One of the most inventive offerings so far this season.

The kind of breezy teen-pic that youngsters flock to nowadays, and this particular specimen is imaginative enough to explore an environment off Hollywood's beaten path. It's also broad-minded enough to portray the evangelical milieu with flair, satirize its foibles with restraint, and respect its ideals even as it shows how individuals may fall short.

Compassionate and marvelously acted, although a subplot about the gay grandson slows the story down for a while.

The movie has no profound insights to offer, but its nimble acting and lifelike dialogue make it entertaining as well as thoughtful. Think "Stand by Me" meets "Ghost World," and you just about have it.

Scurlock's filmmaking style leans more heavily on woebegone personal testimony than facts and figures, but politicians willing to go up against the credit industry's lobbyists would be well advised to take a look.

Stylishly made, if less intellectually resonant than first-rate Mann films like "Ali" and "The Insider."

Snow is a full-fledged genius who enlarged the fundamental horizons of cinema with his classic "Wavelength," but here his aesthetic and philosophical ideas don't quite keep pace with his technological boldness.

Poignant and well acted, though not very memorable.

This atmospheric story unfolds through leisurely shots that invite us not just to watch the characters, but to live and breathe along with them.

While the result is visually brilliant, it's oddly disjointed and packs less emotional force than Richard Price's novel.

A series of vignettes...Some are weak, some are superb -- there's a priceless one with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as Brits with different feelings about learning they're cousins -- but they get better as they go along.

Michael Douglas and Annette Bening head the well-chosen cast, but what gives the movie substance is its willingness to take real stands on real political issues.

The Imposter has too many reenactments for my taste, and Bourdin is glorified by Layton more often than he is condemned. Still, this is one creepy mystery.

Clooney shows strong filmmaking imagination in his directorial debut, but the movie's driving force is Charlie Kaufman's screenplay, a genre-bending romp that blurs all boundaries between the factual and the fantastical.

Although their responses too often seem rehearsed, their innocence is touching and redemptive.

Colorful, if not exciting.

The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.

This first-person account of suffering and survival among Hungarian victims of the Holocaust contains much stirring and revealing material, although the conventionality of its style diminishes the freshness and urgency of its content to a degree. [05 Feb 1999, p.14]

Although it's less novel and feisty than the original "Fantasia" of 1940, this collection of music-filled animations is highly entertaining at times.

Well, it is shameless, and it tugs the heart in all the obvious places, but it has a winning vivaciousness and a trio of performances by its lead actors that transcend its “inspirational” niche.

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.