The movie flames to life whenever Donald Sutherland moves into frame as the young ladies' relaxed, humorous, and magnificently rueful father.

Intending to study the degree to which social class would determine the subjects' destinies, the series actually documents something more filmable--the degree to which the subjects believed social class would determine their destinies and the degree to which they believe it has.

Moving documentary.

Animation fans will find this worth the wait.

With all these safety features built in, this 1985 film is too well padded to qualify as genuinely radical wit, but in an even-toned, TV sort of way it's mildly amusing and inventive throughout.

Even if you can't accept all the movie's left curves, you might still be amused.

Disney's retelling of the popular Chinese folktale, may seem its gutsiest choice yet, but on closer examination it's obviously less a matter of guts than careful calculation.

Their inexperience with thrillers is evident here in the cluttered exposition at the beginning and wholesale revelations at the end. In the middle, though, there's a pretty suspenseful stretch.

The tone is bright and the action brisk, and there are fun turns from Edmund Gwenn (as the priggish elder Strauss) and Fay Compton (as the younger Strauss’s matron and would-be seductress).

In its embrace of human imperfection the movie recalls with elegant formal simplicity the populist threads of 30s French cinema.

More impressive than entertaining.

Jack Hill directs for maximal suspense, violence, and voyeuristic appeal (which Grier certainly embodies).

While Hanon's film stints on character development, he convincingly portrays the events that foster redemption and forgiveness, as over time the Waodani shed their culture of violence.

Tom Courtenay is quite good in the title role, and Julie Christie makes a memorable early appearance .

A wizard at manipulating time, Kitano introduces staccato elements that interrupt the meditative pace even as they help set it.

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

The message, unspoken but inescapable, is that a little sharing might feed wealthy and poor alike.

Like "Mystery Train" and "Night on Earth," this feature by Jim Jarmusch is a short story collection, but it's funnier and more formally adventurous than either--also ultimately greater than the sum of its parts.

Handsome and agreeable 2009 documentary.

The incandescent Doona Bae (The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) gives a daring performance as the toy-turned-woman,

They often seem more bent on titillating or harrowing us than on helping us understand the characters.

Among the many offhand virtues of Julie Delpy's first feature as solo writer-director is the fact that she's as attentive to French foibles as American ones.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized, brushing off the insistent come-ons of a slinky prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) he's taken under his wing.

Coogan delivers a winning comic performance as the pompous impresario, but his story has little dramatic momentum of its own; he functions mostly as a pedantic narrator, imposing some cultural significance on the endless party and pointing out more intriguing personalities.

It's worth seeing for the tightly coiled plot, well-realized characters, and novel take on rapacious teen culture.

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

The interviewees are good storytellers--particularly the eccentric research scientists who tested the effects of nicotine on rats in the early 80s--and the editing keeps their stories moving at a lively pace.

He makes a good job of it, though the wider aspirations to contemporary relevance seem dubious. Stone seeks large lessons in the experiences of ordinary men in battle, but it isn't clear Vietnam has anything new to offer: war is hell and somebody inevitably gets shafted, but the uniqueness of this conflict lies away from the military arena: in politics, psychology, and history. For all the purported naturalism, the film seems resolutely schematic, and the attitudes shaping the drama are far from open-ended.