The film's real appeal won't be to Clooney fans or adventure buffs, but to moviegoers who enjoy thinking about compelling questions with no easy answers.

It's effective but schematic storytelling.

Not a great movie, but contains fascinating historical material.

Michell treats the Irish troubles of the 1970s with clear-eyed compassion, and Walters's performance ranks with her best.

Linklater keeps it lively with imaginative camerawork and razor-sharp editing.

What hits home is Renner’s performance, which gives full weight both to Webb’s fierce, abiding love for journalism and his despair when his livelihood – his reason for being – is trashed. It’s a tragedy, doubly so since the core of Webb’s allegations remains unchallenged today.

Although the film is slow and sometimes ungainly, it takes on surprising power from the dignity of its performances and the moral strength of its ideas.

The story is dark and often violent, but it's told with a remarkable sense of visual energy and imagination.

State of Play is far from a great movie, but it's sentimental in all the right ways.

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

Kevin Spacey gives a bravura performance as superlobbyist Jack Abramoff in George Hickenlooper's uneven but often loopily entertaining Casino Jack.

Karsin doesn't adequately detail the political complexities of the struggle, but how can one not respond to someone like tribal leader Flor Ilva, who declares, "We women are warriors, not with weapons, but with our thoughts and through raising our children."

Has a sense of emotional urgency and deep-dwelling grief.

Despite its deficiencies, and the inadequate screen time allotted to Theron (who's quite good), Sleepwalking has a core of feeling. It's about a do-gooder who, lacking all skills for it, does good anyway. His emotional odyssey has real poignancy.

Adaptation is sort of like the mythical Ourabouros mentioned in the screenplay -- the snake that eats its own tail -- or like a series of mirrors repeating their images to infinity.

Grim and sordid though it often is, the film has a steady flow of visually absorbing images. It's an art movie for the masses.

John Sayles's offbeat western shows how public controversies often overlap with private grudges and conflicting memories.

The dialogue and acting are stagy at times, especially in the early scenes, but the characters are compelling and the Indian atmosphere is vividly sketched.

It's been a while since we've had a good monster movie, and while Cloverfield probably won't give you sleepless nights, it will certainly keep you awake in the theater.

A high-class weepie for adults who disdain the lower forms of four-hankiedom.

The battle scenes and a few of the human vignettes are powerful, but too often the film falls back on conventional plot mechanics.

Its best moments are as exuberant and insightful as anything the screen has given us this season, and its passionate concern for believable characters in a recognizably real world offers a refreshing change from the current spate of feel-good fantasies.

Frankenheimer doesn't recapture the magic he once created in movies like "The Manchurian Candidate," but he does cook up an effective thriller in the "French Connection" vein.

Taking great commercial risks, director Martin Scorsese avoids movie-star performances and the psychological storytelling that Hollywood movies normally thrive on.

Sometimes disturbing but consistently fascinating.

Wittily written and deliciously acted, Lonergan's debut film is a clear cut above the average.

The comedy is often crass and crude, but it makes telling points about how much of "race" is more about the words and gestures we use than the actual colors of our skins.

The sensitive directing of Richard Benjamin and the exquisite cinematography of John Bailey give the comedy and drama a special glow, as do the strong performances by Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage and the stunning one by Elizabeth McGovern. [03 May 1984, p.29]