A genuinely sweet and determinedly inspirational family film that features a charming young actress in the title role. It's a successful feel-good movie, but it would make you feel even better if it didn't push quite so hard for its desired effects.

Although ill-served by the lack of expert voices or elaboration on viable choices, Plagues and Pleasures is an often-fascinating document of change -- incremental as evaporation, or catastrophic as flooding.

If Frederick Wiseman's involving new documentary Crazy Horse is any indication, that old rule about how you get to Carnegie Hall - "practice, practice, practice" - applies equally well to that Parisian temple of self-described "nude chic" known to its intimates simply as "Le Crazy."

Johnson has taken a well-worn, much-revised genre, adapted to what's become a clichéd setting and transcended both in the process.

One of the pleasures of Doctor Strange is the way it both wholly embraces and gently mocks the unapologetic geekiness of the enterprise.

This beautifully crafted jewel of a throwback thriller signifies Okuno as a talent to watch, but furthermore, it pushes the viewer to question what, and who, we choose to believe and why.

Psychotic, battle-weary and devoid of compassion as they may be, these merry professional killers aren’t entirely dead inside. By the same token, Gunn’s insouciant swagger isn’t entirely devoid of warmth or sentimentality, and the bonds of kinship that emerge between comrades — warm little cracks in the movie’s nihilistic facade — can’t help but sneak their way into your own affections.

Audiences who feel battered by Hollywood's usual hard-sell approach to farce may be disarmed by Koepp's soft touch and inclined to credit blandness as understatement.

As Madeleine Sackler's absorbing, often tender documentary The Lottery shows, when it comes to the world of charter education, no seemingly good deed may go unpunished -- or at least undercut.

Stephenson's a true original, worthy of her own reality TV show. As Pressure Cooker proves: Anything is possible.

That Shear knows how to bring the storyline’s seasonal time frame to a cyclical close with humor, warmth and hope is the grace note that makes Fantasy Life feel like the start of a promising writing-directing career.

The machination is comic, and the repercussions carry the awkward tinge of threadbare farce, but the vibe is pure melancholy, echoed in the clinically beautiful monochromatic cinematography and the tinny, weeping musical phrase Hong often leans on to close his extended takes of dialogue.

Escapes is as unconventional as its subject, demonstrating the charming things that can happen when a life in no way ordinary gets documented by a filmmaker most unusual.

What the film does well is capture the confusion of the identity abyss of twentysomethings of a certain social class.

Dances on the edge of flat-lining just like the DOAs that are Frank's stock-in-trade.

It's one of the charms of Air Guitar Nation that much of it plays like a mockumentary in which you're not quite sure who's pulling your leg. But it's real, even if the guitars are not.

Veber, also responsible for "The Dinner Game," apparently has a finger on the pulse of French audiences and Gallic-minded Americans, but there's just not a lot of freshness in this Closet.

Sensitive, gritty and courageous, this film gathers a power and focus not foreshadowed in its deliberately rambling earlier sequences.

It's a drag how Nettelbeck sees working women -- or at least this working woman -- for whom she shows little understanding; there's a puritan, even punitive, cast to the way she sees her character, whose pathology she digs at with the tenacity of a truffle hound.

As for Polsky’s own directorial style, it’s breathlessly, haphazardly eccentric, a little too prone to the clichés sports docs use to pump up our adrenaline. But his subjects — kings of the puck, the pigskin and the pitch — are engagingly self-analytical and honest.

The movie is less an uncharted journey than a 2 p.m. bus tour of a music industry legend. But like an expert guide, Mangold shepherds the story with enough grace, energy and skill to make it worthwhile.

What seems to start out as a burlesque against the rich -- a satire of class-consciousness -- ends up mutating into something stranger and richer and more ambiguous. [10 Dec 1993, p.F4]

It deals with friendship, loneliness, abandonment and forgiveness, and though its curious narrative arc means you're never sure exactly where it's going, the film works up a considerable emotional charge by the end.

If Pusher III is the trilogy's least effective, that may be because the soured-deal plot line is by now a given, and its theme is the simplest: Old habits die hard.

Kontroll is in fact an allegory, but one that oozes a gritty, dynamic realism.

It's potent stuff, laced with smart, sensitive humor, and extremely well handled by Wysocki and the excellent ensemble of young actors that become Terri's intimates.

The proportions of the narrative strands sometimes feel off, but the movie pulses with the unpredictability of full-blooded characters.

More discursive than comprehensive, the film does seem to capture Thomas’ fierce, swashbuckling spirit.