The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

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

Its heart and head are in the right place, but its feet and hands aren't busy enough.

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]

It's cathartic and exhilarating.

Try as I might, I could not love it, because as a piece of cinema, Into Great Silence would try the patience of a saint.

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.

Lumumba revives the tradition of Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers" and Costa-Gavras' "Z" and "State of Siege." In substance and excitement, it joins their ranks.

The title captures this film's harrowing qualities, but not its energy, its limpid beauty or its spiritual grace.

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

A crackerjack thriller, laced with labyrinthine mysteries, moral quandaries and unspeakable evil.

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.

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

The real hero here is Ghobadi, whose love and respect for the culture in which he was raised shines through every frame.

Despite its director's skill at staging trash with dash, Oldboy is too long and portentous to be an enjoyable B movie. The movie's self-seriousness short-circuits its sensationalism.

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.

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.

Reaches the highest comic heights when the show itself starts.

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

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.

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

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.

There is undeniable power in Magnolia, in which small moments of truth are given epic gravitas, not just by Anderson's adroit cinematic style (no one's camera is more restless or inquisitive), but by the wisdom and compassion of the characters he creates.

It's like Chekhov with a British accent.

A visual feast of colorful stop-motion animation, offers many bite-size delights. Ultimately, though, it isn't nearly as flavorful as Roald Dahl's deliciously perverse children's book, upon which the movie is based.

The film is the work of a visual genius who may have overextended his storytelling ability, but with fascinating results.

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]