Warmly and gently handled, though the central story, detailing the personal politics between him and the six childlike monsters, steadily loses steam.

Writer-director Wong Kar-wai makes these five self-consciously idiosyncratic types--often seen through distorting lenses in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's somber, garish Hong Kong--fully and instantly believable.

Slyly exploiting audience expectations and prejudices, Lelouch calls into question our very ways of seeing, even as he and his longtime writing partner, Pierre Uytterhoeven, craft an elegant meditation on loss and rebirth.

Unfortunately the allegory tends to overpower the characterizations even as it deepens them.

It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.

This is certainly well executed, with a sense of fate and fancy akin to Pedro Almodovar's, but its glibness began to wear on me after the agonizing death of a Great Dane was played for laughs.

While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won't oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film's high spirits may still win you over.

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.

Long, grim, but utterly engrossing.

The best thing Mann brings to his picture is a strong sense of time and place.

Responsibility for the ensuing tragedy is so finely calibrated that neither can be comprehensively blamed or exculpated.

Zbanic's story of an ordinary life stained by extraordinary cruelty cuts deep.

The end result is somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Castle, but still worth seeing.

Focusing on one family in a small northern California town that seems to have survived an initial attack, Littman quickly loses interest in the logic of the concept (the naturalistic presentation of an unnatural event) and begins pushing the sentimental pornography of death.

The performances are strong, but the spectator often feels adrift in an overly busy intrigue.

Woody Allen's welcome return to straight-ahead entertainment, after 15 years of slogging through art-house hand-me-downs, happily coincided with a return to Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and she deftly steals the show.

The most riveting interview subject is the unrepentant Killen, who granted the filmmakers surprisingly broad access to his personal life.

I suspect the unconverted will want to be beamed up pronto.

A blandly twisting plot with no meaningful revelations or substantial themes.

Critics have faulted this 2005 British feature about the Rwandan genocide for focusing on a couple of white characters instead of the 800,000 Tutsis who were slaughtered, but such easy judgments miss the point entirely: this is a spiritual drama, not a political one, drawing a thick line between our good intentions and the selfish choices we ultimately make.

The movie's sympathy is often disarming. Unfortunately the director can be generous to a fault, repeating certain moments and letting others run on after he's made his point.

The science is compelling, though Cameron and codirector Steven Quale undermine the movie's scholarship with a silly sci-fi ending.

This absorbing documentary by George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) spends too much time on the celebrities in Bingenheimer's life for its analysis of fame and fandom to rise above the banal.

Ken Hanes's witty script shows its origins in his stage play, with the repartee often a bit too thick and fast for the screen.

Critics, clients, and colleagues all weigh in on the architect, but Pollack is more interested in the mysteries of the creative process, and his studies of Gehry's buildings, deftly edited by Karen Schmeer, capture their dramatic sense of movement and resolution.

Based on two of his previous shorts, this lurid vision is good for a few laughs-some intended, some not.

None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic.

This is jammed with cliches but completely engrossing, in the manner of a movie ardently in love with its own bullshit.