No Man's Land is a 98-minute wonder: this story of three men in a trench renews the meaning of the word "trenchant."

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, Blood Simple is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way.

A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.

It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.

Penelope Cruz is sensational in Volver - she's its lifeblood, its raison d'etre and its meaning.

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

This thoroughly modern movie pulls off a classical feat. It elicits the searing combination of pity and terror that leaves a viewer feeling purged.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

A friendly movie, as scruffy and cozy as a woolen watch cap.

Wastes amusing beginnings.

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.

Isn't a noble story, or even a cautionary one: It just feels pretty painfully real.

A headlong pastiche of lower-depth melodrama and absurd black comedy.

A harrowing depiction of a woman's plight under the Taliban.

It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud.

There's a good heart beating at the core of Victor Vargas, one that belies its R-rating.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

Inspirational, heart-rending and the movie that made Taylor a star - what more do you want? [19 May 2007, p.9S]

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

Quick and lowdown-delightful. It's also a graveyard or two up in class from the torture films that, in recent years, have redefined horror for the worse.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.