Robert Stevenson directed, and it's one of Disney's more watchable live-action efforts.

In one sense, this seemingly melodramatic plot premise is contrived, registering more as myth than as real possibility. Yet thanks to what the movie has in mind and especially what the actors bring to it, it's a lovely myth, one that has the ring of deeply felt truth.

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

Director John Madden calmly dissects the emotions of a woman whose personal life is effectively nonexistent.

Neither PC nor crudely anti-PC, this tough and tender movie, like its characters, is prepared to take emotional risks, and the comic book milieu is deftly sketched in.

Director Jonathan Demme's farcical and broad 1988 comedy, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, doesn't really work, but there are plenty of enjoyable compensations.

Like many fairy tales, this handsome family film concerns a child coming to terms with his fears and the death of a parent.

Only about half of the disconnected gags and oddball conceits pay off, but their gleeful delivery takes up most of the slack.

As an interweave of crosscut miniplots, this isn't nearly as interesting or as pleasurable as Jeremy Podeswa's recent "The Five Senses."

This is a lyrical heartbreaker that skirts most love-story cliches and is brave enough to be as inconclusive as the characters.

A slyly subversive adventure tale that should appeal to children and adults alike.

Both Stanford and Neuwirth are excellent in tricky parts, yet screenwriters Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller abruptly end the story just as the characters are arriving at some uncomfortable showdowns.

Haneke is still a masterful director, and his authority carries this well-acted and attractively shot account of a family from an unnamed city trying to survive in the sticks after an unspecified catastrophe.

This is somewhat fuzzy as narrative, but it's a potent mood piece, and its portait of urban loneliness has some of the intensity of "Taxi Driver" without the violence.

By the end of this 124-minute drama I'd have settled for ANYONE else, but like most visits with irritating people, the movie lingers, sharpening one's judgment.

A shrewd and powerful mix of commercial ingredients and ideological intent.

The screenplay (by Lewis John Carlino, of The Great Santini) collapses into musty moralizing in the second half, and director John Frankenheimer throws in the towel.

This narrative feature debut by Emmanuel Carrere, based on his own novel, is deliberately open-ended, but however one interprets the outcome, the film reminds us how fragile intimacy is.

For a Disney movie, Holes is mercifully low in saccharine.

Most of what transpires is low-key, affectionate comedy and a fair amount of fun.

Michael Webber's documentary "The Elephant in the Living Room" (2010) makes such a powerful case against private ownership of exotic wild animals that this portrait of circus owner David Balding and his beloved elephant Flora seems sentimental by comparison.

Undeniably well executed.

[A] well-crafted piece of middle-American uplift...For once it really does matter most how you play the game.

The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.

As the substantially faithful movie version demonstrates, the story of Thank You for Smoking resides in that libertarian netherworld where the far left and the far right march shoulder to shoulder.

Despite a hokey prologue and ending (the latter imposed by producer Charles Evans), this is one of George Romero's most effective and interesting horror thrillers—not as profound as his remarkable Living Dead trilogy, but unusually gripping and provocative.

The title modifies a term coined by political scientist and philosopher Arthur Bentley that refers to the interactions between people and their environment, and the notion of a shifting center is what gives this experiment much of its interest and also limits it from going very far in any single direction.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.