The story may be about cold-blooded murder, but Bullock's pulsating performance is about the getting of wisdom.

Zellweger has a ticklish furriness reminiscent of Jean Arthur in her screwball comic prime.

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."

Pointed and satiric. Best of all, one must hasten to admit, it's pretty funny.

One of the unique virtues of the cinema is its ability to bring history to life with engrossing detail and gripping immediacy; East-West does this.

The movie is full of holes - it lacks the precision and verve of a Francis Veber farce like "The Dinner Game" - but the two actors brew up a sane kind of comedy from their fractious rapport.

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

The story line meanders and too many scenes drone on; Knocked Up is in serious need of a good editor. But the laughs are plentiful, and it's the rare movie these days where one doesn't feel guilty about finding the whole thing funny.

John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.

Chilling doesn't begin to describe Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple...But the film never gets behind the chill.

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

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.

Extract is an exuberant original...like no other and one of the best comedies of the year.

For movie fans who despair of the state of American cinema, the in-jokes are hilarious.

Macabre and astonishing, Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is a brilliant piece of technology, perhaps undercut a bit by the insincerity of its story and the blood-and-thunder music of Danny Elfman (every single piece he writes sounds like every other single piece he writes). But nasty kids and bored parents should love it.

This compelling account of the explosive growth of Lyme disease grows to encompass all the peculiar politics, corruption and inertia of American medicine.

Seinfeld is the perfect figure to center a documentary called, generically, Comedian.

For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.

Sometimes sly and witty, sometimes dull and forced, Coffee and Cigarettes is Jim Jarmusch's testimony to the difficulties and delights of communication.

Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.

Like "Tango," Wang's film also seeks to uncover whether sex without emotion is really possible, or worth the effort.

You Kill Me kills you softly with its smiles.

Superior family fare.

In the end, this is a movie that doesn't respect its own power. Less of a stacked deck would have left Vera Drake to play a far more effective hand.

The best moments in Paper Clips - and there are plenty - come when it doesn't resort to mundane cliches or calculated emotions to make its point.

Earns few points for originality, but scads for good-hearted exuberance.

Jet Li and Bridget Fonda form a terrific bond in this action film. And the choreography adds a nice kick, too.

By all means, buy a ticket to The Fast Runner, but don't go expecting a masterpiece; actually, in its first hour, the dramaturgy and staging of scenes set in igloos are cramped and amateurish.

The Bourne Identity keeps you in a state of nervous excitation from the opening shot to the fade-out and has a thread of deadpan humor that vibrates alongside the main action like a third rail quivering next to a hurtling train.

Say 'I do' to Best Man.

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

Touching and insightful.

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

Modest, tasty, and it goes down easy, like home cooking.

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

The basic trouble with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is that it goes on far longer than it should. A film of this sort should be no longer than 85 or 90 minutes. This one is 110 minutes long, which means we have to wait much longer for the mouse to turn on the cat.

The movie doesn't add up to much, but it's an effervescent expression of an odd brute-hummingbird sensibility.

It was a time in history eminently worth celebrating on film.

Queen Latifah, the star of Barbershop 2 and Beauty Shop, and thus our reigning monarch of big-screen beauty stylists, should fund and narrate a sequel. Because The Beauty Academy of Kabul is good enough to make you want to know how they do.

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.

Amy Adams beguiled audiences in "Junebug" and "Enchanted" and breathed humanity into the histrionic "Doubt." In the eccentric comedy-drama Sunshine Cleaning, set in the least picturesque parts of Albuquerque, N.M., she tops her own proven talent for epiphany.

Tautou's kind of talent: priceless.

The genius of Garfield's performance is that he fills him with equal amounts of terror and wonder.

What makes this movie ultra-contemporary is the way Abrams has re-imagined Spock and Kirk as a team of rivals.

A slice-of-life where being gay is a fact of daily existence, not an excuse for existential dilemmas or grand tragedies.

It's the performances of Ulrich and Gooding, in particular, that lift Chill Factor out of the derivative. Gooding possesses so much boundless energy that he practically dares you not to care, not to get involved, not to root for his success.

Surprisingly moving and intellectually satisfying.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

Your basic Lasse Hallstrom formula-film, featuring people in dire situations who are redeemed when their basic goodness comes to the fore, elevated a notch by a pair of actors displaying sides we don't often see.

A glamorous, alluring entertainment that revels in the artifice of Hollywood while exposing its corrupt heart, L.A. Confidential pays stylish homage to some of the great film noirs of the distant and recent past.

It's exciting and satisfying, even if the chief villain isn't terribly original and the chase scenes are overlong. Bullock is plucky and believable as an average person who must marshal her strength and smarts to get her life back.

Romanek does such a nice job of calibrating his film's squirm factor, it's possible to overlook some flaws that would sink a lesser film.

Those willing to overlook its emotional grandstanding will find much to admire and even more to think about in this Oscar-nominated Danish drama.

X-Men flies to the rescue with superheroes who have real substance.

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

Luckily, the new The Incredible Hulk is more like those 80-page special issues that comic-book publishers sold in the early 1960s for a quarter, packed with old, favorite story lines.

It has a premise that never stops percolating.

An action-adventure flick that could turn into this generation's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Serenity may be short on exposition, but it's smart and fun.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Offers a welcome riff on a well-worn horror standard.

The Fugitive runs hard and true the whole way through.

Whatever its flaws, Get on the Bus is fairly electric with hope and anger. [16 Oct 1996]

Del Toro stuffs the film with wit and wonderments. Yet, coming out this superhero summer, it plays like a lovingly crafted synthesis of every fantasy saga we've seen in the past decade.

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

Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.

The movie is best when everything is up in the air.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

Rampling's authority over splintered emotions has the force of revelation.

Romantically nostalgic, a love letter to growing up in simpler times.

The original French title is "La Doublure," but The Valet fits Veber. He has become a one-man service industry when it comes to spreading Gallic barbed humor and good cheer.

The determinedly cynical needn't bother, but just about everyone else should love Eight Below.

It's affable entertainment -- a road movie with a smart map and characters who are unpredictable human beings, not just billboard attractions.

Irresistible, campy fun.

Kingsley dims divine Elegy.

This is Forster's show, and he doesn't disappoint.

It's a blast!

Rocky and Bullwinkle have not only returned, but they've been placed in the hands of filmmakers who know what they're doing.

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

Because Bar-Lev fails to go the extra mile either as a filmmaker or a friend, My Kid Could Paint That is at best "documentary silver."

Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks snap, tension and bravura...Yet the movie is novel and big-hearted. It often succeeds at substituting a smorgasbord of psychological confusions for comic architecture.

The cascade of ideas proves to be both pleasurable and frustrating. As the movie retreats into a happy-ever-after ending, even its outrageous lies seem more like little white ones.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

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

These guys are funny.

Oshii is able to knit together action sequences with extraordinary power and conviction.... Ghost in the Shell is absolutely terrific.

Takes a great idea -- what if the inhabitants of a museum came to life at night? -- and milks it for every drop of fun it's worth.

Like "Anais," the only surprises Breillat has in store for us are bad ones. In the willfully perverse final act, she delivers a sadistic blow to the audience -- with a sledgehammer.

A twisted little comic gem.

Foxx is magnificent, taking a role that could be exorbitantly showy (actors playing the mentally disabled tend to forget the word "restraint") and turning in a performance that's controlled and mesmerizing.

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.

Buy your ticket, sit yourself down, and let ol' John take you for a ride. You'll have a blast.

It offers top actors in Fiennes and Richardson, plus a rare joint appearance by the sisters Redgrave.

There's a power to Woman Thou Art Loosed that transcends its limitations, a determined, heartfelt belief in the possibility of redemption.

The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.

What proves the validity of Kandahar is that, by the end, all these scenes are human ruins of the same nightmare world.

The Summer Olympics may offer more intricate, arduous and high-stakes spectacles, but nothing will top the last half-hour of Gunnin' for That #1 Spot for adrenalized high spirits.

Suffused with a sophomoric sensibility that belies its more serious underpinnings.