Tony Leung plays Ip Man, the real-life kung fu innovator who most famously trained Bruce Lee. His life takes in the upheavals in China from the 1930s through the ’50s, including the Japanese occupation.

It's almost impossible to watch this movie and not, on some level beyond reason, succumb. The Pursuit of Happyness is an expert piece of calculation: a male weepie engineered for the whole family.

Seraphim Falls is essentially one long, bleak stalk-and-kill action thriller.

Much of the nattery byplay seems improvised, and the results are very hit and miss – inspired contretemps alternate with gabfests that seem to go on forever.

Given the high quotient of hypotheticals in the story line, Nixon & Elvis can’t really be said to add to the historical record, but it’s an entertaining, deadpan jape that, with a bit of tweaking, could probably work as a stage play.

Energetic acting and perky filmmaking help this likable Argentine comedy-drama avoid the sentimentality that intermittently threatens it.

He uses Vacth, a beauty who somewhat resembles the young Nastassja Kinski or Dominique Sanda, for her eerie, implacable hauteur. There is a mask behind her mask.

It's not a masterpiece, but its story of Civil War enemies banding together for battle against Indian warriors and French soldiers packs an occasional wallop.

Wharton's old-school compassion and Davies's taste for artfully wrought melodrama make an unusual but ultimately successful combination.

Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.

It's a unique blend of history and hysteria, and there's no escaping the dead-serious ideas that run beneath its flamboyant surface.

Has some smart flashes, and a few of the young performers resemble real people and not the usual prefab teen idols.

The screenplay has flashes of real wit, and Perlman is perfect in the title role.

James Mangold follows up the promise of his excellent "Heavy" with this smartly written, superbly acted melodrama.

This high-quality Disney animation combines strong pictorial appeal with amiable voice-performances.

Although the cast, which also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christine Lahti in sharp cameos, is very good, Wiig’s performance is self-effacing to a fault. Like a lot of comic actors, she overcompensates in dramatic roles by wearing a very long face.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel helped open society's eyes to the evils of pedophilia in the 1950s, and this pensive adaptation renews the warning for a later generation.

The first half of this freewheeling comedy-drama finds Toback at his imaginative best. The second half sinks into silliness.

Korine confirms his reputation as one of today's most experimentally minded filmmakers, helped by an inventive cast including German director Herzog in a surprisingly strong performance as the father.

It's a sophisticated fantasia that adults should enjoy equally. (In other words, it's the perfect family entertainment.)

Jim Jarmusch has made a vampire movie, but, as you might expect, not just any old vampire movie. “Twilight” fans will not be amused, but Jarmusch’s usual coterie of art-film followers will likely find the movie his best in years.

Liu is dazzling as the heroine, and the movie as a whole strikes a lovely balance between comedy and compassion.

The film’s title is derived from a magical black stone of Persian lore that reputedly absorbs the burdens of those who speak to it until it crumbles – freeing the speaker of her troubles.

The film is rude, colorful, and bursting with questions about American culture, subculture, and society. [08 Apr 1991, p.11]

The gently told comedy-drama is more colorful than you'd expect, using wry humor and lively music to keep sentimentality at bay.

The song-and-dance numbers that make this musical tragedy a celebration of life despite its awfully grim climax.

Ms. Moncrieff's low-key directing is matched by fine acting from Agnes Bruckner as Meg and David Strathairn as her mentor. Aside from a somewhat schematic climax, this is as smart a debut as we've seen in a long while.

The language of that poem, which periodically pours out from the screen, is the best thing in the movie. The worst thing: the interpolated animated sequences that are meant to "illustrate" the poem but which can't begin to compete with the imagery evoked by Ginsberg's words.

The characters are sharply etched but the plot is made deliberately ambiguous, suggesting that family life is so emotionally intricate that no single story can contain or explain it.

Moving and informative.

It's not a deep-thinking film, and I wish it probed more thoroughly into the feminist issues it raises, instead of finessing them in a goopy finale. But much of it is first-class summertime fare, generating plenty of humor while examining a slice of Americ ana that's as revealing as it is entertaining.

Its refusal to draw solid lines between "good" and "evil" characters is more sophisticated than the psychology of most current commercial pictures. It's well worth a trek to a theater adventurous enough to show it.

Although the story seems disjointed at times, no other war movie has tried so valiantly to convey not only the suffering of combat but the awful fissures it leaves between humanity's ideal oneness with itself and the world we live in.

Nicholson makes the movie so poignant that it's hard to resist, but I wonder if Payne and Taylor are rejecting the skeptical attitudes of their other films to become more popular, hoping a softer emotional tone will help this picture win the Oscars that have eluded their more tough-minded works.

It's surprising no filmmaker has adapted Dodie Smith's novel before now, and pleasing that Mr. Fywell and company have done such a responsible job with it. It's one of the season's most captivating surprises.

Often best around the edges. Without making a big deal about it, Scott reveals how the Mafia, while putting up a businesslike front, deplored the incursion of black gangsters into the drug trade.

Very inventive, but stay away if you can't stomach over-the-top violence.

Although the film doesn't probe Whale's personality as deeply as it might, the acting is excellent and movie buffs will enjoy its behind-the-scenes references and nostalgic film clips.

The best scenes capture the blend of irony, melodrama, and real emotion that distinguishes Fassbinder's most memorable pictures.

Some will find it exhilarating fun.

What helps Lin's feature-directing debut is his insight into the dark side of living up to "model minority" stereotypes in a materialistic culture.

This remake stays close to the eponymous 1979 horror movie it's based on, except for being precisely 10,000 times scarier.

Earnest, if not as informative as it might have been.

Directors as different as Otto Preminger and Jean-Luc Godard have taken a crack at "Carmen" and Ramaka's version is a colorful addition to the list.

Unique and fascinating.

Never entirely escapes its theatrical origins, and, by framing the story so pugilistically, the filmmakers don't bring out the full richness in this material.

If you can endure watching it, you won't forget this grim cautionary tale for a long time.

Cillian Murphy plays a hyper-feminine transvestite who spends much of the movie traipsing about an increasingly violent landscape in search of his long lost mother. His whirligig encounters, political and sexual, rarely soar.

Spielberg's directing is a tad less tricky than usual, but he doesn't have much talent for psychological suspense, which is the heart of the story. DiCaprio underplays nicely and Walken is superb as the con artist's downtrodden dad.

The acting is fine -- and so is the moody-blues direction -- but, given the subject matter, the movie should be blacker and more disturbing.

The story wanders, the plot twists seem contrived at times, and the emotions are never as intense as they might be. But it highlights yet another facet of Hoffman's talent: a gift for monochrome, of all things! And it has a heart as good as Raymond's own. [30 Dec 1988]

A sweet, not altogether satisfying variation on the fantasy-becomes-reality conceit he (Allen) used in his Depression-era "The Purple Rose of Cairo."

The script by Jeffrey Hatcher is overburdened with plot complications, but Bill Condon, who worked with McKellan on “Gods and Monsters,” has a real affinity for this actor’s capabilities. He brings out his best.

This modest drama is a touching tribute to the late Argo, a character actor you'll instantly recognize.

The Whistleblower is frustratingly uneven, but at least it affords us the rare opportunity these days to meet up with a movie hero who isn't wearing jammies and a cape.

Isn't for everyone, but horror fans with strong stomachs will find it a memorable monsterfest that rarely loses its bite.

Of course, on some level, no movie about this subject can fail to move us, and Son of Saul has its share of powerful sequences. I wanted it to be great, though, with a largeness of vision to match the awful immensity of its subject.

There are times in this lovely, complacent movie about uncomplacent circumstance when I wanted to be shaken up, and wasn’t.

A standout is Ben Mendelsohn’s Aussie nutcase.

Connery (an actor as well, and the son of Sean Connery) keeps the performers honest, and a few of the father-son tussles, with their admixture of love and envy, are powerful.

The picture repeats itself a lot, but Dash is a good sport in poking barbed fun at the PR machinations of today's music business.

Nick Nolte gives a superb performance and Julie Christie is positively incandescent.

The footage of Gehry's work, notably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, is often startlingly beautiful, and Gehry is forthcoming about how he achieved his effects. But too much of the film is taken up with gushy self-serving talking-head testimonials.

Set in an exotic world inhabited by humanoids of wildly different sizes, the fantasy reflects the interest of director Laloux and designer Roland Topor in surrealistic art. [24 Dec 1999, p.B6]

Four stories with automatons as important characters...The last is the most touching, but all are skillfully made.

Judge still comes up with enough laughs to deserve our attention. He is helped more than a little by hilarious work from supporting players Kristen Wiig, David Koechner, J.K. Simmons, and Dustin Milligan.

The cast is appealing and much of the action is wryly amusing, although Baumbach borrows so many moves from Woody Allen and Francois Truffaut that their names should be in the credits. [5 June 1998]

Leconte reconfirms his growing importance to French cinema with this precisely crafted, marvelously acted drama, which makes a powerful statement on capital punishment.

Just about everything connected to this movie is a tie-in, except for the popcorn. And even then I'm not too sure.

Best of all is Robert Downey Jr. Amid all the hardware, he alone in the Marvel series has consistently given top-notch performances. His work in “Endgame” is extraordinarily moving and makes me wish yet again that this great actor would on occasion see fit to be great in a movie that doesn’t require him to fill out a franchise.

This good-natured comedy serves up plenty of laughs while suggesting that the best experts in human psychology are plain old humans.

Danijel, who cares for Ajla while at the same time carrying out his mission of ethnic cleansing, is the least fully explored character in the movie, which leaves a big blur at its core. Still, this is an impressive piece of work that doesn't flinch from the atrocities that no doubt motivated Jolie to make the film in the first place.

Directed and cowritten by a veteran of Denmark's no-frills "Dogma 95" movement, this is a quiet, no-frills drama with simple human values at its core.

Ultimately it’s an upbeat movie about life’s downbeats.

Law is lively and Shyer keeps the action hopping with help from the movie's original gimmick of having Alfie keep up a running monologue to the audience.

Sentimental from the moment the title hits the screen. But it's a nice kind of sentimentality, based on real affection for the characters and real involvement with a place and time.

The actors play their roles to the hilt, but in the end, the role of these investors in extenuating the crisis they took advantage of is played down, as is the disastrous life consequences of all those who were severely hit by it.

The odd-couple pairing does yield its occasional rewards, though. The collision between Everett’s monosyllabic gruffness and Maud’s chatty ditherings is inherently funny, and so is her insistence on marriage before sex, which he finds confounding.

At heart, this is an old-fashioned monster flick decked out with Hollywood's full battery of high-tech visual effects. It's as goofy as it is gory -- stay away if you don't like in-your-face mayhem.

A third aspect of The Tracker is less successful. In a badly calculated move, Mr. de Heer and singer Graham Tardif fill the soundtrack with songs full of clichés, platitudes, and truisms.

Director Chris Renaud and his team have fun with these dithery, frenetic characters. The film is less special when it slows down and takes a breath of fresh air.

The movie's TV-style production values are a little too slick, but the real-life stories are fascinating to watch.

The story gains most of its dramatic impact from superbly understated acting and Christopher Doyle's atmospheric camera work.

The computer-driven effects are impressive, but the adventure is hampered by a flat screenplay, dull acting, and just a hint as to why the dark side of the Force will eventually transform cute little Anakin into the evil Darth Vader.

Dano is still doing his ethereal, creepy underacting routine, but, compared with De Niro's scenery chewing, he seems almost dignified. The film, written and directed by Paul Weitz, has many touching moments and many more hokey ones.

The story is a mess, as usual with Toback's movies, but intricacies of contemporary urban culture are vividly illuminated by his insistence on blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Rarely has a dance movie done so many cinematic pirouettes with such a graceful sense of audience-pleasing fun.

The material veers a bit too predictably from near farce to serioso dramatics but the trajectory here makes emotional sense.

What gives the movie its poignancy – what turns it into something more than a polite entertainment – is Smith's role. Or, to be more exact, her performance, in tandem with Courtenay's.

There is one aspect of Conviction that is a real cheat. No mention is made that Kenny, six months after his release from prison, accidentally fell and fatally fractured his skull. Did the filmmakers think that our knowing this would wreck a happy ending? For a film that prides itself on its realism, this omission is unspeakably wimpy.

Schoenaerts has the gift of being able to make inarticulateness expressive. Perhaps this is why, in moments, he seems to recall Brando and Dean.

Director Hank Rogerson casts a sympathetic eye on the proceedings.

Nolte gives one of his most fully realized performances, Coburn makes an amazingly powerful comeback, and Schrader's filmmaking has never been more expressive or assured.

Succeeds in bringing a lump to the throat without, as is de rigueur these days, insulting our intelligence.

It's an impressive movie, pointing to Howard as a promising new director.

Comically grotesque, strikingly filmed.

Michael Douglas plays US Secret Service agent Pete Garrison, and his jaw has never seemed tighter.

The cinematography is gorgeous from first frame to last, but the story occasionally rings false.