Like "The Godfather," it shows him (Makovski) as a crook with certain standards, surrounded by rats with none.

The film is a soapy melodrama set from about 1936 to 1946 and done with style.

Manito sees an everyday tragedy with sadness and tenderness, and doesn't force it into the shape of a plot.

Jet Lag is sort of a grown-up version of "Before Sunrise"...The difference between the two films is sort of depressing.

Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.

This is the kind of movie you happen across on TV, and linger to watch out of curiosity, but its inspired moments serve only to point out how routine, and occasionally how slow and wordy, the rest of it is.

A video game crossed with a buddy movie, a bad cop-good cop movie, a Miami druglord movie, a chase movie and a comedy. It doesn't have a brain in its head, but it's made with skill and style and, boy, is it fast and furious.

The genius of the movie is the way is sidesteps all of the obvious cliches of the underlying story and makes itself fresh, observant, tough and genuinely moving.

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.

By the end of Capturing the Friedmans, we have more information, from both inside and outside the family, than we dreamed would be possible. We have many people telling us exactly what happened. And we have no idea of the truth. None.

A movie with the nerve to end with melodramatic sentiment--and get away with it, because it means it. Expect lots of damp eyes in the audience.

This is just the movie for two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level.

This time the dad is the hero of the story, although in most animation it is almost always the mother.

Seems conventional in its ideas about where it can go and what it can accomplish. You don't get the idea anyone laughed out loud while writing the screenplay. It lacks a strange light in its eyes. It is too easily satisfied.

Aniston, as a sweet kindergarten teacher and fiancee, shows again (after "The Good Girl") that she really will have a movie career.

A cheerful, life-affirming film, strong in its energy, about vivid characters. It uses mental illness as an entertainment, not a disease.

Slight and sometimes wearisome.

Too cluttered and busy, but as a glimpse into the affluent culture of a country with economic extremes, it's intriguing. Occasionally it's funny and moving, too.

Overcrowded and overwritten, with too many shrill denunciations and dramatic surprises; we don't like the characters and, worse, they don't interest us.

The movie's performances have a simplicity and accuracy that is always convincing. Compston, who plays Liam, is a local 17-year-old discovered in auditions at his school. He has never acted before, but is effortlessly natural.

They talk warmly and with enthusiasm about certain titles, but I have the eerie feeling that they must be at a movie whether they enjoy it or not.

The movie is as light and frothy as a French comedy, which is what it is, a reminder that Cedric Klapisch also directed "When the Cat's Away" (1996).

It is an immensely skillful sci-fi adventure, combining the usual elements: heroes and villains, special effects and stunts, chases and explosions, romance and oratory.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

Aggressively simple-minded, it's fueled by the delusion that it has a brilliant premise: Eddie Murphy plus cute kids equals success. But a premise should be the starting point for a screenplay, not its finish line.

LaBute has that rarest of attributes, a distinctive voice. You know one of his scenes at once. His dialogue is the dialogue overheard in trendy mid-scale restaurants, with the words peeled back to suggest the venom beneath.

No better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.

Leconte brings his film to transcendent closure without relying on stale plot devices or the clanking of the plot. He resorts to a kind of poetry. After the film is over, you want to sigh with joy, that in this rude world such civilization is still possible.