Builds slowly but passionately, not dancing to some Hollywood tune, but finding its characters where they are and letting them be who they are.

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.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

Spring, Summer values life, beauty and even human fallibility, ascribing to humanity a nobility we neglect at our own peril.

The real attraction is watching all these guys and gals on the train, so young, so dedicated to their music, so unconcerned about almost everything else.

The movie lives in its small details.

Tells an important story about a story that might never have been told at all.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

Hero is a movie that lives up to all the nobility of its title, a gift to movie audiences who cherish the opportunity to be transported to a heretofore unimagined world and absorbed totally into what happens there.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

This is Mitchell's show, and his performance lives up to his triple billing as writer, director and star.

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.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.

You may feel like you need a drink and a shower when you come out of "Naked," but at least you'll know you've been somewhere new.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

Hathaway carries you on an emotional whirligig that can be horrifying and funny, hopeful and devastating.

A terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a pleader.

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

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

As great as the film looks, the story, adapted from a novel by P.D. James, never quite comes into focus.

A revealing, intimate, quirky and generous portrait of nothing less than the American Dream.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.