The cast of Rain is first-rate, especially Wierzbicki and Peirse, whose tense relationship is as loving as it is competitive.

Overflowing with comedy and drama, The Boys of Baraka unfolds on the mean streets of Baltimore and in the wide-open spaces of Kenya.

A humorous bounty of flesh and fantasy.

The backgrounds, it must be said, are the most impressive features in the picture: Vibrant with color and often deeply evocative, they make you wish something a bit more lively was happening in front of them. [18 Nov 1994]

White throws in a dog-in-peril shot to ensure the audience's sympathies. The ploy works, perhaps too well, turning Year of the Dog less into the askew character study it wants to be than a showcase of lovable-dog shots.

A welcome anomaly - a shallow hero you root for.

One gets the feeling Kaufman was so intent on putting fury and fanaticism on-screen, he forgot about having it serve any greater purpose. Which makes Quills the film equivalent of one of de Sade's novels: artifice, without art.

Akin to being force-fed sugary confections from a bottomless bowl. At first the idea seems just grand, but after a while, all you want to do is scream, "Enough!"

Almereyda has done a splendid job of rendering Hamlet as expressive visually as it is verbally.

Batman Begins is obvious from the get-go - and almost no fun.

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

This comedy of stereotypes pokes fun at poker buddies and coffee klatches only to make room for variations on more recent stereotypes. Some of the boldest 'types provide the funniest bits, such as Jon Favreau's embodiment of an upscale Stanley Kowalski who treats all-male card games as clan rites.

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

The movie captures exactly why those of us who do this for a living can't seem to shed ourselves of it: that crazed, dizzying, exhausting sense of being, if ever so briefly, where it's happening; and the sense that somewhere out there in the great unknown landscape that is our readership is somebody who cares what we write. The movie understands what draws people to Suns both real and imaginary.

Too much about the game and not enough about the town, the players and everything else.

It's a clear-eyed, unsentimental portrait and indelible for that very reason.

Some might find the whole thing exhilarating, but exhausting is more the word that comes to this man's mind.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

(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.

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

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.

It's a tough slog, but worth seeing once. [08 Nov 2008, p.4C]

Wilde is a worthy movie that, although helped considerably by Stephen Fry's bravura performance, never breaks out of its static, episodic structure. [05 Jun 1998]

Brad Pitt's sensitive performance helps make 'Benjamin Button' a timeless masterpiece.

This may be the quietest addict ever to hit movie screens, as well the most disturbing.

Siegel takes us to the brink of operatic melodrama, then lands us in a tragicomic spot: a psychological landscape of alternate life and make-believe death.

A wonderfully understated work offering insights to a world where no emotion is simple.

The movie doesn't complete itself, in the sense of filling in our knowledge of its people (who are more like passengers). It simply comes to a stop.

Nobody does this stuff better than Disney, and there's plenty here to like.

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

Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.

In Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou tries to top the breathtaking poetic spectacle of his masterpiece, "House of Flying Daggers," and instead plummets into self-parody.

A sensational date movie.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty.

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

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

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.

Luckily, Penn, Watts and Leo carry more weight than that; they keep this movie's two hours and five minutes from seeming like lost time.

Absorbing, artfully executed.

The highest compliment I can pay Pieces of April is that it brings to mind a Paul Simon lyric: "the mother and child reunion is only a motion away."

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.

You'll never see a more tactile expression of the intimacy between artists and their instruments than in Davis Guggenheim's elating It Might Get Loud.

For better and worse, the entire film goes by like a theme-park cyclone ride. It makes as much sense as it needs to when you're on it. All it leaves in its wake is a residue of vertigo and speed.

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.

Although the movie is unabashedly alarming, it's also intelligent fun.

Pucci pulls off Justin's transformation without resorting to histrionics; it's like a radio-station signal finally coming in clearly.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

Comes across as more willfully clever than profound, leaving us to applaud the message while pondering why the messenger had to strain so hard to get it across.

It has a premise that never stops percolating.

In an era of exploding documentary innovation, Girlhood simply follows unfamiliar characters down familiar paths. It's not a negligible experience, but it's not an eye-opener, either.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

The film's action doesn't disappoint; if anything, it ups the adrenaline ante considerably.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

What's frustrating is that the movie should be so much better, or at least more entertaining. With Baldwin, Macy and Bello, director Kramer is holding three of a kind.

It's an odd duck: a labor-intensive piece of light entertainment.

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

Funny Games condescends to its audience like a pretentious, preachifying graduate student in post-modernism. It would help us out of the cultural quagmire we're drowning in, if only we could understand its highly convoluted and exclusive language. [29 May 1998, p.1E]

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.

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

The film has a lot of right in it, including an ending that's suitably uncertain, but fraught with possibilities.

Can be recommended even if just for the presence of Elaine May, who turns in her most charmingly ditzy performance since "A New Leaf."

Aimless and unfocused.

Remarkable documentary.

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

Instead of a sweeping epic, this adaptation of a novel by Elizabeth Bowen is much quieter, a work perhaps too understated and stereotypical for its own good.

Foster is strident, Vincent D'Onofrio has little to do but chain-smoke thoughtfully as an accessible priest, and the physical atmosphere is hazy.

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]

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

If The Eyes of Tammy Faye is skimpy, it's still an important correction to the record about this fascinating and misunderstood woman, who turns out to be much more than just her makeup.

While it displays its share of quirky charm, off-kilter characters and outlandish situations, this is really the first film where you can feel the Coens straining to keep up with themselves.

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

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.

Norton is brilliant in Lee's so-so 'Hour.'

The movie conveys the drama of the moment but eschews context. The result is an arresting yet frustrating experience.

Divided We Fall has a lot going for it, but its Places in the Heart ending, sentimental and incongruous, helps ensure that it will not find a place in a demanding audience's heart or mind.

"His eye is incredibly sharp and amazing, in regard to visceral cinema," says Uma Thurman, who has worked with Tarantino on both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. "He's a great storyteller. He's very seductive as a filmmaker."

The enthralling documentary Crazy Love is about how a high-flying lawyer's obsession with a young beauty blinded her, metaphorically and literally.

For all its pretensions, Changing Lanes, ultimately, is about nothing more profound than one foul day.

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).

There's plenty to like about Adrenaline Drive, including the appealing, sympathetic performances of its two young stars and the tongue-in-cheek humor that pervades the film.

An opportunity to enjoy the pure adrenaline rush that has always been the hallmark of martial-arts cinema.

It bears roughly the same resemblance to the Bennett Miller-Dan Futterman-Philip Seymour Hoffman masterpiece as the now-forgotten "Valmont" did to "Dangerous Liaisons."

At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

Light, engaging documentary.

In Babe: Pig in the City, the sunny mood of the Hoggett Farm has been supplanted by darker urban tones, suggesting the arrival of a new cinematic genre: Barnyard Noir.

His film would benefit from more subtlety and tighter editing, but as both director and star, Gibson takes the story by the hilt and plunges forward, as single-minded as Wallace screaming into battle.

But even those who succumb to his primitive, survivalist vision may resent the way he presents every kind of atrocity at least twice without illuminating any of the exotic details once.

It's one of those movies whose appeal depends on the viewer's tolerance for watching French people suffer, smoke and sigh prettily.

There's an awful lot of kinetic energy to Chopper, and the violence is portrayed as graphically as imaginable.

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

The only thing that tops Cave here is Cohen himself at the end, singing "Tower of Song" with U2.

This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

What's missing is what Pixar never fails to provide: The kind of storytelling heart that is inseparable from imagination.

This flight of fancy stays aloft on the power of its acting and its atmosphere.

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