Challenges us to reconcile its snapshots of earnest entrepreneurs, colleagues, and fans with its long takes of her disillusionment.

Coming-of-age drama is pretty familiar stuff.

Fascinating and troubling documentary.

The film never moves far from the conventions of Italian sex farces—that is, it’s a comedy of embarrassment and frustration—but the flip Marxism adds a little flavor.

As pulp sci-fi this Fox release is pretty good, but it's also commendable for its sensitive depiction of adolescent behavior: even the bullying scenes avoid the caricature of most studio films.

The plot, though, is recycled from the Vince Vaughn comedy "Fred Claus" (Santa's duties are assumed by a goofy relative, in this case son Arthur) and the old Rankin-Bass special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (Arthur goes on a rogue expedition with a couple other misfits).

Terry Gilliam's third fantasy feature (1989) may not achieve all it reaches for, but it goes beyond Time Bandits and Brazil in its play with space and time, and as a children's picture offers a fresh and exciting alternative to the Disney stranglehold on the market.

Although the last part of the film becomes repetitive and slightly confused, Eastwood manages the picaresque plot with skill, and his visuals have a high-charged, almost Germanic quality. Wales also possesses a touching emotional vulnerability that marks another significant step away from Eastwood's often-overcriticized macho image. All in all, a very creditable film.

Intelligent and handsomely mounted, though it doesn't use its length to build to a particularly complex emotional effect. It's a thin, snaky epic with more breadth than body, rather like watching an entire Masterpiece Theatre chapter play in a single sitting.

Blake Edwards's 1962 film is largely a formal study, a good excuse to explore some offbeat locations in San Francisco (including Candlestick Park at the climax). Nice work, but Edwards has done better.

It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.

Solid, agreeable entertainment, this basically consists of plentiful gags and lighthearted satire spiked with Dante's compulsive taste for movie references, humorously scripted by Charlie Haas but without the darker thematic undertones and the more tableaulike construction of the original.

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.

Even as a hagiography, though, it's pretty interesting: Fishbone predated-and outlived-the early 90s "alternative" boom that provided it with a brief marketing hook, yet the band truly embodied alternative music's underground ideal, challenging listeners of all races and musical persuasions.

This is a remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.

An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson.

This is effective as straight-ahead, action-packed storytelling, losing some of its energy only in the final stretch.

When Sayles has a compelling story line he's one of America's finest (Matewan, Lone Star), but when he doesn't he can be dull and unfocused. Filling out the latter category is this ensemble drama about piracy, both personal and economic, on an island off the coast of northern Florida.

This made-for-cable opus, halfway between documentary and docudrama, is willing to try anything and everything except for a consistent relationship to its material.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.

The contrast between Cadigan in recovery and at his most disturbed provides an excellent antidote to romanticized and sensationalized portrayals of mental illness in Hollywood films and on TV talk shows.

Takes too long to get its themes and characters out on the field.

Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction, and his wonderful cast never lets him down.

This 1948 effort is probably the last of their watchable films, though it’s a long way from their best.

David Levien codirected; the fine supporting cast includes Richard Schiff, Jesse Eisenberg, and Danny DeVito.

This is a fairly accomplished first feature -perky, visually inventive, and unusually nast

Fascinating: supposedly the crooks kept all the cash and jewelry, but their sponsors in the MI5 were really after sexually explicit blackmail photos of Princess Margaret and other aristocrats that were being held by the revolutionary Michael X.

Many of the elements in this story about a woman who's nearly eclipsed by her overbearing mother are all too familiar, yet the combination is utterly charming.

Depardieu, a great actor who in recent years has delivered several overblown performances, is here measured and naturalistic, a sympathetic match for Ardant's icy obsessive, and Beart is suitably mysterious as a spy in the house of love.

The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era--especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous "Eve's Bayou."

So little care has gone into the characterizations, the structure, and the situations that the film merely feints at significant comedy.

For all his good intentions, screenwriter Paul Laverty (best known for his work with Ken Loach) is didactic and crudely manipulative.

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

Its numerous ancillary characters are so closely observed that even those without speaking parts register as people, in a manner than blurs the line between strangeness and intimacy.

The 3-D effect is fun: during a thrilling launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, hurtling debris cracks the camera lens, and I found myself checking my goggles for damage.

Partly funded by the Humane Society, this gripping documentary by Michael Webber rips the lid off a scandal that periodically turns up on local newscasts but then disappears from public consciousness.

Roger Corman's 1970 retelling of the story of Ma Barker and her three loony sons in Depression-era America is completely out of control, but the smash-and-grab stylistics are exhilarating.

One of the earliest of the Disney true-life adventures (1953), this won an Academy Award for best documentary, in spite (or because) of its celebrated use of square-dance music with footage of scorpions.

Stanley Donen's follow-up to Charade is not quite the tour de force the earlier film was, but even with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren standing in for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, it's a slick and satisfying entertainment.

The snickering humor that percolated through the Coens' debut, Blood Simple, is the whole show here, and it's damn near hysterical.

It's all very clever but not really provocative - though a layer of political subtext may make the scenario seem funnier and more meaningful.

The film persuades us to think long and hard about what prison means, and Lee has shaped it like a poem that builds into an epic lament, especially in a beautiful and tragic closing that risks absurdity to achieve the sublime.

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) seem to be after the gentle irreverence of David Gordon Green's buddy flick "Pineapple Express," but without his sensitivity and attention to character the movie quickly grows monotonous.

It's a classic fight movie, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable martial arts instructor...But nesting inside is a sour little 70s-style David Mamet play about the lies, calculations, and ice-cold politics of Hollywood, as the fighter is befriended and then discarded by a callow movie star.

An eminently watchable antique, this was the Marx Brothers' first film — a literal recording of their Broadway smash hit.

Walsh’s directness gives the film an understated quality that may seem anachronistic today but has real cinematic integrity.

Doug Liman's Fair Game is a model exercise in dramatizing recent political scandal, and easily the best fact-based Hollywood political thriller since "All the President's Men."

It has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its critics--I can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings.

With his delicate mix of sick humor and compassion, Goldthwait is that rare comic writer who can legitimately be compared to Lenny Bruce.

Proof that you can buy an Academy Award, with David Niven, Cantinflas, and 44 stars in cameo roles spending a lot of Michael Todd’s money as they tour the world in Jules Verne’s balloon.

This potent, entirely honorable drama by veteran TV dramatist John Wells actually delivers the goods, pondering the pain and dislocation of the new normal.

Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) has made an electrifying picture.

Gentle, low-key first feature.

An amiable black comedy.

Screenwriter Kate Boutilier provides plenty of sharp patter, and Paul Simon contributed the catchy song "Father and Daughter."

Quentin Tarantino's lively and show-offy tribute to Asian martial-arts flicks, bloody anime, and spaghetti westerns he soaked up as a teenager is even more gory and adolescent than its models, which explains both the fun and the unpleasantness of this globe-trotting romp.

Scherfig aims at bittersweet irony, but Wilbur's suicide attempts yield neither pathos nor humor.

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least.

Michael Cera elevates deadpan to an art, starring as a slacker turned action hero in this wildly inventive comedy that's one of the most vivid and spirited adaptations of a comic book since Spider-Man--and one of the hippest since Ghost World.

Sinister and beautiful, this mostly black-and-white animation from France culls the talents of six artists and designers.

This early Hitchcock film shows more signs of the artist to come than any of his other British movies, pointing forward in particular to the deep sexual themes of Marnie and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The narrative decays more quickly than the characters.

Gordon Hessler directed this 1974 British feature, whose main raison d'etre is some first-rate “Dynamation” special effects from Ray Harryhausen, including a ship's figurehead that springs to life and Sinbad crossing swords with a six-armed statue.

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.

The main novelty of this conventional, slight, but charming youth picture is that it's English and therefore more class-conscious than most American equivalents.

Clint Eastwood resurrects the star system, the Hollywood love story, and middle-aged romance, but despite all his craft and sincerity, he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese can't quite turn Robert James Waller's cardboard best-seller into flesh and bone.

Only loosely connected to the story, the visuals quickly grow monotonous, and as the chronicle arrives at Cobain's late years of curdled fame and fortune, his bitterness and cynicism make even the narration hard to take.

Chereau's film is both an observant portrait of class-bound London by a foreigner and an empathetic look at sexual passion that completely avoids cheap prurience.

The movie overextends a patch of folk mysticism toward the end and then adds a silly whimsical coda, but as a comedy of errors it's often hilarious.

An exhilarating and terrifying journey through youth-culture hell.

Jackson's portrait of impotent rage is tremendous, and Affleck, who drops his usual smugness, is surprisingly good.

Sentimental.

As disposable fun, this is every bit as enjoyable and as forgettable as most Hollywood equivalents.

Overstays its welcome, but for mindless thrills you could do worse.

A frightening portrait of a man whose technological genius fails to compensate for his gaping emotional deficits.

First-rate agitprop about the ruthlessness of South African apartheid, directed by Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) and adapted from Andre Brink's novel by Palcy and Colin Welland. The relentless plot is effectively set up and expertly pursued, and Hugh Masekela makes some striking contributions to Dave Grusin's musical score.

A Boy and His Dog lacks the density of a Peckinpah film—in spite of some clever ideas and a few well-wrought images, it seems too schematic and its satire too blunt.

Infamous has dramaturgical strengths, whether or not it gets the facts right. Jones's performance as Capote tends to be delivered in a monotone, yet thanks to Craig all of their scenes together are potently realized.

Despite the usual amounts of gore, this is a surprisingly tender, ambiguous, and sexy film in which Romero's penchant for social satire is for once restricted to local and modest proportions.

Heightened emotion and nagging banal reality fight each other for screen space, doing final battle in a daringly ambiguous ending.

Charlize Theron, in nonglam mode, dominates this powerful drama about sexual harassment at a Minnesota iron ore mine in the early 90s.

It was the most assured film Coppola had made in a decade, full of casual wit and visual invention. And even though the split narrative doesn't quite cohere, Coppola wins an amazingly high proportion of his risky bets, including a finale that takes off into total abstraction.

This indie drama starts off as a sexy little date movie, but once the lovers have been separated it grows steadily more complicated and mature.

Director Gary Ross (Pleasantville) generally avoids the elaborate exterior shots and special effects that dominate high-concept blockbusters.

The ultimately uncomplicated view of sexual and emotional violence in a family is only tragic, not insightful.

Wears its art, as well as its heart, on its sleeve -- so much so that I feel guilty for not liking it more.

Transcendently kitschy, trippingly funny fairy tale, which has a surprising amount of psychological insight and a dance number to die for.

Fairly predictable, but the two leads' impressively nuanced performances make it less so, and Berri makes skillful use of both actors.

Fiercely uncompromising psychodrama infused with a keen intelligence and a sinister primordiality.

More good-natured than Michael Moore, these guys score by raising the issue of just how much their amateur antics exaggerate the neocon principles of the WTO.

Sam Wood's direction is limited to forced perspective compositions and hollow, incantatory line readings, but the craggy landscape shines under Ray Rennahan's Technicolor cinematography.

An odd, atmospheric 1947 thriller with a San Francisco setting, adapted by writer-director Delmer Daves from a David Goodis novel and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

A pleasant, inoffensive, and (quite properly) mindless diversion.

The movie is more interesting than achieved: it's the most forthright statement of the transference theme in Hitchcock's work, but it's also the least nuanced.

Part celebrity dish, part business journalism, this illuminating 2008 documentary about the legendary Italian designer Valentino Garavani spans the tumultuous final two years of his decades-long reign as one of the most successful innovators in the fashion industry.

This Belgian comedy suffers from the fact that its mismatched lovers are so consistently unpleasant; it catches fire only in the scenes between the mother and the daughter.

As Gibney follows Abramoff through the decades, he traces a solid line from Reagan’s mantra of deregulation to the financial collapse of 2008, showing how three decades of procapitalist lobbying have pushed most Americans out into the cold.

Fast-paced and intelligent documentary.