It’s the kind of intimate tour of New York that usually gets called a love letter to the city, except the corners Aronofsky likes have so much grime and menace and humor that it’s more like an affectionate dirty limerick.

Jude is hardly precious about his craft. But that’s because he’s confident you’ll leave bursting with thoughts and feelings about the price of progress, the weight of history and the ways we struggle to do right amid so much that’s wrong.

In an era when AIDS research still seems in its infancy and bacteria and viruses seem to now be able to outwit science's most powerful arsenal, there may be lessons to be learned here. And they're told with great feeling and fine craftsmanship. [15 Apr 1994, p.F24]

Jean de Florette is like good peasant bread: honest, chewy, unsurprising and heavily satisfying.

Johnson is nothing if not a punchy ringmaster of deadpan humor and his grab-bag mindset generates enough goodwill to appreciate the DIY brashness of it all. I’m one of those who had no clue of this act’s history and I’m fairly certain I’d look forward to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Sequel.

A sort of new-wave nuke film, “Miracle Mile” is intense, humorous and powerful. And, yeah, it’s also sometimes off the wall.

Out of magnanimity, I’ll liken this trifle to a Rothko. The more I think about The Christophers, the more I imagine it has interesting layers. But I won’t fault anyone who just sees a simple square.

This is a superbly crafted mixture of old and new footage.

Roach has insightfully made this about people, not societal scapegoats. He and McNamara have changed up nearly everything in this disaster except its vibrations of dread.

Despite their clear affection for these women, the Dardenne brothers never sugarcoat their characters’ unenviable circumstance or latch onto phony bromides to alleviate our anxiety. And yet Young Mothers contains its share of sweetness and light.

What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and The Chronology of Water, arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 "The Ring" reveals that Hitchcock began to be a master of his craft early on, already adept at manipulating his audience's emotions and in creating suspense. [25 Nov 1996, p.F8]

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

If Mendonça Filho overstuffs his accomplished picture, it’s a fitting rebuke to a violent regime that would have tried to tamp down his voice. He finds a worthy partner in Moura, who embodies the rugged sex appeal and muffled anguish of a principled individual in a world gone mad.

Dickinson’s first feature is so assured in every other regard that you can give him a pass for these interludes. Urchin establishes him as a filmmaker to watch: a storyteller willing to look at a thorny subject and admit that there are no easy answers.

Hitchcock deftly maneuvers the film from comedy to romance to melodrama to near tragedy. [02 Feb 2007, p.E12]

A film this well-made and cut (the pacy editing by Aden Hakimi calls back to the elder Romero’s own cutting of his major titles) shouldn’t be relegated to just one kind of audience. Anyone who appreciates horror should find something to smile at here.

Most assuredly, though, this is a duo of director and star once more moving in concert together, maybe not as confidently as with some previous efforts, but with a knowing intelligence.

With its perspectives on love, aging and solitude, "Prelude to a Kiss" still offers a good deal more than the usual smiles of a summer's day. [10 Jul 1992, p.F14]

The movie is most cutting when it moves away from the big set pieces and, instead, examines the small ways that employees lose their humanity to a capitalist system that’s out to destroy them.

Helander and editor Juho Virolainen pace the carnage like slapstick. They have a nimble rhythm for how many times a victim can dodge disaster before splattering. The violence is so big that it becomes comedy, even getting us laughing at a severed head, twice.

The movie is a powerfully blunt instrument of empathy. Ben Hania’s insistence on close-up melodramatics — faces in anguish, a handheld camera glued to them — sometimes overshadows a thirst for something more analytical. But it’s decidedly a vision, one steeped in roiling pain.

The edgy appeal of Erupcja is in the way it maps humans as molecules and electrons, fizzed by location, inspired by connection, driven to hover, fuse and release. The characters may get bounced around a bit and some will feel stranded, but you’ll know you’ve been taken somewhere new by this charming indie.

The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

Stiller’s approach is musical; his assembly of clips and photos is musical — poetic, not prosaic

Even if you don’t know her music, the film still works an acidic sketch of fame.

At times it’s as if you’re onstage with the cast. And yet that simple approach, in confident hands, reflects the magic that only cameras and cutting can do: collapse distance and time into a special intimacy, letting strong actors with expert-level songs be the greatest of special effects.

De Toth never makes a false move, never lets up a breakneck pace and gets sensational performances from one of those amazing casts we once took for granted in Hollywood pictures. [13 Aug 1998, p.F16]

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.

Enough can’t be said about Liu’s astonishing, naturalistic turn. She’s a physical marvel here, making herself as small and inconspicuous — yet also as quietly resolute — as her complex character requires.

“Boosters” isn’t perfect and that doesn’t matter. The audacity of it — the exuberance Riley puts into making and loving movies — is what I want to see more of from every filmmaker, fashionista and human being still grinding at their own creative ambitions.

The film's plot may have more holes than one of Tequila's innumerable victims, but when a visual stylist like Woo is at his peak, no one even thinks of caring.[30 Apr 1993, p.F6]

This 1939 William Wyler version of Emily Bronte's passionate and inspired novel of l'amour on the lightning-lashed moors and gloomy heaths is the best and most successful on screen. [16 Oct 1994, p.65]

A hysterical farce about a Sicilian laborer (beagle-eyed Giancarlo Giannini) who gets himself in political and sexual trouble. [31 Jul 1997, p.F39]

In the end, the great thing about “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” is that rather than creating a desire to meet this formidable individual, it makes you feel as if in some way you actually had.

With the same painstaking care that made John Bryson’s “Evil Angels,” the book on which the film is based, incontrovertible, Schepisi builds his mosaic with Australian faces and voices crisscrossing every social class and occupation.

This time, with Besson scripting / producing and Patrick Alessandrin directing, it amounts to a raucous and colorfully junky helping of seconds.

There's a mystery at the heart of Sherlock Holmes, and it's not the one the great master of detection has been called on to solve. It's how a film that has so many good things going for it has turned out to be solid but not spectacular.

Wisely, Hancock has given the film as much humor as heart.

A potent, energetic heart-tugger and Khan and Kajol, major Bollywood stars, are highly appealing and equal to the demand of their emotion-charged roles.

Perhaps not since "The Godfather: Part II" have we seen a sequel come along that more than matches the mastery of the film that came before it -- all the pathos, the brio, the epic sweep. . . . the cheese balls.

Still worth watching because it provides a showcase for a group of actors who really appreciate this kind of farcical comedy.

The movie's humor targets both kids and grown-ups with equal success, but, even with the presence of a mustache-fixated monkey, the main attraction here is the movie's vibrant 3-D animation and its perfect storm of foodie-friendly sight gags.

McKay, a British stage actor who was doing an off-Broadway production about the movie legend when casting started, and Danes, whose acting always seems so effortlessly good, are the best things about the film.

To Twohy's credit, he does a decent job of keeping you guessing -- and interested -- until almost the very end.

To really understand the zany and surreal comic madness of A Town Called Panic, you're going to have to see it for yourself.

A solid heist flick elevated by its ensemble cast and the visual eye of Hungarian-born director Nimrod Antal ("Kontroll").

Despite Teardrop Diamond's rough edges, the filmmaker, who has spent much of her career acting on stage and screen, succeeds in transporting us back to that other time; capturing the lyricism of the dialogue and the fetid South that Williams so brilliantly envisioned where nearly everything goes to rot.

Beguiling but long-winded.

Hardwicke has connected so intensely to the Meyer novel that it's hard to imagine anyone else making a better version.

The result is a more-clever-than-most window into modern urban yuppie mating rituals, tracking just how tough it is to keep a grip on love and the corporate ladder at the same time.

Somewhere between the rabbit-hole absurdist comedy of Charlie Kaufman and a navel-gazing Woody Allen film is the somberly humorous indie Cold Souls.

Sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie.

Serves as an absorbing snapshot of America's highly influential, reportedly 50-million-strong evangelical Christian movement.

Returning to his roots after a stint in Hollywood, Woo has made the most expensive film in mainland Chinese history, a pleasantly traditional picture that marks a new direction for one of the world's premier action maestros.

Blood Diamond attempts to be an action thriller with serious political overtones, to be as much position paper as "Zulu Dawn."

What works best, though, is that it's practically an R&B/gospel musical.

Not the supernatural horror picture its title suggests, but this subtle, elliptical film evokes its own kind of nightmarish situation.

Funny, but its lacking at the core. Judd Apatow's comedy takes the guy's side of things, but how does the woman feel about all of this?

It says something when you come out of a film as weird and fantastical as Oldboy and feel that you've experienced something truly authentic. I just don't know what. I can't think of anything to compare it to.

Just a good old-fashioned romance, one in which people actually bring out the best in one another rather than the worst. How novel is that?

Zodiac is primarily a complex character study, despite the film's grim and gruesome subject matter. It's a role reversal of sorts for a director who normally emphasizes the brutal tension in his movies.

Though the film's final break-the-bank action sequence in Venice is worth waiting for, Casino Royale's 2-hour, 24-minute running time is long enough to exhaust all but the series' biggest fans.

Schreiber takes Foer's sprawling, multilayered, multigenerational beast and hones it into a post-Glasnost buddy picture; a polished nugget of a road movie, focused mainly on Alex and Jonathan's growing sense of identification with each other and with their origins.

The political realities of his legacy can be endlessly debated, but in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it.

Pirate Radio, the new rock-saturated comedy that proves life really is better when it's set to a '60s soundtrack, is, to borrow from the Stones, "a gas! gas! gas!"

Like a wayward love child of Lenny Bruce and the Three Stooges, Brüno is an idiot savant of penetration -- breaking through borders, boundaries and anything that resembles good taste on his way to whipping up as much cultural anarchy as he can. I would guess Brüno is holding on to an R rating for this sublimely spicy soufflé by the skin of his, well, let's just not say.

The Boys Are Back is a bit like the parenting it portrays -- at times there is pain, mistakes will be made, but if you can get beyond that, there is pleasure to be found.

Aside from the singing and dancing, it is the color and pageantry of India as filtered through the work of cinematographer Santosh Sivan that captivates us.

Barely credible, but in the hands of the film's dedicated minimalists, "barely" is enough, and they turn the precious little they have to work with into a plus.

If the film offers any lesson, it is that nirvana is not easily attainable, so there really are no shortcuts.

Wonderful, heartwarming.

Though Aliens of the Deep flirts with Zissou-Murray's divine madness, Cameron's vision seems somehow cozier. No wonder he's not yet ready for dry dock.

Only 22 when he began shooting the film, Greenebaum displays a prodigious understanding of the treatment of the elderly in contemporary America.

At heart a reverie, a meditation on the past and its treacheries.

Romantic comedies have become so cannibalistic lately that Hitch stands out for what seem like major innovations by comparison.

By turns funny and sobering, sweeping and intimate, the consistently entertaining Inside Deep Throat plays like a giddy prance through the minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics.

A solid family film that strikes a shrewd balance between tough-mindedness and sentimentality and boasts a fine cast.

Features some charming songs by Carly Simon and is warmly animated so as to evoke nostalgia in parents.

Keanu Reeves has no peer when it comes to playing these sort of messianic roles -- he infuses them with a Zen blankness and serenity that somehow gets him through even the unlikeliest scenes with a quiet, unassuming dignity.

The new Israeli film Walk on Water is complex and paradoxical, at times frustrating but always involving. Something like the country that produced it.

The animated tale has flashes of brilliance but seems assembled from cultural flotsam.

There's considerable universality in Black Cloud's plight, yet Schroder makes it personal and deeply felt. In a direct, unpretentious manner, Black Cloud expresses most effectively its hero's struggle with himself.

It takes a rugged survivalist mentality to sit through 108 minutes of Off the Map, a self-consciously loopy and mystical drama about a family that lives off the map, off the grid, off the land and mostly off their meds in the mangy desert of New Mexico.

Although this is the kind of entertainment designed to send its audience home happy, Ice Princess has its share of stinging moments and has a good deal more edge than one might have expected.

The movie is as side-splitting as it is creepy, especially when it ventures into surrealistic nightmare imagery.

Schizo is an ugly name for a dark and lovely piece of work, but maybe that's the point. The world this film depicts can be a casually pitiless one, half modern and half tribal, but it can also offer compassion and beauty.

For an unabashedly silly spoof of a girly action flick, D.E.B.S. is unexpectedly fresh, thanks mostly to the sweetly exuberant love story at its center.

What makes Lipstick & Dynamite its own animal is that, intentionally or not, the director has allowed something else into the mix, a glimpse of the unvarnished and the unsanitized.

For all the vivid, amusing characters that surround Gina, Beauty Shop rightly belongs to Latifah, who comes into her own as a star and an actress in this film.

Sweet and often hilarious.

Yes, this could be a better film, but the good qualities it does have are rare enough to hold our interest on screen and off.

Sternfeld's approach is rigorously minimalist, which is a plus since the Winters family is in no way extraordinary or distinctive.

If this strikes some as some kind of gallingly blasé, ostentatious Parisian sophistication, it's far from it.

It's hard to imagine "The Wild Bunch" having the depth and grace it did without Peckinpah having this experience to draw on, and for that masterful film alone we're grateful to have Major Dundee back among the living again.

A film that takes a steadfastly gentle look at some of life's harshest moments while not overlooking its joys, House of D deserves a chance to find an audience.

If the script isn't as well-structured as it could be, the dialogue is refreshingly natural. Kutcher is surprisingly well cast as the awkward, somewhat dorky Oliver, and Peet is charming and charismatic without being cloying or artificial.