not failure of imagination. Most importantly, it seethes with life, unlike nearly every other movie out of Hollywood these days.

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

There's a dignity to Mondays in the Sun that manages to keep the film buoyant, helping to keep all the despair at bay.

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

Nothing seriously detracts from the film's overall brilliance.

Himalaya does for yak caravans what "Red River" did for cattle drives: it sees them as the stuff of epic conquest.

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.

Entertaining, thrilling and honestly sentimental, it's an equal-opportunity crowd-pleaser.

It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

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

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

A snarling satire of Hollywood single-mindedness and its lack of any moral underpinning.

Taymor conjures images that are as indelible as they are wordlessly articulate.

There are no surprise twists, no characters who rise above themselves, no cheap happy endings. There are just people struggling with emotions and situations they think are beyond their control.

A Dirty Shame is certainly dirty, and maybe it's even a shame. But this is the John Waters we've come to know and cherish, and that alone is cause to celebrate.

Baseball, Boston and Drew Barrymore. Certainly sounds like a winning combination.

Passionately acted and grittily convincing.

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

Lightning in a Bottle has breadth, both in its multitude of perspectives and its spectrum of performances.

Gloriously funky in the good old meaning of the term. Its vulgarity may be offensive, but it's also pungent and real, and it fuels some ferocious humor.

All about mood, and not one bit about action - which explains why it's at once both the most passionate film of the year so far, and the most determinedly inert.

In the full-house ensemble of Henry Bromell's Panic, Neve Campbell is the wild card.

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

Filled with delightful sequences.

Ron Howard has made his best movie with Frost/Nixon, an electric political drama with a skin-prickling immediacy.

A bittersweet joy. Its humor and romance are refreshing because the writer-director, Greg Mottola, realizes that maturity is a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward process.

Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction - tart, funny and piercing - of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.

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

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

The Cider House Rules is about many things -- chance, passivity, free will and self-invention -- but ultimately it comes back to Larch, who emerges as a toweringly noble figure even in his weakest moments.

Greengrass has a fine sense of pacing, keeping events moving. It's rarely hard to guess what's going to happen next, but events unfold with such gusto that there's barely time to notice that.

The film mixes the psychological with the supernatural, the profane with the ridiculous, the self-indulgent with the understated, and dares you to assume anything. It's all great fun.

Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.

Gloriously retro, unashamedly celebratory of the joy of moviemaking and the love of old-fashioned heroism.

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

Four Christmases works because of some genuinely funny setups, a pace that never dwells on one gag (or even one family) too long and a careful mix of slapstick and bawdy humor. But mostly, the film works because of the astonishing acting talent the filmmakers brought together to make it.

Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis.

As the sequence builds, it accretes so many heroic and nightmarish associations it plays like a prelude to apocalypse, which of course will come in Episode III. Attack of the Clones is part soda pop, part witches' brew - and all visual ambrosia.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

A marvelously subversive, slyly manipulative effort.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

Absorbing, artfully executed.

A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.

Disturbing, maddening, often confusing, but also charming, engaging and challenging in all the best ways.

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

The movie may not be perfect, but it's jam-packed with goodies -- like a breakfast cereal fun-pack with a prize on every box-top.

Has nearly perfect pitch.

The kind of movie that gives mainstream Hollywood star vehicles a good name.

What the film does, brilliantly, is provoke the intelligent fan to wonder if there's a limit to how far the proceedings can go.

Remarkable documentary.

Guerrilla provides one huge compensation: the getting of historical wisdom.

A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

For at least two-thirds of its length, all elements combine for a taut thriller, a Hitchcockian exercise in suspense pitting human frailty - can our minds be trusted? - against human resourcefulness.

This film teaches the rewards of patience for directors, for actors and for audiences, too. The compelling reality of Juliette's plight comes from how subtly and gradually she emerges from her carapace.

De Niro and Stiller combine to bring on laughs you don't have to feel guilty about.

No American film this year can touch it. [28 Feb 1992, p.10]

Scratch will make even the uninitiated believe in the joy and propulsive power of hip-hop.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

A movie of unforced nobility and quiet pleasures, Butterfly works on all sorts of levels.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

The only thing missing from this rich production is an emotional charge, which Highsmith could create on the page but which Minghella doesn't quite capture on screen.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

There's great action moviemaking here: You learn what it means to "carve" a pool, as you learn what it means to "close off" the boxing ring in Ali.

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

Imagine "The Godfather" through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy just in from the hinterlands of rural Jersey and his dad's pepper farm, and you have an idea of the originality, and the oddity, of the film. [16 Feb 1996]

Sparkling, believable performances by young actors, the steadying presence of veteran Maggie Smith, an elegant musical score by Zbigniew Preisner (including a song co-written with Linda Rondstadt) and, especially, an uncommon respect for the stately pace of the source combine to make a lovely movie.

The result is a highly critical and impossible-to-dismiss examination of the administration's rush to war that is sure to move both sides of the political spectrum to apoplexy.

A frequently hilarious exercise in one sex desperately trying to figure out the other.

Well-paced, scathingly funny satire of the fashion industry and its eminently lampoonable pomposity.

Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture. Let the Right One In locates most of its fright-power in the needs and confusions of people who are usually overlooked.

The astonishingly versatile Kinnear proves note-perfect as a huckster who slowly rids himself of slime.

Accomplishes a delicate balancing act, that of entertaining the audience with the thrills and adventure of the Andrea Gail's final journey.

Hannibal isn't art. But for filmgoers with a taste for the absurd and a tolerance for the blackest of black humor, it's one heck of a thrill ride.