After his murder, Michele Montas goes on the air to insist that Jean Dominique is still alive, because his spirit lives on. But in this film Haiti seems to be a country that can kill the spirit, too.

What sets Deep Cover apart is its sense of good and evil, the way it has the Fishburne character agonize over the moral decisions he has to make.

Clint Eastwood, a master director, orchestrates all of these notes and has us loving Mandela, proud of Francois and cheering for the plucky Springboks. A great entertainment. Not, as I said, the Mandela biopic I would have expected.

This is one of the best crime thrillers in recent years, with Anna Kendrick demonstrating a strong set of storytelling skills and a keen eye for period-piece visuals in her directorial debut, while also turning in one of her career-best performances as the “bachelorette” who unknowingly chooses Alcala as her “dream date.”

Given the grievousness of their sins, one wonders why the church continues to shelter them. Might it not be more appropriate to excommunicate them, and refer them to the attention of the civil authorities?

All of Me shares with a lot of great screwball comedies a very simple approach: Use absolute logic in dealing with the absurd. Begin with a nutty situation, establish the rules, and follow them. The laughs happen when ordinary human nature comes into conflict with ridiculous developments.

Cold Pursuit moves forward with the assured and deliberate force of Nels’ massive snowplow. And with Neeson/Nels at the wheel, Cold Pursuit is one fantastically hot mess of a movie.

Jim Braddock is almost transparent in the simple goodness of his character; that must have made him almost impossible to play. Russell Crowe makes him fascinating, and it takes a moment of two of thought to appreciate how difficult that must have been.

Something Wild is quite a movie. Demme is a master of finding the bizarre in the ordinary.

Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.

Starts at the beginning and goes straight through to the inevitable end, unblinkingly. It doesn't relieve the pressure, as "Iris" does, with flashbacks to happier days.

Comedies open every week. This is the kind I like best. It grows from human nature and is about how people do their jobs and live their lives.

There is a kind of horror movie that plays so convincingly we don't realize it's an exercise in pure style. ''Halloween'' is an example, and John Dahl's Joy Ride is another.

Janeane Garofalo in this movie... is so likable, so sympathetic, so revealing of her character's doubts and desires, that she carries us headlong into the story.

The editing, with so many twists and turns and so many supporting characters needing their due, is without hiccups. And thankfully, there’s plenty of dark humor.

Dillon has the kind of acting intelligence that allows him to play each scene for no more than that particular scene is really about; he's not trying to summarize the message in every speech. That gives him an ease, an ability to play the teenage hero as if every day were a whole summer long.

[A] conventional yet fascinating documentary.

The point of the film is not to create suspense, but to capture the relentlessness of human greed, the feeling that the land is so important the human spirit can be sacrificed to it.

The plot of Point Blank, summarized, invites parody (rookie agent goes undercover as surfer to catch bank robbers). The result is surprisingly effective.

Whether the protest movement hastened the end of the Vietnam War is hard to say, but it is likely that Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for re-election was influenced by the climate it helped to create.

Sometimes we feel as if the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite, but sometimes it must have seemed to Frida Kahlo as if her life did, too.

Ben Is Back shifts gears and becomes as much a thriller as a family drama, and some of the developments stretch credulity. Through it all, though, there’s the magnificence of Julia Roberts, and the fine performances from Hedges, Vance and the rest of the cast. They do great justice to this finely constructed slice of fractured family life.

Aronofsky brings a new urgency to the drug movie by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel.

The point is that for the soldiers, it's a dead zone, life on hold, a cheerless existence. And this plain-spoken old woman reminds them of a lifetime they are missing.

This is director Atsuko Hirayanagi’s feature-length debut (based on her own short film), and it is a most impressive first effort. Oh Lucy! is quirky and offbeat and strange and sometimes quite dark — and yet oddly lovable.

With Campion’s native New Zealand standing in magnificently for early 20th century Big Sky Country, The Power of the Dog is a study in contrasts between the almost surreal beauty of the mountains and the sky and the vast land, and the nasty, petty and often unspeakably harsh manner in which people will treat one another — even their own kin.

What I respond to in the movie is its fundamental romantic impulse.

An imperfect but deeply involving and beautifully made Western.