Reflective, deliberate, building gradually to a climax that left me touched.

They have turned a brief, appealing, honest autobiography by Susanna Kaysen into a long, appealing, rather dishonest film.

A tribute to anyone who ever picked up a score, a pen, a paintbrush or a grease pencil - or a movie camera.

Foster and Yun-Fat each show about three-quarters of their characters.

Charming Stuart Little improves on original tale.

Atmosphere goes only so far in a story where the major characters fade from memory.

May wrestle with big ideas, but it does so through a succession of small emotional moments.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

To adapt it for a 130-minute movie, Irving ruthlessly cut away subplots, eliminated supporting characters and pared down the traits of the ones that remain.

It's packed with such passion, humor, fine acting in small roles - there are no big ones - and vitality in the storytelling that the lesson comes across entertainingly.

It's choppy and cheap-looking, and it has dead spots like the Sahara, but it also has a surprising number of genuinely funny bits, most of them slapsticky and gleefully rude.

A conventionally violent, do-or-die ending on such an unconventional movie.

It flies apart when it clumsily introduces humor at a funeral or an application for death benefits.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

Wrestles with big questions, gets the upper hand during the first hour, then loses its grip. By the end, it's flat on its back on the mat.

The film isn't quite as striking as its star, but it's just as honest.

I do have one overpowering Y2K fear: that Hollywood will keep belching out movies as excruciatingly dull, brutal, mindless and overlong as End of Days.

The sequel is faster, funnier and wilder, with more cunningly contrived computer effects.

A long, slow pity party full of characters who constantly bemoan their fate while telling other people not to pity themselves.

Fair, overlong James Bond from the second shelf.

The film, though seldom sleepy, is often hollow.

Almodovar still populates his work with characters you'll see nowhere else in movies.

A love story more involved than I can easily explain.

A scathing, scurrilous, sometimes silly but often searching comedy about the nature of faith in the 21st century.

Deep as a Canadian lake: Below the placid surface, menacing creatures swim around unseen.

If you have a strong stomach, a weak sense of disbelief, an active interest in Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie and a temporarily inactive brain, you may enjoy it awhile.

Foggy allegories and misty metaphors.

Rarely connects with reality.