I feel such an affection for Chabrol and his work that I probably can't see The Flower of Evil as it would be experienced by a first-time viewer. Would that newcomer note the elegance, the confidence, the sheer joy in the way he treasures the banalities of bourgeois life on his way to the bloodshed?

What's alluring is the way the characters played by John Livingston and Sabrina Lloyd savor each other, in between their troubles. Movies are too quick to interrupt romance with sex. Sarah and Rand fascinate us with their dance of dread and desire.

To see strong acting like this is exhilarating. In a time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in a dizzy editing rhythm, it is important to remember that films can look and listen and attentively sympathize with their characters. Directors grow great by subtracting, not adding, and Eastwood does nothing for show, everything for effect.

If you have seen the masterful 2002 Brazilian film "City of God" or the 1981 film "Pixote," both about the culture of Rio's street people, then Bus 174 plays like a sad and angry real-life sequel.

Suspension of disbelief, always necessary in a thriller, is required here in wholesale quantities. But in a movie like Out of Time I'm not looking for realism, I'm looking for a sense of style brought to genre material.

If quirky, independent, grown-up outsider filmmakers set out to make a family movie, this is the kind of movie they would make. And they did.

Yes, this is a comedy, but it's also sad, and finally it's simply a story about trying to figure out what you love to do and then trying to figure out how to do it.

True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead.

A sweetheart of a film, whimsical and touching. It positions itself somewhere between a slice of life and a screwball comedy.

Endearing and vulgar in about the right proportion. The movie doesn't exactly work, but sometimes when a car won't start, it's still fun to look at the little honey gleaming in the driveway.

There's too much contrivance and not enough plausibility, and so finally we're just enjoying the performances and wishing they'd been in a more persuasive movie.

Once in the jungle they have all sorts of harrowing adventures, and I enjoyed it that real things were happening, that we were not simply looking at shoot-outs and chases, but at intriguing and daring enterprise.

What redeems the film is its successful escapism, and Lane's performance. They are closely linked.

Who was Joseph Fiennes channeling when he chose this muddled tone? Obviously he was reluctant to gave a broad, inspirational performance of the kind you find in deliberately religious films.

I think the screenplay, written by director Isabel Coixet, is shameless in its weepy sentiment. But there is truth here, too, and a convincing portrait of working-class lives.

By the end of the movie, I frankly didn't give a damn. There's an ironic twist, but the movie hadn't paid for it and didn't deserve it. And I was struck by the complete lack of morality in Demonlover.

At a time when so many American movies keep dialogue at a minimum so they can play better overseas, what a delight to listen to smart people whose conversation is like a kind of comic music.

[Figgis] has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience.

Not brilliant and it has some clunky moments where we see the plot wheels grinding, but it has its heart and its grin in the right places.

A gentle and sweet whimsy, attentive to the love between the two brothers, respectful of the boy's growth and curiosity.

It's so impossible to care about the characters in the movie that I didn't care if the vampires or werewolves won. I might not have cared in a better movie, either, but I might have been willing to pretend.

Sayles handles this material with gentle delicacy, as if aware that the issues are too fraught to be approached with simple messages.

What makes the film astonishing is that it follows a real boy on a real journey, and the boy is in England at this moment.

There are laughs in the movie, and a lot of good feeling, but it seems more interested in its Italian stereotypes than its gay insights.

The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.

Lohman in particular is effective; I learn to my astonishment that she's 24, but here she plays a 15-year-old with all the tentative love and sudden vulnerability that the role requires, when your dad is a whacko confidence man.

I understood the general outlines of the story, I liked the bold strokes he uses to create the characters, and I was amused by the camera work, which includes a lot of shots that are about themselves.

I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters.