A sparing use of exterior shots during the mesmerizing buildup to the match heightens their impact, while invasively tight close-ups put the actors to the test.

Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless.

With its persuasive special effects, gentle pace, and more expressionistic than surreal production design, this serious yet far from ponderous drama is something of a marvel.

The film's theme of acceptance is undercut considerably by Hurt's overcalculated performance.

Directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who studied filmmaking in Belgium, this is raw, sardonic, and formally complex.

This is basically Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily.

As in the first movie, To deftly references the "Godfather" trilogy, examining the moral equivocation and shifting alliances among various syndicate members.

Slight film of mostly comic tableaux.

The cloying score aside, this is a searing depiction of war in all its savagery, waste, and folly, with artfully choreographed sequences that surpass the conventions of the genre.

The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies.

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

Confounds expectations -- about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel.

Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect, and his two lead actors--Sasson Gabai as the band's conductor and Ronit Elkabetz (Or) as one of the locals--are terrific.

So few movies these days concern themselves with ideas of any sort that a drama like this one, about a man humbled by the consequences of his own intellectual breakthrough, seems even more powerful.

This sequel to the French actioner "District B13" (2004) offers more of what made the original such a sublimely stupid pleasure.

Despite the gimmicky direction and a disappointing climax, this is a distinctive and unsettling comedy.

This is hardly Flaubert, but it is a fairly beguiling look at moral calculation.

Too many extraneous elements have been added--the victim here is an aborigine, which prompts a racial backlash against the men and their families--but at the movie's center lies the knotty story of a marriage poisoned by amorality.

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.

Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence.

The engineering of the special effects is fairly impressive, and the sight of so many objects and creatures being buffeted about carries a certain apocalyptic splendor.

Reitman deserves credit for going through with a bitterly ironic ending, but the movie is marred by its warm condescension toward flyover country.

Except for one manipulative deathbed scene, Ken Kwapis directs with sensitivity, steering the multiple story lines toward a satisfying conclusion.

The film would have been more satisfying if director Jan Kounen (Darshan: The Embrace) had shown more of the ferment of the times.

Affecting and offbeat.

It's not very special, but it's nice to see a Disney film that follows the rules of the family-film genre as Walt laid them down, rather than trying to emulate Spielberg's empty, high-tech grandiosity.

Ali Selim, a highly successful director of commercials in Minneapolis, makes his feature directing debut with this simple and beautifully paced drama, letting the characters breathe and the land speak.

Here's something you don't see every day: a genial, politically correct splatter comedy.