What I ultimately took away from the documentary is the deep love that can exist between owners and their dogs. In The Truffle Hunters, both are shown to be the custodians of each other’s happiness.

As I watched Raya, Namaari, and Sisu grapple with anger, fear, and self-doubt, I realized “Raya” had done something few films even try – it allowed three well-developed female characters to drive the story.

What grounds the overflow of incident are the many human touches that personalize both the anguish and the stray glimpses of freedom.

If Balram was simply a born hustler, his odyssey would not have the resonance it has here. But we can see glimmers of what he might have become if not for his caste.

The power of this film sneaks up on you. It glides from jubilation to heartbreak without missing a beat.

A crowd-pleaser in the best sense, it overflows with empathy for its beleaguered people.

The buildup is slow and deliberate, creating a vivid sense of love and warmth within the family who share the harrowing adventure. The climaxes are horrific, with effects recalling ''Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' but in a less exotic setting.

The story is slender, but the Brazilian settings are exquisite and lilting tunes by Antonio Carlos Jobim cast a spell over the entire enterprise.

Has a mixture of strengths and limitations often found in historical epics: lots of eye-filling action and spectacle, little in the way of psychology or human interest.

Some will find the movie's sexual antics too explicit and unconventional for comfort.

Splendidly acted, and directed with touches of visual poetry by Lasse Hallstr"om, but a little heavy on trite sexual-awakening scenes.

A film of great ambition and accomplishment...Such weaknesses aside, Jungle Fever remains the most thoughtful, provocative, and deeply felt statement on race problems and gender relations to arrive on screen in a very long time - and the funniest and most entertaining to boot.

Leaves out portions of John Irving's novel that would have given it more balance and perspective, but the acting by Maguire and Caine is first-rate by any standard.

Bird isn't an easy film, and it doesn't always make an effort to be likable. But it's a dazzler - at least as good as "Round Midnight,'' and that's saying a lot.

To say it right out, The Bostonians is the best movie I've seen all year.

The film should captivate anyone with a taste for bold cinematics, unpredictable storytelling, and pitch-black humor aimed at the worthiest of targets: a self-involved and self-congratulatory, industry that often gives lip service to art while worshipping the bottom line. [10 Apr 1992]

Many belly laughs.

A powerful ending lends a strong emotional charge to this prettily filmed drama, but too much of the story is taken up with romantic clichés about the everyday challenges of childhood.

The plot is lively and the dialogue packs many good laughs.

The movie is artful to a fault, with too many characters sitting in perfectly arranged, immaculately lighted rooms and talking a lot. It contains near-classic sequences, though, and splendid performances. [28 Sept 1990]

The picture has fine ensemble acting and superb Italian scenery. It would have more power if it were shorter and tighter.

Controversy and all, JFK is one of the year's most powerful and provocative films.

Rhys-Meyers and Johansson work well together - they both know how to project glossiness and guile.

A winning movie about losing. I didn’t always warm to its coy quirkiness, but it’s the rare American movie about contemporary teenagers that rings more true than false.

It’s a charming, wistful movie, and I trust Tan will not have to wait another 20 years to direct her next film.

Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.

What also comes through is a quietly scathing portrait of a society in which every move, overtly or covertly, is monitored.

As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.

The dragons in this movie are expertly brought to life.

Although stylistically and conceptually it never lifts itself entirely out of the realm of a made-for-television drama – don't expect "My Left Foot" – The Sessions is bracing. It's also one of the few movies to recognize that people with severe physical disabilities have sexual lives, too.

Without Cooper's performance, Breach would have been a good, workmanlike thriller. His presence lifts it to a whole new level.

Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.

The ad campaign for the sci-fi thriller District 9, with mysterious billboards touting aliens among us, is highly creative and amusing. So, in patches, is the movie, which is a thinking man's, or man-boy's, "Transformers."

It may be subtitled, and the faces may be unfamiliar, but District B13 is the best buddy action movie around.

Timeliness is certainly on the side of Mira Nair’s uneven but fascinating The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Plowright's performance as a genteel widow in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a small-scale gem, deeply felt without being in the least bit showy.

The film stands quite well on its own. The directors have made the right, essential decision to make the movie almost entirely from Maisie’s point of view.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an ersatz experience, a commingling of forced uplift and exotica, but it's moving anyway.

The film has a transcendent spookiness.

The most powerful scene in the movie, and the one that most fully encompasses its meaning, belongs to Mrs. Morobe (the marvelous Thandi Makhubele).

It sounds like what it is: a modest, workable story for a modest, workable picture. And that's one of the things that make Broadway Danny Rose so likable. The film's very lack of presumption lifts it above the common run of noisy farces and pretentious romances so plentiful these days. [09 Feb 1984, p.29]

It’s to Hall’s credit that, in the end, we see Chubbuck as a victim of no one so much as herself.

Wilson is pretty much the whole show. With nobody else around to steal from, he ends up stealing scenes from himself.

The film pays off in the end when, almost imperceptibly, the rush of emotions it stirs in us rises to a soft crescendo.

This is a movie about people trying to make sense out of the senselessness of what happened.

If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.

The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.

I wish the directors had emphasized more of the players' personal lives apart from the football field. But, in the end, this is a documentary about Courtney and the transformative powers of caring. He works wonders on his players and they reciprocate.

It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.

There's an original comic temperament at work here, and that's rare.

Although the film's Guatemalan and Mexican portions include much effective storytelling, the long American episode is the most stirring.

Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.

The film suffers at times from biopic-itis – the narrative unfolds with the requisite heartbreak carefully apportioned – but it's always eye-catching.

The Loneliest Planet is not a perfect work of art, but it gets at something powerful: the way that life can turn us around in a flash, without warning.

I wish that the Mexican drug cartel subplot was not so overwrought and Oliver Stone-ish, and the decision to shoot much of the film "Cops"-style is also problematic. But the film puts you right inside an everyday inferno and, to its credit, doesn't turn down the heat.

I am not a fan of food you need a microscope to see, but if your idea of fine dining is pumpkin meringue sandwiches, bone marrow tartare with oysters, tea shrimp with caviar anemones, and ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive, then by all means make haste to El Bulli.

The ending is a set-up for yet another sequel: Can "28 Months Later" be very far away?

I wish this movie wasn't so purposefully elegiac and attenuated – at times it's like a middling Terrence Malick fantasia – but it's well worth sitting through.

The film's parallels between Mohmed's travails and the Iraq war are forced, but overall this is a fascinating odyssey that never plays out in ways you would expect.

Along with its disappointments and its narrowness of intellectual focus, Doubt offers up the crackling pleasures of performance and a narrative that snaps shut like a mousetrap. It's the movie equivalent of a rousing night at the theater.

Shulman was around so long that he even got to weigh in on Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. He was skeptical once but came to love it.

In some ways the movie might have been better if it had been about those two Hollywood guys with only occasional blips from the hostage crisis in Iran.

Levy-Hinte has said that a great deal more concert footage exists. I can't wait for the expanded version DVD.

Despite his street cred, Muniz comes across as way too effete for these laborerers, many of whom have harrowing life stories to tell. But his intention to have them re-create photographic images of themselves out of garbage, while it may not pass muster as high art, has the effect of raising their spirits.

Babette's Feast isn't a fast-moving or flashy film. But it has a subtle charm and a warm humor that stick to your ribs far longer than the usual motion-picture glitz. [4 March 1988, p.21]

If I never felt entirely transported by Avatar, it's probably because the story thudded just as often as the imagery soared. But Pandora is still a good place to park yourself for three hours.

Philip Noyce's anti-apartheid drama is tense and thoughtful, if somewhat marred by Hollywood-style thrills.

If there is a single image that we take away from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," it is of Willy Loman weighted down to his very soul by his suitcases. The image that holds in this modern-day salesman's serenade is Nick the salesman reduced to selling off his own life.

It's as if we were watching one of those buddy-buddy bromances told, this time, from the perspective of the woman who is normally on the sidelines of the men's attentions and affections. It's a welcome angle.

The director is fortunate to have cast actors who fully embody their roles. Muehe, who once played Josef Mengele in Costa-Gavras's "Amen," has the ability to let you see far beneath his masklike countenance. Koch, dashing and intense, is entirely believable as a man of the theater; Gedeck exudes a sensuousness that this covert society cannot abide.

Part 1 of the final installment, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' is another scrupulous adaptation of J.K Rowling's books.

This intermittently terrific cerebral thriller does, indeed, hinge on the proper use of dictionary definitions, but the film is really about the oppressive blahness of small-town, postcommunist Romania. In such surroundings, parsing definitions can almost stand for high drama.

Although the film, for the most part, is told from the perspective of the IRA, it does not blithely take its side.

Lola is, in other words, a believable heroine for our times.

This computer-animated feature is consistently inventive, if a bit busy and overlong.

Bong's style is comically tart even in the film's most noirish moments.

I do hope there will be many more future installments. I’d like to spend more time with these folks.

Thankfully, the usual Disney cutesy factor is relatively low, and the script by Justin Marks is more literate than usual for this sort of thing. There are even some end credits that, for a change, are actually funny.

The big news here is not simply that Nim was traumatized, it's that Nim was signing that he was traumatized.

The Plot Against Harry isn't likely to be a smash hit; it will be most successful in large cities, with audiences who want something different from slam-bang Hollywood comedies. But it has the special kind of charm that comes from watching believable characters behaving in real, if eccentric, ways. [02 Feb 1990, p.11]

This film would be better if it wasn't so slick. Still, parts of it are enjoyably shaggy, and Hopkins is very endearing.

A slight but winning documentary.

O'Donnell portrays a hip nun, but the movie is more ponderous than pop. [10 Apr 1998, p.B2]

What actors! The great Miriam Margolyes has a wonderful cameo as a scullery maid, and Colin Firth manfully endures a face full of frosting. And then there's Angela Lansbury, playing her first movie role in 20 years as the villainous Aunt Adelaide.

Dews perhaps makes too much of the notion that Allis was a woman out of her time – a feminist precursor. This is too sociological a formulation for such a patently psychological crisis.

For most of the movie, Dheepan, for all its flaws, is hard-hitting in ways that count. It has the intimacy of a personal drama but the amplitude of a much larger immigrant odyssey.

Destined to become this year's love-it-or-hate-it movie. Is it OK to say I merely liked it a lot?

The animation is consistently sporty and there are some choice comic riffs on martial arts movies.

The sources of this happiness become far more complex when Adrien’s revelation is imparted (only to Anna). At this point the movie’s moral compass spins.

It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.

Devotees of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" may regard this film as a nostalgia trip, but it's much more comprehensive, more forward-looking than that.

The problem is, the geek in question, at least as Jesse Eisenberg plays him, doesn't have the emotional expansiveness to fill out a movie. Perhaps sensing this, the filmmakers play out the story line from multiple points of view and crowd the stage with a pageant of voluble supporting characters.

In all, it's a fun exercise in nostalgia but a three-hour homage to grade Z movies is a long sit. Grunge overload sets in early.

This latest movie adaptation sustains a consistent note of measured mirth. As in the novel, the romantic flippancies have a serious core because at stake is nothing less than the prospect of an enduring happiness.

In "Birders," by contrast, nature is one big entrancing show; a world of tweets without "tweets."

You may not feel like dancing after watching Pina – unless you have a thing for earth in your shoes – but you'll certainly know you've seen something.

Trophy is a documentary that can make the stomach turn and the head spin. It’s about the big-stakes world of hunting and conservationism, and what’s surprising is how morally intertwined the two activities are.

Huppert never loses sight of the fact that Nathalie’s wounded heart often overrules her steel-trap mind.