So understatedly good.

The blend of chic histrionics and ultra-bright daylight imagery make much of the movie resemble a network soap opera with an on-location interlude. It looks as cheap as life is held in Medellin.

Arrives as a balm to seared adult psyches that have endured all manner of assaults at the multiplex this season.

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

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

Lasseter's inclusive, utterly distinctive sensibility makes Cars all that it can be. His embrace of the comic-dramatic friction between innovation and tradition infiltrates every aspect of the movie - the look, the characters, the story.

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

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

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

It's a shame his (Foxx) performance isn't surrounded by a better film.

Cheeky, brass-knuckles British crime film.

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

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

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.

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

These guys are funny.

A moral, not a moralistic, movie. It's also a bracing aesthetic achievement, creating a fictional version of a factual case that illuminates as it entertains.

Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.

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

Notes on a Scandal isn't humorous or witty enough to sustain black comedy, and it isn't insightful or deep enough to suggest a contemporary tragedy. All it does is put an eloquent veneer on petty meanness.

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

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.

Burton's movie is more like Chris Columbus' first Harry Potter movie. Nearly everything that's supposed to be magical falls flat; nearly everything that's supposed to be mundane is magical.

Quinceanera may be the year's most nonjudgmental film, and therein lies both its greatest strength and most naggingly troublesome weakness.

Those not familiar with Proust will doubtless feel lost. Unlike the printed word, film does not offer the chance to pause and reflect, or go back and re-read a passage.

Shallow and one-sided.

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.

The film's strengths can't be separated from its shortcomings. Despite its heavyweight supporting cast, Stone Reader mostly pays tribute to the enthusiasm and purity of the amateur.

An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.

Webber's film offers painstaking reproductions of the town of Delft circa 1665 in all four seasons. That's just the problem: you feel every pain he took. Girl With a Pearl Earring is an art movie in the worst way.

JFK is entertaining, if only because the cast of characters in the New Orleans underground is so bizarre. [20 Dec 1991]

Touching and insightful.

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

There's no denying the raw emotional power of this heart-rending story.

Seabiscuit revives the sweeping pleasures of movies that address and respect the mass audience, raising the common denominator instead of pandering to it. This crowd-pleaser rouses honest and engulfing cheers.

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.

Contains a dozen winning moments of humor, uplift or exhilaration. But are they enough to justify a 154-minute running time?

Hellboy is, to borrow a phrase, one helluva good time.

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.

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

Tautou's kind of talent: priceless.

Unfortunately, it lacks emotional lift or folkloric fervor.

Compulsion, self-deception and the slippery nature of evil are explored with fidelity and supreme control .

This picture is absorbing -- and eye-filling -- whether the prose and the passion are connecting or running on parallel tracks.

The Crow, the death-haunted, mega-violent, pulpy, vigorous final film of Brandon Lee, may not qualify as much of a monument to a lost life -- what film could? -- but it's a hell of a movie.

In real life, Bacon and Sedgwick are husband and wife. Their scenes mark one of the rare times an off-screen couple's intimacy enriches on-screen passion.

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.

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.

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

Filled with so much heartbreaking beauty, Bringing Out the Dead might be best described as an artist's sketchbook, a series of tableaux and ideas that provide a telling glimpse of a director whose work is always evolving.

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

The heartbreak comes not from watching her fail, but from realizing how easy it would be for her to succeed. If only she knew better how to try.

What Phoenix and Witherspoon accomplish in this movie is transcendent. They act with every bone and inch of flesh and facial plane, and each tone and waver of their voice.

Johansson bequeaths the welcome sight of a talent in full bloom to this wilted, dark whimsy of a movie.

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.

You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]

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.

Swimming is perceptive and, ultimately, embraceable. Like the adolescent it so lovingly depicts, this is a movie you want only the best for.

While the film is obviously meant as a call to arms, the very single-mindedness of the approach could work against it.

Smith shows the grasp of character and offbeat humor that really registered in "Clerks," and a subtler mastery of film fluidity and professionalism than anything in the cheesy, amateurish "Mallrats."

Winterbottom ("Welcome to Sarajevo," "Go Now") has filmed Wonderland with a hand-held 16 millimeter camera, lending the production an air of scrappy immediacy that is often arrestingly at odds with Michael Nyman's overheated musical score.

The performers are tremendous, particularly Deschanel, who can travel to the end of an emotional tether and then suggest the mysteries of change and growth that lie beyond.

The movie's not nearly as cool as the setup.

Has nearly perfect pitch.

Those who come to the movie cold will find it an exasperating assembly of brutal pedantry and whimsies, boasting far less charm or grace than even the first Harry Potter picture.

Because it's by the Coens, The Big Lebowski is studded with visual and verbal jokes and flourishes, but ultimately they amount to pearls without a string. The Coens have thrown their considerable talents into making the world's smartest dumb movie, a dubious distinction that for their admirers will have to suffice, at least for now.

In some ways, Thank You for Smoking does not bemoan smoking as much as it bemoans people's willingness to be duped by smooth-tongued orators.

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.

The fault isn't Clooney's alone. The Coen brothers contrive a few spectacularly funny bits and pieces but rarely get into a flow. Too often they mistake facetiousness for slapstick invention or wit, and they don't follow through on their best ideas.

The American writer and poet Charles Bukowski is certainly an acquired taste, and Factotum may be just the film for determining whether one wants to acquire it.

At its best, Tropic Thunder wrings divine madness from wretched excess.

Fairly bursts with the exuberance and youthful energy that must have attended its creation.

Craven's films aren't showy, but that should never be held against them. In their streamlined construction and rock-solid simplicity lay their brilliance.

Playing a perpetual victim like Victor (Walken) might be easy, but making audiences want to watch him for 97 minutes isn't.

Deep Blue is pure bliss. This documentary about ocean life in all its forms achieves its own tidal pull with visual marvels that conjure a Darwinian delirium.

Nicholson is terrific here, in a role that demands he act, rather than just be Jack.

What's fatal to the film is that De Niro's character, though compelling, is so temperate and wise he gives no indication of why he was drawn to a life of crime.

Passionately acted and grittily convincing.

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

Plummer's performance is a miracle: In a movie as flat as a tablecloth, he suggests dimensions as wide, deep and curved as Cinerama.

No great shakes as a documentary, but there are great shakes in the sight of 10- and 11-year-olds learning ballroom dancing in the New York City public school system.

There're some low New York laughs in Swingers and some nice clothes if you like bad taste, but on the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. At least they know how to make a sandwich in that town!

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

A thoughtful, engaging film.

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

Fellowes sets the screen for a tale of subterfuge in the upper crust, a la Agatha Christie.

Jonze lets the magic ebb away in a sorry mesh of strained relationships.

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.

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.

Surprisingly formulaic. So many scenes seem lifted from a 1950s melodrama, from Blake and Francis' repentent mother (Leslie Ann Warren) to the film's tearjerker of a final scene.

If only all this wonderful talent wasn't in service to a story that pushes credulity beyond the breaking point, perilously close to the realm of farce. Too many coincidences, too much convenient timing, too little honest plot development.

What makes the movie potent, though, has nothing to do with metaphor or parable. It's that the story provides Connelly, Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Kingsley's wife with all the tools they need to resurrect, flesh out, revamp and criticize outmoded male and female roles.

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]

Denzel Washington does a cocksure turn in Training Day -- That may be enough to transform a shallow picture with delusions of grandeur into a crowd-pleasing hit.

Despite its adrenalized actors, Tape is a tired return to the roots of the American indie movement's popular surge a dozen years ago. It could have been called "sex, lies and audiotape."

In less accomplished hands, Black Book could have been a hopeless mishmash. But Verhoeven proves a sure-handed storyteller, which might come as a surprise, as well as a terrific visual stylist, which shouldn't.

Fails to go into the one realm that would make it worthwhile, which is Ed Wood's brain.