Cruise holds the center of the film with a sharply focused performance, though his bonding with the wise samurai chieftain (Ken Watanabe) is noticeably more ardent than his soggy romance with the stoic wife of a man he killed in combat.

Writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore steal from the best, gleefully cribbing from "A Christmas Carol" to fashion a screenplay with heart and sharp one-liners.

The special effects are incredible, blah blah blah, but oddly, the most effective element here is the original movie's striking visual design-everything pitch black except for the luminescent piping on the costumes and foreground objects-which was inspired by the primitive arcade games of the early 80s.

Leslie Dixon's script and TV sitcom specialist Garry Marshall's direction are basically warm, funny, and lighthearted, and the relaxed amiability of the two leads—as well as Chicagoan Michael Hagerty and Roddy McDowall (who doubles as executive producer)—helps to make this good family entertainment.

All this could've collapsed into empty shocks if not for Inoue's gripping performance as an exasperated single woman who senses her happiness slipping away with each vengeful blow.

Needless to say, the plot goes nowhere, but under the pornographic circumstances Figgis, Cage, and Shue all do fine jobs.

Chen tries to generate some suspense, but there's never any doubt which side has to win.

Director Alan J. Pakula’s first effort is so technically imprecise and understated that it has a kind of wistful charm—as if Wendell Burton, who plays the superstraight, mild-mannered preppie to Liza Minnelli’s sad, quizzical, freaked-out emotional loser, had directed and written it himself.

Director Sidney Hayes can be needlessly rhetorical at times, relying on a campus statue of an eagle to create a sense of menace (the UK title was Night of the Eagle), but this is still eerily effective.

Sam Rockwell plays the brother, and in his handful of scenes he skillfully tracks the character's slow decay from cocky loudmouth to thoroughly beaten man; Swank, delivering her usual spunky turn, suffers badly by comparison.

The two leads keep the movie afloat with their light-footed class warfare. This Anglican buddy romance is buoyed by a spicy history lesson about the scandalous marriage of the duke's elder brother, Edward VIII, to the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.

An engaged and knowing look at the underground world of improvised rap, concentrating on artists less interested in commercial success and cutting records than in the "spontaneous right now" of "nonconceptual rhyme."

Despite the aggressive silliness of this enjoyable comedy, the emotional focus on the painful social experience of high school makes the film real and immediate, and the flavorsome dialogue in Robin Schiff's script gives the leads a lot to work (as well as play) with.

The thematics are rather cloying, but the mood—profoundly relaxed, bemused—eventually conquers.

This is every bit as silly and adolescent as you'd expect from Besson, and about as contemporary as "The Perils of Pauline." But I was delighted by the balletic and acrobatic stunts, some of which evoke Tarzan.

The narrative kept me glued to my seat.

This time the quest plot involves Asian-American pals Harold and Kumar chasing after a Christmas tree to replace one they've accidentally burned down, but that's only an excuse for the relentless barrage of tasteless gags, most of them damned funny.

Though the story drags for the first hour, this becomes a solid character study once the principals arrive at their hiding place.

Occasionally cloying, but the distinguished British cast (Anna Massey, Robert Lang, Georgina Hale, Millicent Martin) generates considerable gravitas.

Set in postwar Berlin, the story involves prostitution, black marketeering, and the death camps, and the tension between the visual style and the adult story makes the movie pretty engrossing -- it's an R-rated "Casablanca."

For a family picture this is still superior.

The result, though clearly flawed, is passionate and ambitious, celebrating that long-gone era when a book of verse could spark a revolution in consciousness.

I appreciated its cogent history lesson, which details China's brutal treatment of Tibetan nationals from the late 1940s through the Cultural Revolution and into the '80s, when it executed 15,000 dissidents.

Fresh, character driven, often funny, and unfashionably upbeat (as well as offbeat).

Director Mark Bamford has a feel for the entanglements of daily life, and his lively editing rhythm holds the multiple stories together.

Everyone in the cast conveys that messy mix of teen self-consciousness and bravado, but Josh Peck is particularly nuanced as the bully.

Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) steals his every scene as the aphorism-spouting Fowley while Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning often fade into the 70s wallpaper as guitarist Joan Jett and front woman Cherie Currie.

The film is still an entertaining and invigorating thriller, with a structure and some curious sexual overtones that suggest Howard Hawks's "A Girl in Every Port."

This engaging documentary traces the life of folk icon Pete Seeger, emphasizing his lifelong belief in the power of music as both a social and a political force.

Despite a melodramatic score that at times seems almost facetious, the movie's tone is sober and sincere, its unlikely ending persuasive.

The melodrama form allows Tornatore to examine such current issues as human trafficking and black-market babies within a yarn that, for all its sentiment, is never less than gripping.

This documentary about the public education crisis isn't as smart or rigorous as Bob Bowdon's shoestring production "The Cartel," which arrived in town earlier this year and quickly vanished. But the new movie is still an admirable exercise in straight talk.

Director Mike Barker elicits a marvelously agile performance from Hunt, who's well matched by Tom Wilkinson as her new admirer.

Screwball office comedy.

Thanks to a fairly good script, this thriller about a Soviet cop sent to Chicago to apprehend a Soviet drug dealer is a respectable enough star vehicle.

Funny, moving, and insightful look at questions about identity and community.

A fine example of the genre, but not for jaded tastes.

Posh meets prole in this period drama elegantly directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Prick Up Your Ears).

Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public.

Klores and Stevens don't have much to work with visually besides talking heads, old photos, news clippings, and stock footage, but with a narrative this insane, that's more than enough.

Functions primarily as a suspense film, and it manages to be gripping even though the outcome is already known.

The musical value of this footage is so powerful that nothing can deface it, despite the best efforts of Zwerin to do so: all the worst habits of jazz documentaries in treating the music, from cutting off numbers midstream to burying them with voice-overs (which also happens on the sound track album), are routinely employed.

Messy but engaging comedy.

Compared to "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service," this is one of the anime master's weaker efforts.

Kiarostami tries to explain himself and reveals contradictions and a penchant for hyperbole--along with surprising insights.

Spectacular CGI disasters.

Harrelson returns in Moverman's second feature playing a similar character, a bullheaded LAPD officer whose long career with the force is unraveling amid a succession of brutality complaints, and although the role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, it's counterbalanced in this case by funny, observant scenes of his gyno-centric home life.

In keeping with his models, West is concerned with not suspense exactly but the ritual withholding and ultimate lavishing of bloody chaos.

The plays and amusements the boys put on--by far the most successfully magical scenes in the movie--inspire Barrie to create his great work, "Peter Pan."

A highly enjoyable and offbeat thriller.

Inevitably it's a mixed bag, though the film's assurance in keeping it all coherent is at times exhilarating.

The tradition goes back centuries, but by tracking the seven-year odyssey of a young girl named Guddi from dutiful daughter to family rebel, Brabbee is able to puncture the system's facade of social acceptability, exposing its contradictions in memorable fashion.

This isn't all gold--there are lame riffs on a booze-swilling dog and a flabby old man with a boner--but it's well above average.

For horror fans who crave a few laughs along with their ritual decapitations and limb severings.

Largely free of generic horror-movie elements, such as exploitative torture and murder scenes. Those it does contain draw attention to the difference between the conventions of psychological drama and those of pulp horror.

This 1983 feature was Carpenter's best film since Halloween but still couldn't recapture the perfect balance of visceral shock and narrative integrity that defined his first success.

A fleet, enjoyable Jackie Chan romp.

Steven Sebring spent a decade making this documentary about the punk poet, and it shows.

The fulcrum of this deeply humanist work is an extended two-shot of the strike's leader, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), as he converses with a priest (Liam Cunningham); the virtuosic sequence encapsulates the whole sorry history of a horrific civil war.

Not without its cruelties, but not without its beauties as well.

Anticapitalist propaganda that persuades and uplifts is in short supply these days.

This dazzling CGI feature by DreamWorks Animation appropriates the vivid undersea psychedelia of "Finding Nemo," though in contrast to that movie, the father-son parable here is just an excuse to burlesque "The Godfather" for the 100th time.

The bitterly beautiful black-and-white industrial and residential landscapes reflect the sense of anonymity felt by the characters.

The notion that Page, like Marilyn Monroe, was too ditzy to know what she was doing is more a mythological construct than an observation.

The behind-the-scenes access to professional kitchens, the intricacy of the desserts, the venerable traditions, and above all the camaraderie and respect the chefs extend each other reveal the craftsmen at their civilized best; think of this movie as the antidote to Gordon Ramsay.

The movie brushes against some of India's worst social ills, but it's essentially a fairy tale.

Robert Wieckiewicz is good as the conflicted protagonist, but the most valuable player here is cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, who turns in handsome work even though most of the action transpires in inky blackness.

The source material has undergone some sentimental softening, though Hope Davis, as the heroine's sister, does a swell job of making sanity seem obnoxious.

A heart-wrenching performance from Brenda Blethyn sustains this 2009 drama by French writer-director Rachid Bouchareb.

Mostly it's an overearnest examination of emotional and sexual fidelity.

A throwaway comedy that really delivers.

This gets very suspenseful (as well as fairly gruesome) in spots, and if it never adds up to anything profound, it's still a welcome change to have a lesbian couple as the chief identification figures.

To her credit, Perry isn't taken in by Fujimori's attempts to distance himself from the controversies that plagued his presidency. Helped by Kim Roberts's excellent editing, she succinctly chronicles his unlikely ascent and subsequent collapse.

Carpenter creates a vision of the technological future that is both disillusioned and oddly affirmative in its insistence on the unscientific survival of emotional frailty.

The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence.

Milius can be faulted for reviving a number of ostensibly dead macho myths, but in the context of the subculture his film deftly re-creates, they take on the aura of eternal values. The breathtaking surfing footage, rather than the slightly stunted characters, makes his most eloquent argument.

Befitting her subjects, director Leanne Pooley maintains a joyful tone throughout.

Set in an expressively underlit environment, this rivetingly moody drama is enhanced by the restrained use of incidental music.

Humorous touches add warmth without being cloying, but Mullan carries the film with his intelligence and rugged intensity: images of his barrel-chested physique against the craggy shore resound on such an elemental level as to be almost spiritual.

Some powerful dialogue.

Pacino is typically excitable but also strangely sad, as if the case could take all he's got; Williams, on the other hand, tries playing against type but still goes over the top.

A painstakingly crafted nonrealist story, which doesn't seem to imply anything beyond what it depicts.

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are both such guarded celebrities that I have a hard time imagining them as lovers, a problem this Chicago-based romantic fantasy surmounted by isolating them from each other almost entirely.

The film is never dull and often rousing, but this is essentially a conventional version of a classic opera--the attempt to transform it into a critique of macho hubris comes off as an afterthought, and the poverty is just a backdrop.

Peter Weir, the standard-bearer of the Australian Tradition of Quality, is on hand to smother all the contrivances in his solemn, academic style, and the result is a moderately effective, highly affected thriller.

Unlike high school movies made for the teen market, Chalk gets many of its laughs from the backstage wrangling among the teachers as they unload their stress on one another.

Meticulously rendered CGI creatures--from Arthur Rackham-esque flower sprites to a troll that could have sprung from "Jurassic Park"--spike this dark adventure, shot marvelously by Caleb Deschanel.

As a suspense movie, this works pretty well: director Bryan Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) maintains a crisp pace as the plotters set out to kill the fuhrer with a briefcase bomb, and the historical details of the botched coup, which exploited one of Hitler's own contingency plans to mobilize the army reserves and disarm the SS, are inherently interesting.

Its mix of personal reminiscence (Mario made his screen debut playing Sweetback as a boy) and cultural history is fascinating. This engages in a fair amount of mythmaking itself, but its lesson in self-empowerment is both vivid and sincere.

One of the few Romero films written by someone else (Rudolph J. Ricci), it has a good eye for the kind of unglamorous middle-class life seldom seen in American movies.

This is certainly well executed, with a sense of fate and fancy akin to Pedro Almodovar's, but its glibness began to wear on me after the agonizing death of a Great Dane was played for laughs.

This bleak vision directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") is pointless with good reason.

Subplots are woven stealthily into the story, taking the pressure off the central drama, allowing it to be affecting rather than melodramatic, and heightening the atmosphere of the lush Louisiana setting.

Though it lacks the sensational pizzazz of "Blackboard Jungle", the politics here are arguably somewhat better, and the supporting cast -- George Dzundza, Courtney P. Vance, Robin Bartlett, Beatrice Winde -- isn't bad either.

It's soon apparent that a closer model for this charming romantic comedy is "Bell, Book and Candle." The direction by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) is so fluffy it's easy to drift along and ignore the logical lapses.

I don't care for Benjamin's way of using death to validate his sentimental themes, but at this point any American movie that can get past the "I love you”s without audience snickers has to be counted a success.

The portraiture is so carefully done that I regret in some ways the tricky plot--which is also carefully done, but seems at times to belong to a different movie.

Ella Ramangwane gives a fine performance as the young Sandra.