It's a haunting portrait of a young man who, while genuinely gifted and loved by friends and family, couldn't cope with the world.

At once upsetting and highly involving, it packs an undeniable punch.

This is a polished, palatable intrigue, with a knockout performance from Olivia Williams as the PM's hardened wife and a highly persuasive one from Kim Cattrall, cast against type as his buttoned-up personal assistant. But the mystery is unraveled a bit too conveniently.

Conceivably the best picture Sam Goldwyn ever produced.

Part of the minimalist humor growing out of this small-scale event is that they can barely remember anything, because the revolution scarcely made any difference.

The movie endorses the liberal conception of the Chicks as free-speech heroes, which doesn't quite wash: Maines shot her mouth off to a receptive overseas crowd, then issued an apology as soon as the backlash began back home.

"Weird but cool," as one character says -- yet the movie is also remarkably touching.

Sidney Lumet's direction, like David Mamet's patchy script (which adapts a Barry Reed novel), may not be quite good enough to justify the Rembrandt-like cinematography of Edward Pisoni and the brooding mood of self-importance, but it's good direction nonetheless; and there are plenty of supporting performances—by James Mason, Jack Warden, Milo O'Shea, Charlotte Rampling, and Lindsay Crouse, among others—to keep one distracted from Newman's dogged Oscar-pandering.

For one of the first times in his career Jean-Luc Godard has elected not to hector and harass his audience, and it seems to have paid off.

A marvelous sense of detail and spectacular effects--good fun all the way.

A romantic tale of love interrupted the isolation that is an inherent part of the human condition and ultimately the importance of the seemingly smaller moments in life.

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion.

The underlying rhythms of repression and release are reflected in the film's visual line, with cool, controlled images suddenly giving way to aggressive flashes of liberating camera movement. The plot creaks a bit, and the character relations aren't exactly fresh, but all things considered it's a reasonably satisfying effort.

A proud, forthright indictment of national and personal corruption, as evoked through a young reggae singer's odyssey from country to city, from innocent to outlaw.

Whenever writer-director Oren Moverman moves past these scattered and admittedly voyeuristic moments into the lives of the two soldiers, the movie drifts into received wisdom and unconvincing romance.

Alain Resnais' 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, "Smoking/No Smoking"; that film tried to be as "English" as possible. But this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British culture, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy "Muriel" and "Providence."

Johnston's childish, repetitive tunes prove that he's no Brian Wilson (or even Roky Erickson), which makes you wonder whether Feuerzeig is examining the singer's exploitation or participating in it.

Writer-director Cary Fukunaga keeps the story lean while peppering it with realistic details.

One problem leads to another, but because the children's points of view are so powerfully rendered, the plot of this elegant and lightly magical-realist 1997 drama never seems merely coincidental.

The altitude, extreme cold, quicksand, and crushing poverty are potent dramatic elements, but of course there's no mention of China's complicity in the area's economic ills; instead writer-director Lu Chuan frames the story as a showdown between the head ranger and the leader of the poachers.

Although the film is fast and consistently clever, it is more deeply flawed than any other Hitchcock film of the period, failing to find a thematic connection between its imaginative set pieces.

It's a highly stylized, roaringly dynamic action film that shuns plot and characterization in favor of a crazy iconographical melange—it's like the work of a western punk trucker de Sade...The climactic chase, with its deft variation of tempo and point of view, is a minor masterpiece.

The shocking, ambiguous ending might have been better served by the film's original, ambiguous title, "To My Sister."

Dumont's film is unfinished in the sense that some paintings are.

Leisurely pacing of this kind is likely to register as a form of respect for the viewer's intelligence and observation.

I enjoyed the invented trailers the directors fold into the mix, but despite the jokey "missing reels," these two full-length features are each 20 minutes longer than they need to be, and neither one makes much sense as narrative.

Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 noir fable is highly derivative in its overall conception, but it finds some freshness in its details. All in all, this evokes the spirit of James M. Cain more effectively than the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice did.

The film is surprisingly mature in its depiction of community dynamics and its sobering conclusion, which addresses the real-life costs of environmental devastation. The visual design veers from fantasy to naturalism, depending on the tone of the story: the tanuki appear sometimes as Disneyesque cuddlies and other times as realistic-looking rodents.