The day-to-day realities, especially economic, of Sonny and Jewel's lives could have been more fully detailed to good effect, and Cage might have also have risked setting off the tenderness of his storytelling with an edgier style. Even so, few films take the viewer by surprise with such emotional impact as Sonny.

McGrath, who adapted the novel, manages to catch the flavor of it without its tang.

Just because people are objecting to Max for all the wrong reasons doesn't make it a good film, and it's not. It's a bizarre curiosity memorable mainly for the way it fritters away its potentially interesting subject matter via a banal script, unimpressive acting and indifferent direction.

A splendid film. It uses all the resources of cinema -- masterful writing, superb acting, directorial intelligence, an enveloping score, top-of-the-line production design, costumes, cinematography and editing -- to make a film whose cumulative emotional power takes viewers by surprise, capturing us unawares in its ability to move us as deeply as it does.

Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.

It's Zeta-Jones who keeps you watching from start to finish -- You'd have to go back to Joan Crawford in her hungry prime, in films like "Rain" and "The Women," to find another female film star who grabs hold of the screen with such ferocity.

The only way his (Benigni's) show-off performance could have a prayer of working would be if the film were released as a silent.

For all his genre-hopping and shape-shifting Spielberg seems to have become too big to tell small stories, which is one reason why the film sputters on one too many false endings.

A witty and delightful Christmas present for the entire family.

A venturesome, beautifully realized psychological mood piece that reveals its first-time feature director's understanding of the expressive power of the camera.

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

It is a lovely, amusing diversion from the start, but the depth of its poignancy by the time it's over comes as a surprise.

Ramsay reaches out boldly with a film that is as unsettling as it is minimalist.

In an instance of director, stars and material melding flawlessly, Spider is a brilliantly realized depiction of a mentally ill individual.

To transcend cliché, movies like Narc need the passion of a heretic who can take stock characters with their stock predicaments and turn them inside out, the way Curtis Hanson and Quentin Tarantino do. Blood, guts and flash aren't enough.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

Rarest and most impressive of all, Antwone Fisher is a serious drama set in the African American community, one that showcases powerful, confrontational scenes between black actors.

There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.

If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.

Anthony LaPaglia and Sigourney Weaver are superb in this moving adaptation of the post-Sept. 11 play.

Its heart is so much in the right place it is difficult to get really peeved at it.

As saccharine as it is disposable.

Familiarity and continuity are what the success of this series has always been about. We've been here before, and we like the neighborhood.

A sharp brainteaser of a film, a compelling mind game you compulsively play along with.

Every holiday season needs a pleasant surprise, and this year it's Drumline. This entertaining and enthusiastically told tale shrewdly energizes its way-familiar plot line by setting it amid one of the greatest and least-known spectacles in American sports.

As for Schneider, he may be obnoxious and unhandsome, but he is, more important, talented and fearless, the driving force of this brash, not-so-predictable comedy.

A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges.

Even when they don't always add up, these are movies in which De Niro can shrug off the burden of being Robert De Niro. Where the star who was Travis Bickle can again freely assume the part of the great character actor -- if only this time to ask, "You laughin' at me?"