The immersive quality of 3-D is particularly well suited to undersea documentaries, and this one, directed by Howard Hall ("Into the Deep"), offers a close-up look at such fantastic creatures as the fried egg jellyfish, the mantis shrimp, the sand tiger shark, and the thuggish wolf eel.

The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.

Bale dominates the movie as Dicky Eklund, a pathetic loudmouth who's let his own fight career slip away from him, yet what really holds this together is Wahlberg's low-key, firmly internalized performance as a man torn between his loyalty to the clan and his responsibility to himself.

In short, it's amusing only if you agree not to think very much about it.

The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements.

Attenborough's work lacks even the undercurrent of personality that David Lean brought to his films: the film has no flavor but that of the standard Hollywood hagiography, in which the hero is rhetorically elevated to sainthood by systematically stripping him of all his psychology and inner life. Luckily, Ben Kingsley is charismatic enough in the title role to command some warmth and interest, and the film is paced so quickly—rushing through 55 years of hastily exposited history—that it's never really boring.

Scenes of ingenious slapstick violence.

It's a fascinating cultural artifact and a stomping good time.

Powerful second film by writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent).

The movie is so clever and smoothly paced that it's easy to overlook the odious story line.

Shot during the March 2003 invasion and the early stages of the American occupation, it tells us more about how the channel decides what to report than we probably know about most American newscasts.

You know you're in for a hard-core art film when you hear more people raving about its opening shot than the movie itself.

The film is unsparingly gritty, but with a woman's tenderness it also grants the characters an occasional moment of grace.

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's script may in spots be as much of a skim job as their one for "Ed Wood," but it's almost as sweet and as likable, and if the movie can't ever practice what it and its hillbilly hero preach--the only "beaver" shot in the movie involves a corpse--its heart is certainly in the right place.

Visually stunning, with ravishing uses of color and beautifully modulated lap dissolves, Ju Dou may not be the most formally striking Chinese film I’ve seen...but it certainly is the most effective and dramatic in terms of commercial moviemaking, both as spectacle and as story telling.

One of the better Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn comedies—not so much for the screenplay by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, which lacks the bite and sophistication of Adam's Rib, as for the relaxed and graceful interplay of the stars.

Though the shocks are well conveyed, it's the sweetness that lingers, making this the first cute and cuddly entry in the genre.

The astronauts playfully mug for the camera, and the footage is spectacular, from a fiery liftoff montage to familiar but lovely shots of the earth from space to the moon's mysterious gray surface. But it's telling that a description of the problems of defecating in zero gravity is more interesting than astronauts' trite musings on “out of this world” views, and the ahistorical editing is occasionally irritating.

An exquisite, haunting movie for grown-ups about love and family ties.

However one chooses to take its jaundiced view of history, it's probably the best film to date by the talented Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream), a triumph of mise en scene mated to a comic vision that keeps topping its own hyperbole.

Hence the fascination of Faithless: the tension between the script's dour puritanism--the craving of suffering, the wallowing in abstract guilt--and the earthy plenitude and innate sensuality of Ullmann's austere compositions.

To my taste, the only serious drawback to this absorbing film is Harris's unimaginative adherence to documentary convention, which obliges him to "illustrate" the voice-overs even when the material matches the narratives only in fictional terms.

A brave effort to stare down the specter of American failure, it gets off on the wrong foot by pretentiously turning the doomed hero into a Christ figure--a traffic cop with arms extended in crucifixion mode--before the story even gets started.

Viewers hoping for new revelations will have to be content with learning that Hitler suffered from severe stomach problems. Yet there's much more here than a trickle of unsatisfying tidbits.

Mitchell Leisen's polished direction serves this 1941 melodrama written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

The language has been changed to English, of course, which is the only real reason this movie exists; the story development, desolate tone, and key set pieces are mostly copied from the original movie, which in turn was based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

I can't think of a better portrait of contemporary Paris or the zeitgeist of 2001-'04 than Chris Marker's wise and whimsical 58-minute 2004 video...no one can film people in the street better than Marker or combine images with more grace and finesse.

Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.