A stunning documentary that examines life at the ground level in a patch of banally pretty but otherwise nondescript French meadow. [27 Nov 1996]

A campy riot of retro cool, a warm and fuzzy ode to the '70s buddy cops.

"Happy Accidents" should retire Tomei's status as part of a show-biz urban legend and establish her once and for all as one of our most versatile and engaging performers.

An absorbing glimpse not only at the phenomenon of punk rock but also at British social history and the rock star mystique.

It's a fine, fierce and nearly unforgettable movie.

An engaging yarn and a moving character study, but it's also a sweet, sad glimpse of everyone's future.

The movie needs more incident and complication; it's modest to a fault.

You won't want to miss it if you care about movies that dare to chart intimacies in our age of spectacle, or about up-and-coming female performers and underused male veterans finding roles worthy of their gifts.

By the time it's ended, past and present have fused inextricably to create a movie that, in its own down-home way, is nothing less than epic.

The whole movie aspires to set an Annie Hall vibe, especially when Tom keeps trying to re-create, first with her and then with someone else.

Though it stops short of explosive comedy, the Ivan Reitman film is consistently amusing in its populist celebration of common sense and decency in the place of sophistication, power-brokering and cynicism.

A refreshingly unpredictable and fizzy comic fantasy. It tickles the fancy even when it strains credibility.

Funny, sweet and only mildly offensive.

Not a perfect 10, but its imperfection is what makes it gripping and bewitching.

While it's certainly too derivative to be a great movie, it's too goodhearted and modest in its aspirations to be denied.

This delightful, if perhaps too calculatedly winsome, comedy presents seniors who are coping with emotional and physical losses and challenges them to act like the young people they still are at heart.

Like its predecessor, Jeepers Creepers 2 is that rare modern horror film that remembers audiences are scared far more by what they don't see than by what they do. For that alone, horror fans should be thankful.

Charming has devolved into almost a pejorative these days, but Tuck Everlasting is the sort of film that could change that.

With a wistful look at the wages of ambition and the failure of promise, Wonder Boys finally celebrates self-awareness, ending on a muted, quietly moving note of triumph.

The result is a movie that inspires without pontificating and plays on the heartstrings without pounding on them incessantly.

In Hustle & Flow, a star is born playing a star who's born.

It's hard to figure where it's going, and when the movie's over, it's even harder figuring where it's been. But the careening roller-coaster ride calling itself Smokin' Aces is such a hoot to be on, who really cares?

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.

Director Daniele Thompson gets the point across so airily and pleasantly, in a film cast to perfection, that it's no problem accepting the message with a shrug, while profoundly enjoying the messenger.

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 Son's Room is the anti-"In the Bedroom." I mean that as a compliment.

A quirky and satisfying love story.