The charm of Bagdad Cafe is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.

It's intense and involving, and it doesn't let us go.

Then I realized the movie's point is that someone like this nerdy Harvard boy might be transformed in a fairly short time into a bloodthirsty gang fighter. The message is that violence is hard-wired into men, if only the connection is made.

Lumbers a little on its way to a preordained conclusion, but is intriguing for its glimpses of backstage life in shabby German postwar vaudeville, and for Dietrich's performance, which seems to float above the action as if she's stepping fastidiously across gutters.

Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton are appealing together as far from perfect parents, and CJ Adams has that ability of so many child actors to be pitch-perfect.

Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched.

This is the best-looking horror film since Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

This isn't a made-for-video that they decided to put into theaters, but a version intended from the first to be theatrical. That's important, because it means more detail and complexity went into the animation.

The movie is slapstick with a deft character touch here and there. It's hard to keep all the characters and plot lines alive at once, but Ruthless People does it, and at the end I felt grateful for its goofiness.

More than a half-century after first taking the stage, “The Boys in the Band” still leaves us with so much to think about, so much to feel, so much to consider.

It is not filled with quick cutting or gimmicky editing, but Jerry Schatzberg's direction is so confident that we cover the ground effortlessly. We meet the characters, we get to know the world.

The Hate U Give is indeed a message movie, and yes, there are a few times when certain characters come close to becoming caricatures. But those are minor drawbacks to a story filled with immediacy and urgency but also so much heart and soul.

Reich is a more lively speaker than Al Gore, however, frequently working jokes about his sub-five-foot height (his growth having been disrupted by a genetic disorder) into his presentation, and many of the film’s statistical interludes have been entertainingly animated as insurance against eyeball-glazing.

A lot of actors can hold big machineguns and stand convincingly in front of special effects and explosions. Not many can stand in front of a camera and be nine months pregnant, and actually make us care.

The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, "Sin City," which in comparison was a chamber drama.

Scorsese tells the Wolf’s story almost strictly from the Wolf’s point of view. We never see his victims. It’s actually an effective technique, because the Wolf certainly never really saw his victims either — not as actual human beings who could be hurt by his financial hocus-pocus.

Even when the story comes close to flying off the rails, Matt Damon holds steady and commands the screen.

One of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.

The movie is taut, tense, relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong.

The little boy here, a stick-figured, button-headed, wide-eyed tot with a signature red-and-white striped shirt, is one of the most distinctive and adorable animated characters you’ll ever come across, and his introduction to “the world out there” is a moving revelation indeed.

If you appreciate dark, original and chilling gothic horror stories with a supernatural twist, if you like low-low-budget indies that somehow manage to look and feel like big-time major motion pictures, you gotta check out Dig Two Graves.

One of the most thought-provoking movies in recent years — the kind of film you’ll find impossible to forget, the kind of film you’ll want to discuss and debate with friends and colleagues.

The film is beautifully well-mounted. The locations, the sets, the costumes, everything conspire to re-create the Rome of that time. It provides a counterpoint to the usual caricature of Mussolini. They say that behind every great man there stands a great woman. In Mussolini's case, his treatment of her was a rehearsal for how he would treat Italy.

Brian De Palma's Carrie is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in "Jaws."

If you are open, even in fancy, to the idea of ghosts who visit the living, this film is likely to be a curious but rather bemusing experience.

Such an original and disturbing and haunting and creatively outrageous piece of work that it refuses to drift from your conscience.

Damon is terrific. The movie lives and breathes on his performance, and he comes through in every scene.

If Fugitive Pieces has a message, it is that life can heal us, if we allow it.