Belvaux tells this seamy story with great energy, and gives an all-stops-out performance in the leading role. Also fine are Catherine Frot as Bruno's former girlfriend and Dominique Blanc as the addict.

Bridges is fun to watch, Fanning emerges as Hollywood's best 6-year-old actress, and Rogers's talents are wasted. A likable drama within its limitations.

A mixed package, but often fun to watch.

The acting and screenplay are amusing, but director Sitch might have taken a more adventurous approach to a tale with such an adventurous subject.

First-time director James McTeigue's big, bold imagery, with slashing reds and blacks, is a close approximation of the novel's look and feel.

If we must endure yet another spring-summer cycle of comic book superheroes, this movie at least delivers the wham-bang goods (recycled though they may be).

Entertaining documentary about stuntwomen who do risky business for a living.

The results are visually striking, but conceptually they oscillate between poetic, pretentious, and philosophically dubious.

At once sympathetic and unsentimental, this is a model of low-budget storytelling on a human scale.

One glaring question the film doesn’t raise: Why, given his history, is Tilikum still entertaining in sea parks?

None of Ferrell's movies have ever really done justice to the best of his "Saturday Night Live" work, but those of us who love his comedy have learned to take the good with the bad.

Both actors are a lot better than this material requires – or deserves.

Lindo gives a powerhouse performance of immense feeling and subtlety.

Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.

Neeson and Rush give emotionally rich portrayals of the main characters, and August's proudly classical filmmaking keeps the dramatic energy high even when the secondary performances sag in the story's second half. [08 May 1998, p.10]

Vigorously directed by Joel Schumacher, the film is closer to a suspense thriller than a journalistic report.

I kept wishing that Still Mine had jettisoned the film’s true-story trappings and moved more deeply into the Craig-Irene duet unencumbered by bad-news bulletins from the building inspectors. Easily the best parts of the film are those in which husband and wife quietly summon up in often the barest of glances and touches a near-lifetime together.

They vary enormously in style, quality, and ideas, but the best of them -- by Gitai, Chahine, and Iñárritu, among others -- pack an enormous emotional and intellectual punch.

Strong acting and smartly tuned-in directing turn a run-of-the-mill detective story into a striking, sometimes harrowing blend of horror and suspense.

The movie is lively, funny, and endearing until melodramatics and sentimentality take over in the last few scenes.

Directed by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky with the same unearthly visual style, and the same mingled concern with technology and psychology, that he showed in his towering ''Solaris'' a few years ago.

This capably made HBO documentary takes an understated and compassionate look at a subject that is often sensationalized in other contexts.

Poignant, spirited, revealing.

Mamet's screenplay is full of savvy satire and the cast couldn't be better.

Isn't glossy, but it has a thought-provoking mix of skepticism, hopefulness, and respect for all but its most scurrilous characters. Hollywood could learn from its canny blending of psychological and multicultural insights.

An enjoyable movie that marks a rattling good directorial debut for Stephen Fry, the English actor who's best known for starring in "Wilde" seven years ago.

In Source Code, the new thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, "Groundhog Day" goes metaphysical. Some people, I know, will argue that "Groundhog Day" was already metaphysical. Perhaps, but compared with "Source Code," it's "Caddyshack."

Bale is brilliant.

As mysterious as it is sinister.

Evocative and disturbing.

The movie's cutest twist is that the monsters are more scared of kids than kids are of them, because they think human children are toxic.

A refreshingly novel ride.

Director Paul Greengrass downplays the movie's travelogue aspects by repeating the bobbly, hand-held camera style he used on "The Bourne Supremacy." It's not a style I'm fond of.

Suicides are proliferating in the city -- is the song to blame, or is it the tenor of the times?

I’ve never been able to figure out if Reggio is an artist or a con artist. Perhaps, in some ways, he’s both. He has claimed in interviews that he intended to make a movie about “the wonders of the universe.” Whatever he’s made, for better or worse, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The drama is a gentle, witty parable of the mixed feelings some people show toward free choice when it confronts them not in theory but in everyday life.

This is more than enough material for two hours of summer-movie fun, and The X-Files delivers said fun reasonably well. The action scenes are bigger and bolder than their small-screen counterparts.

For its first two-thirds, Potiche is a frothy delight.

The movie is more a family album than a historical study, but you'll learn a lot and your toe will tap, tap, tap.

The fact-based story is so riveting and revealing that the filmmakers needn't have used melodramatic formulas to boost its impact.

It's one of the season's most original and energetic movies.

Gloria is a starting-over story that never quite picks up a head of steam. Lelio paces the action as a series of sketches, and the hit-or-miss quality of the material makes for a bumpy ride.

Politics and humanism find an engrossing balance in this ambitious drama based on the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban poet who was persecuted by the homophobic Castro regime.

The collision of sleek melodrama and old Woody Allen stand-up routines is at times oddly effective and at other times just odd.

Just loopy enough to be tantalizing, involving, and fun.

At a time when screen comedy has its own problems with anger management, Sandler's self-possessed style is as refreshing as it is funny.

One of Hollywood's bloodiest and goofiest adaptations.

One of the most violent films this year, it's no more so than many of the Asian kung fu flicks it pays homage to. Don't be surprised if it slaughters its action-film competition in this overcrowded movie season.

During vast sections of Broken Embraces, I wished I was watching the actual old-time noirs instead of the miasmic concoction that Almodóvar has made from them.

But there's no denying the movie's frequent hilarity, abetted by Mel Smith's superbly laid-back directing and on-target performances by an excellent supporting cast.

Why does affection sometimes grow between people who seem to have little or nothing in common? That's the tantalizing question running through this capably acted comedy-drama

It plays out all the usual tropes of the investigative-journalism genre – the hot tips, the clandestine meetings, the hand-wringing about ethics, etc. – without adding a jot of novelty.

Reissued with the addition of 50 minutes trimmed from the original 1980 cut, Fuller's only A-budget movie is still among the lesser works of this frequently brilliant filmmaker.

Lively, gentle, smart.

Kushner's proactive stance on gay rights is prominently aired and, to a lesser extent, so are his musings on the Arab-Israeli situation. His participation in the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's controversial "Munich" did not make it into the film.

Estevez directs with ease and assurance but, both internally and externally, not enough happens to these people.

Thanks to director Zucker, this is by far the best installment yet -- there's less bathroom humor and more "Airplane!"-type lunacy.

Sean Connery is still up to par as James Bond in the latest adventure of Agent 007,

The acting is uneven, but Huston's performance gains eerie intensity as the tale moves from sensationalistic melodrama to humanistic tragedy.

There's some very funny dialogue, but the picture falls apart when it tries to think real thoughts about celebrity, publicity, and the media.

About two-thirds of the way through, Rendition takes a bad turn and sells out most of what made it worth watching in the first place. Witherspoon is given little to do except look weepy, Freeman's change of heart is Q.E.D., and the radical Islamist subplot overwhelms the action, which becomes so confusingly structured that I thought the projectionist had misplaced a reel.

It’s a strange movie – simultaneously rawly realistic and airbrushed.

I wish the film, which is mostly a standard-issue talking-heads-and-clips affair, had showcased more of her performing, but what we see still justifies her fleeting fame.

Since Mr. Bean rarely speaks a complete sentence, the effect is of watching a silent movie with sound effects. This was also the dramatic ploy of the great French director-performer Jacques Tati, who is clearly the big influence here.

The tone of uplift is earned. Larraín’s unarguable point is that, in politics, if we wait for good to issue only from the pure in heart, we will be waiting a very long time.

Old-style animation slows down after a snappy start, but it's lively enough to keep kids from fidgeting too much.

Bardem is brilliant.

What this film is really about is how interconnected we all are, like it or not, on the Internet, and how alluring and alarming this can be.

A romantic kung-fu comedy with a good heart.

Merchant brings keen insight and rich humanity to this culturally revealing tale of psychological unease in a tense postcolonial world.

What have the Yes Men actually accomplished with their japery? Their film is an inadvertent reminder that activist antics are not the same thing as reform.

Lots of lively tunes and spirited acting.

The coach is certainly an offensive goofball, and the Bears are certainly a pack of hard-to-handle whippersnappers. But the picture's point is that surfaces don't tell the whole story about people, about teams, or about anything.

Kathy Bates gives her most gripping performance since "Misery," also based on a Stephen King thriller. The picture is weakened by a rambling and inconsistent screenplay.

Ross manages to keep the pacing remarkably swift, given that the games themselves don't start until halfway through the 144-minute running time.

The acting is excellent.

Maybe the movie does so much dawdling and meandering so we'll have more time to bask in their presence; in any case, the otherwise pleasant picture uses up its ideas long before it uses up its running time.

One of the season's most watchable treats.

De Felitta dodges the temptations of sentiment and preachiness.

Unexpectedly subtle cinematic style.

There are enough pleasantries and good jests in this new film to make a meal.

You may find the film as outrageous as it is outlandish, and Bowery would have taken that as a compliment.

Which is not to say the movie is anything less than diverting. It’s just that diverting is often all it is.

If I had to give a two-word review of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, it would be: "Wow! Huh??"

The acting is amiable and the story is crisply told.

Bee Season, at its core, is about something powerful: The ways in which family members wreak destruction on each other with the best of intentions.

The film could be more adept and probing, but the ladies - Cleo Hayes, Marion Coles, Elaine Ellis, Fay Ray, and Geri Kennedy - are delightful.

It will frustrate viewers who like stories to make instant sense, but fans of provocative puzzles will have mind-teasing fun.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are attractive stars, but what's most appealing about the picture is the value it puts on sharing ideas and feelings through language.

Snarky and enjoyable, but it could have been a ferocious black comedy. No Thank You For Playing It Safe.

The willingness to blend professionals and nonprofessionals is Duvall's most interesting directorial trademark. Most commercial filmmakers hesitate to use this technique, but he doesn't see it as risky.

Here's hoping other filmmakers will follow its spirit, if not all of its methods.

Taylor is utterly believable even when the screenplay (from an Anne Tyler novel) is too self-consciously quirky, and Pearce nicely portrays the guy she obsesses over.

A swiftly told, smartly acted yarn, and it even has an idea or two on its mind.

Todd Solondz's movie begins like a suburban ugly-duckling tale with many comic overtones, but it grows darker as it goes along, evoking dangers that youngsters must be alert to in today's world - from drugs to child abuse - and showing how cruel children can be to one another when grownups aren't around.

This visually intricate fantasia combines his (Greenaway's) extraordinary cinematic imagination with a story and characters less compelling than those in his best works.

Caine is reason enough to see any movie. He gives this clever, somewhat lumbering caper movie a deep-seated soul.

The Town might have amounted to something more than an occasionally good movie about crooks in trouble. There's a knife-edge here, but it's been blunted.