Coppola's fondness for the operatic gets the better of him as the action approaches a climax, but the movie is girded by a sense of knotty family history.

Bullock, Rowlands, Whitman, and others in the cast -- most notably Harry Connick Jr. -- acquit themselves as admirably as the pedestrian script allows.

You feel for the first time that Scorsese is trying to distance himself from his characters—that he finds them grotesque. The uncenteredness of the film is irritating, though it's irritating in an ambitious, risk-taking way. You'd better see for yourself.

The documentary is most valuable for its fly-on-the-wall footage of the inventive tunesmith puttering around his apartment and drilling the band on his idiosyncratic arrangements.

Good-humored and enormously entertaining but also sentimental and a little dishonest.

Jas lots of action, drama, comedy, and corn -- and few pauses, which is striking.

Another early youth ensemble pic from St. Elmo's Fire director Joel Schumacher, with an aspiring-to-hipness cast.

This is cloying, deceitful, and more or less irresistible.

This first feature from Disney's new nature division has an encyclopedic reach and spectacular footage shot by more than two dozen crack cinematographers.

Writer-director Walter Hill, known earlier in his career for his American versions of French thrillers by Jean-Pierre Melville (indebted in turn to Hollywood noir), specializes in tweaking much-used material.

The narrative--a complex structure of flashbacks and shifts in perspective that's part inspirational story, part courtroom drama, part character study, part exposé--never makes it seem that history is being oversimplified.

Improves as it unfolds.

While Milani lacks an overall cinematic vision, she skillfully uses composition and camera movement to underline emotions in each scene.

As you might expect, this is hip deep in reminiscence.

Sitting on the shelf since 2008, when it was muscled out of the marketplace by "Cadillac Records," Sony's glossy, star-studded movie about Leonard. But it's clearly the better movie, earthier, wittier, and more intimate in its treatment of America's racial divide in the 1950s.

It's chock-full of typical Wilder cynicism and the offhand transvestite humor that would reach its apotheosis in Some Like It Hot, but its wit falters as the melodramatic tension builds. The resulting letdown is terrific, but along the way there is some of the funniest men-at-loose-ends interplay that Wilder has ever put on film.

This 1932 release was the first Marx film to take on the Depression, and the brothers manage to satirize everything from education to prostitution and bootlegging.

[It] may not be your cup of tea, but you have to admire the style, sincerity, and overall sense of craft even if you don't fancy the comic-book gore.

Exciting, clever sequences driven by surprisingly little plot and culminating in a climax full of the transmogrification animation was invented for.

The screenplay is by Norman Krasna, a hack of the lowest degree, but Hitchcock shapes it smoothly to his personal ends.

The charm, humor, and healthy eroticism of Australian writer-director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting) are back in force in this pleasantly recounted tale, set in the 30s, about a newlywed Anglican clergyman and his wife, freshly played by Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald, who stop off at the remote home of a controversial (i.e., erotic) painter (Sam Neill).

Classic 1943 canine weepie.

This is familiar but atmospheric, with good performances by Peter Falk, Blythe Danner, Joey Bilow, Michael Santoro, Merle Kennedy, and former football pro Don Meredith.

A potent feminist protest--all the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force today.

The project is lush and seductive as a whole, though some segments are especially vibrant.

The real summit meeting here may be between the two leads. They're good at their specialties - Reynolds's casual jock studliness and Bateman's nervous white-collar introversion - and they're even better at switching into the other guy's shtick and mannerisms.

As a truthful account of the life of Tina Turner or as a faithful adaptation of her as-told-to autobiography, I, Tina, this 1993 film can't be taken too seriously. But as a powerhouse showcase for the acting talents of Angela Bassett (who plays Turner) and Laurence Fishburne (who plays her abusive husband, Ike) and as a potent portrayal of wife beating and the emotions that surround it (in this case, Ike's professional envy and Tina's stoic acceptance of abuse), it's quite a show.

Strutting around like a rooster in a thin-lapeled suit, 117 isn't much different from other comic Bond figures, but the movies find a fresh and exceedingly rich vein of comedy in his airy sexism, racism, and colonialism.