A transcendent, transporting experience, a trance movie that casts a major league spell by going deeply into a monastic world that lives largely without words.

The film is a persistent spectacle of audio-visual mood and twee posturing: Strange musical currencies underscore almost every scene, and Logan's acts of scoping and cocooning, in and out of Joey's planetary-themed bedroom, are punctuated with fuzzy video of animals on the hunt.

Much of the credit for the movie succeeding goes to Thornton. In his able hands, Farmer is not so much someone who simply has faith in what he is doing but a man who believes with incontrovertible knowledge of what can be accomplished.

Often mildly amusing but rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the film works best in scenes with a distinct Miami flavor.

Fortunately, director Michael Apted and his team understand the challenges of this kind of story and have met them with intelligence and energy.

Kramer shows zero feeling for the nuances of a midlife sexual awakening.

If the journey is familiar, at least the company is good.

The film does a fairly remarkable job of capturing the attitude of the festival, covering its evolution from quaint little Woodstock knockoff into something much larger that is both hallucinatory and hypnotic. It's Mardi Gras meets Burning Man with an excellent, revolving house band.

Filled with tension, deception and bravura acting, Breach is a crackling tale of real-life espionage that doubles as a compelling psychological drama.

A wonderfully heart-wrenching love story for tweens, teens, and even adults who fondly remember when a friendship could be ignited by a gesture as simple as offering a stick of Juicy Fruit.

It's entertaining to watch ol' hothead do his thing with his fiery chain and his "penance stare," but for a comic book with a rebel spirit, the adaptation feels obediently conventional.

Although Alvart lays on the biblical allegory too heavily at times, the film's pace is brisk enough to maintain our full attention. Antibodies is not so much an art house movie as a well-made, commercial thriller that happens to be in German.

Avenue Montaigne may not be a centimeter deeper than it needs to be, but you also won't be feeling that your pocket was picked when it's over.

Close to Home is a slender slice -- a sliver is more like it -- of a very rich cake.

It is terrible in every aspect -- wretchedly written, directed with a ham fist (by Matthew Levin) and over-acted.

While excellent films like Danis Tanovic's Oscar-winning "No Man's Land" and Vinko Bresan's "Witnesses" have dealt with the war itself, few have dealt with the aftermath, and none with the aching power and empathy of Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams.

Something about Eklavya: The Royal Guard suggests a lost film by David Lean. With some muted echoes of "Hamlet." And a whiff of "Rigoletto."

More surprising is Perry's inability to write back-and-forth dialogue with any real wit or verve. He is at his best when writing speeches, and some of the film's best moments come when Union is given snappy monologues on the state of contemporary relationships and African American maleness.

Bamako is an attack on globalization that is endlessly cogent, confrontational -- and, best of all, as captivating as it is illuminating.

Bad as Harris' Hannibal Rising screenplay (his first) is, at least it's an improvement on his dreadful book, streamlining its convoluted action and discarding large chunks of unspeakable dialogue.

Murphy and his brother Charlie, who collaborated on the screenplay, seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the latter's stint on "Chappelle's Show." Where Dave Chappelle used stereotypes to confront prejudice, the Murphys (and their co-screenwriters Jay Scherick and David Ronn) merely squeeze a few grudging drops from caricatures that were wrung dry in the age of vaudeville.

Consistently imaginative, revealing and funny.

A project such as Operation Homecoming should shed light on their experiences, but Robbins' film just falls short. [06 Apr 2007, p.E17]

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

The Messengers is at once ruthlessly efficient and shamelessly distended.

The romance makes an awkward, contrived fit with the nominally serious political stuff, and even those momentous events come off as generic and unconvincing.

Fired! is missing the one thing it could have used most: a career objective.

Bisexuality certainly increases the geometric possibilities of the romantic comedy, completing its triangles and allowing for quadrangles and other, more amorphous layers of amorous involvement.