Without proclaiming itself a wake-up call for the West, In This World cries out for some new method of achieving international trust.

This picture is jagged and exciting; it tells several plots imperfectly, yet makes them add up to a great American story about integrity challenged and triumphant.

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

An insightful, clear-headed look at relations within a Chinese-American family.

A souped-up roadster of a film, a relentless action flick that looks great and moves with more grace and speed than seems possible.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

Isn't an act of expiation but a gift of understanding.

The movie never undercuts his brilliance and his unexpected charisma. No matter how high his degree of malevolence, he cuts a bigger figure after you see the movie than he did before.

Dense, ironic and thoroughly engrossing caper melodrama.

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.

L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Hotel) is unexpectedly entertaining because it captures the point in young adulthood when life is unseriously serious, or maybe seriously unserious.

The movie's best moments belong to Bill Murray,

The movie is, to borrow Rob's phrase, unassailably cool.

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.

The movie has dual strengths that silence most objections. Even more than "X-2" or "American Splendor," it is, in a good way, the most comic-booky movie of the year. It's also the human Winged Migration.

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

Director and dancers catch the audience up in a web of imagination.

The Saddest Music In the World may not be for all tastes, but maybe it should be.

It gets under your skin and into your head, and you don't want it to leave.

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

A thoughtful, engaging film.

The movie's steady good humor and respect for character is pleasing - even energizing.

If you have an ounce of romance in you, you'll sense your own inner Captain Blood emerge when Captain Shakespeare turns him into a dashing figure with a dangerous sword.

The Breakfast Club meets Rear Window. The result should satisfy dating crowds from high school to night school.

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.

A quiet, heartfelt story of love and loss.

In every important way, Breach isn't just a solid thriller; it's also an ambitious and engrossing piece of narrative journalism.

The whole film is about innocence and experience, and if it isn't a Blakean song, it is a sturdy and vibrant piece of prose.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you feel that no good idea, let alone good deed, goes unpunished. Only the exuberance of the moviemaking keeps your spirits high.

The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.

Without a note of music or any other extraneous narrative device, Emitai plunges the viewer deep into the lives of the Diola, to the point where the subtitles translating the Diola and French languages are almost superfluous. [02 Feb 1998]

Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.

Every turn of the story, every interpolated song or dance serves to recall pleasant times in the theater or thrilling stories in the newspapers. [12 May 1936, p.10]

Despite the merry duo of Ford and Connery, The Last Crusade offered a familiar pursuit of the Holy Grail. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a better move: It goes back to the future. Once again, the Indiana Jones series is the rare franchise that treasures knowledge and embraces the unknown.

Both a condemnation of torture as a political tool and a tribute to the bravery that exists within everyone.

No one has caught the pride, remorse and pain of an unloved and possibly unlovable husband better than Edward Norton in The Painted Veil.

Both handmade and souped-up, it beautifully renders two types of camaraderie: the bonds among eccentrics and the fellowship of speed.

Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.

A humorous bounty of flesh and fantasy.

Will Ferrell does chicken-fried comedy right: with crackpot discipline and stripped-to-the-beer-belly courage.

As good as Willis is, he's no match for Mos Def.

Jew or Gentile, a good story well told is a thing to be cherished.

It's an unusual and engaging romantic comedy because it's mostly about how these women ready each other for real love.

Fast Food Nation offers no easy answers, but plenty of food for thought.

It twists in on itself mercilessly, rarely pausing to let the viewers catch up, but that's OK. A movie like this depends on staying at least a step ahead of its audience, and this one surely does.

By turns grisly and hallucinatory, The Proposition is one of those grand, mythic Westerns, full of wide-open spaces and dank little hellholes, detestable bad guys and virginal women, laconic lawmen and wary natives.

Only David Lynch could make the incomprehensible so compelling.

Live-In Maid is a lived-in movie. Its cataclysms may be small in scale, but the movie brings us so far into these women's lives that a shattered cup creates an earthquake.

What's bleakly hilarious about the whole movie is that Bekmambetov directs the nonaction scenes just as hyperbolically.

In a society where athletic competitions are too often likened to war, the recognition that everyone's equal once they're off the playing field is a welcome reminder of that little thing called perspective, not to mention sportsmanship.

Until it detours into dysfunctional-family comedy-drama, Transamerica rides cross-country without ever running low on bracing, cactus-spined surprises.

Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie.

Cool!

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

The Guardian is that rarest of cinematic commodities: an action movie displaying brains and heart and the opportunity for its stars to do something more than keep the narrative flowing between explosions.

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.

When it comes to what's great about King Kong, it's not the harum-scarum. It's the girl.

Nolte brings this movie a piece of his heart, and grants us peace.

In the strongest scenes, Ben Affleck gets his lead actors to extract the bitter juice from Lehane's wood-alcohol prose. The movie has its horrifying Gothic twists and turns, but it's never better than when it takes these two into places where the underclass goes to forget or be forgotten or get lost.

Largely devoid of the usual Western histrionics, this 1957 film, thanks to the steady hand of veteran director Delmer Daves, represents one of the more sober depictions of the clash between chaos and order that has always been at the center of the movie Western. [26 Aug 2007, p.3E]

The film marks Braff as a talent to watch, blessed with the sort of natural, everyman appeal that audiences eat up.

With Joan Allen bringing a crisp intelligence to the sharp, unsentimental narration, it's both awful and fascinating to follow Hitler's warped growth from frustrated painter to self-appointed arbiter of Germanic art.

Like Brian De Palma's 1981 masterpiece "Blow-Out," this movie contains cutting perceptions of obsession, institutional and professional myopia, misplaced loyalty in experts, misreadings of evidence and the kind of confusion that leads to conspiracy theories. But Fincher's movie falls short of masterpiece status.

Kung fu purists may scoff, but escapists with a sense of humor should romp through The Forbidden Kingdom.

Shortbus is nothing if not over-the-top, replete with consummated sex acts, both gay and straight.

Tightly scripted and intricately plotted, the buddy film manages the neat two-step of being simultaneously profane and engaging.

Kasi Lemmons' movie is called Talk to Me, but what it really does is sing to you, in the argot and cadences of soul, jazz, rock and rhythm and blues.

The Wachowski Brothers once again they prove themselves our reigning masters of murk.

Best of all is Jeff Bridges as the voice of Geek, a laid-back philosopher-penguin who becomes Cody's low-key guru, mentoring him in the ways of the wave.

There are times when his message threatens to overwhelm his story line, and the last 15 minutes or so of Blood Diamond demonstrate what happens when sentimentality wins out over style and grit.

The Duchess of Langeais is a romantic dance of death.

This team has succeeded at making a film that opens a subculture without programming our responses to it.

Except for the Mozart music and Tharp movements around the edges, Amadeus plays like a monument to mediocrity. The movie belongs to Salieri.

What makes Lynn Littman's film so devastating -- beyond, that is, the power of Jane Alexander's brilliant performance as the surviving mother -- is its icy control and its complete disavowal of sentimentality and sensationalism. It's a small monument to the principle of understatement. [02 Dec 1983, p.B1]

There's little time for nuance in Stop-Loss, and it doesn't deny any of the film's power to wish Peirce would occasionally slow things down enough to let her audience ponder what they're seeing.

A movie like this could easy slide into Shirley Temple territory, showcasing a child actor so full of sweetness and light and good, old-fashioned spunk that audiences wince. But Palmer, whose enthusiasm and energy never seem forced, avoids all those traps; her Akeelah is never less than believable.

The film's impact and poignancy are undeniable.

The most exhilaratingly horrifying movie to come out in years.

Cotillard brings honesty to histrionics. She makes Piaf - "the little sparrow" - soar.

The triumph of American Hardcore is that it convinces general audiences that there were vast underground reservoirs of angst and anguish to be tapped.

A funny, touching mood piece.

By far the most purely entertaining of all his films to reach these shores, Roman de Gare is the rare trick film in which all the tricks reveal something amusing, involving or poignant about its characters.

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]

This documentary (like the fact-based 2004 feature Miracle) demonstrates how powerful true sports stories can be when they delve into the mystery of leadership instead of falling back on nostalgia.

The shows themselves are extraordinary, especially Japan's Ichigei group, which has the all-out fun and athleticism of a vitaminized Twyla Tharp troupe.

The Last Mistress turns the melodramatic pieties of films like Fatal Attraction inside out. The anti-heroine acts like a vampire in reverse: Even when she drinks the anti-hero's blood, she makes him feel more alive.

Bright semi-adult entertainment.

Berg doesn't let up on the tension, even when the action is bloodless.

The scenes between Dengler and Duane, between a force of nature and a force of reason, are the real heart of the film.

This Christmas is the rare movie about a cozy household at holiday time that's as funny and dramatic and poignant as any seasonal family get-together should be.

Vanya's journey to find his mom is not easy or picturesque or heartwarming. But it's also never without hope.

The opening half-hour may prove to be a disreputable classic of pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking.

What gives the film a haunting and sometimes droll poetic unity is the way co-directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen trace all their characters moving in a jellyfish-like fashion.

It does offer that most pleasant and valuable of viewing experiences: A message movie in which story and character come first.

Rambles and sometimes wobbles like a runaway movie. But Schreiber's instincts keep the film frolicsome and vital.

Sarah Silverman says things you wouldn't expect a nice, attractive Jewish girl to say. But that's only half her appeal.

The story seems fresh and alive. They also had the good sense to cast Dunst, at 19 already one of Hollywood's finest and most consistent actresses.

The movie may be too precious for mass consumption, but its filmmakers' willingness to assume the best of their audience, combined with its Everyman origins, suggest a movie that deserves a chance.