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.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." When Woody Allen published his second collection, he called it Without Feathers. Guest is as sharp and original as Allen, but he hasn't lost hope. For Your Consideration -- disillusioned but also fresh and ticklish -- is a thing with feathers, too.

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

Characters are manipulated and lives made whole in ways both satisfying and unexpected.

Soldini's consistently understated touch, and a poignant turn by Licia Maglietta as the confused and bemused main character, turns Bread and Tulips into a character study worth studying.

Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.

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.

Russell's conviction is so total that it tingles the spines of the audience.

The people are just a little too calculatedly quirky in Off the Map, an otherwise engaging comedy.

It's a topical, iconoclastic documentary with the warmth and pace of a first-rate personal essay.

There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.

It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

It's a small, amusing movie that's long on charming affability. [03 Feb 1995]

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.

A thoroughly absorbing, even transfixing, journey to a future that may already be upon us.

A pop masterpiece.

It pulls together diverse residents of the city, from produce vendors to academics, and trains a loving eye on their unique environments and the urban landscapes they all share.

There's more than a trace of James Dean in Gosling, except that he's a rebel with a cause.

The fascination, humor and poignancy of Departures, this year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, rests in the Japanese ceremony of preparing bodies for their caskets.

This Filthy World does many things, including transform tabloid commentary into comic art. But at its best, it shows that the child is father to the wild man.