Moves along the way its leading man walks along - steady and sure.

Rosenwald tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man.

The Farrellys manage to have their cake and scarf it down, disgustingly, too.

Rodanthe is a reliably steamy stormy sultry story.

This is more than the story of soldiers grappling with stress and doubt as they reenter the "normal" flow of domestic life. It's about strangers bonding, about friendship and discovery, about the comedy and tragedy of the human experience.

Gripping, sobering, inspiring stuff.

What it expresses most of all is the sheer fun and joy these experiences can bring.

Lieberher, a Philly native transplanted to L.A., is a reed-thin, wide-eyed wonder. There's none of that precocious Hollywood child-actor stuff going on; he's seriously thinking about what he has to say, assessing his words and their implications. It's rare to see any actor - let alone a novice, barely out of the single digits - so readily and naturally displaying inner thought in front of the camera.

The music, of course, resonates. And so does this exquisite heartbreaker of a story.

An improbably entertaining, if overlong, adventure that brings new meaning to the term "summer camp." Doubloons! Ripped bodices! Unbuckled swash! Rum galore!

McGregor, playing his lover, is a perfect foil: gentle, funny, magnetic.

Has a cool, midcentury-modern look (dog and boy live in a populuxe Manhattan penthouse) and a voice cast that may not be A-list but fits the bill nicely.

A cross between François Truffaut's sometimes-harrowing dramas about childhood and a Steven Spielberg fantasy, Gondry's film abounds with sentiment - without falling prey to sentimentality.

Nicely filmed and acted.

A mopey meditation on family and its dysfunctions, Winter Passing is in fact of more than passing interest.

The picture uses humor and a heartfelt conviction to tell a story about discovering your destination in life.

Guggenheim doesn't bring much visual style to the game. But he brings heart (and some Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack) to the story of a lost Jersey girl redeemed by sport. Yeah, I cried. And cheered. You will too.

The film is enjoyable as a performance piece, an eminently watchable contest between two actors at the top of their games.

Heavyhearted without being heavy-handed, Corbijn's lyrical movie is about a man who has built his own cell and become his own jailer.

A wickedly funny, Naked Gun-style parody that conflates old-style private-eye pics with Shaft and, yes, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The unassuming performances by Krasinski and Rudolph help make this the first Mendes movie that feels lived-in rather than staged.

Despite the jumpy, ride-along camera work and the ever-present threat of engagement, a certain tedium sets in during the film.

Jon Favreau, the actor-director who made the delightful family film "Elf," has a firm grip and a light touch with this material about bickering brothers who find a board game that zaps the family home into hyperspace.

It's a farce with heart, a meditation on identity, family and gender politics that has real faith in its characters - even when the characters themselves lack it.

Isn't a good movie, at least by any conventional definition of the word good. But it's not a bad movie, either. It's a Bob Dylan movie.

In her byplay with Clooney, Roberts only occasionally strikes a spark. Clooney, on the other hand, generates heat.

Searing and hypnotic docudrama.

All Good Things is a "true crime" drama with speculative scenarios and a kind of deliberately murky aura. It's a strange, thrilling tale begrimed by bad memories, by bad deeds.

So gin-and-tonic dry, so deceptive in its deadpan-ness, that it's not always clear that Julian Fellowes is having fun. But he is.

(Director Lionel Coleman) wisely opts for a straightforward approach with long takes that capture Cho's kinetic rhythm and rely on her talent and honed timing to carry the evening.

Lovely performances from McDormand, Downey and Richard Knox, who looks uncommonly like Little Richard, as a bar owner named Vernon Hardapple.

It also boasts one of the funniest, loopiest Woody Harrelson turns in years.

Birth makes its oddball supernaturalism seem completely, compellingly real.

The Big Easy is an extremely enjoyable (and well-lubricated) vehicle for two actors who aren't quite yet stars, but should be.

Child actor Pawar is extraordinary as Saroo during his terrifying odyssey, and Davis portrays the streets of Calcutta, teeming with homeless children and adults, as if they were one of the rings of hell from "Dante's Inferno."

Jessica Biel is Vera Miles, the star who had the nerve to get pregnant when Hitchcock wanted her for "Vertigo." He feels betrayed, and she feels relieved, consigned to a supporting role in Psycho as Marion's sister. And Toni Collette, in glasses and a dark wig, is Hitchcock's long-suffering secretary, Peggy. Both Biel and Collette are very good, engaging.

Gritty, suspenseful and almost poetic in its depiction of an unforgiving town, A Most Violent Year is just shy of being great.

The Bronze, for all its crudeness and lewdness (Melissa Raunch, anyone?) and wonky comedy, is actually a good old-fashioned tale of redemption.

A charmer.

A clever feature-length cartoon just as entertaining as the hit Nickelodeon series on which it is based.

Like Sorkin's D.C.-set TV series, "West Wing," his script for Charlie Wilson's War is full of rapid-fire badinage, with movers and shakers moving smart and shaking snappy as a squad of aides trot along behind, briefcases and coffee cups in tow. A decade - not to mention a war - never went by so quickly.

Mendes nonetheless works this screenplay like a jazz virtuoso plays with a familiar theme such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

What's not to like?

Would Backbeat be as compelling a story if it were about, say, Freddie and the Dreamers? Probably not. But despite mostly undistinguished acting and some directorial gracelessness, Backbeat is potent because it tells this emotionally complex and musically exuberant story from every angle conceivable. [22 Apr 1994, p.03]

Though not as great as "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc.," Pixar movies that are the gold standard for family movies, Finding Nemo is visually entrancing.

It's a documentary that is ostensibly a profile of a man, but is really about the vibrant city he inhabits, beyond the Hollywood sheen and the grit of Compton.

At its heart, there's Blanchett, an actress whose instincts are unerring, and dead-on.

Ambiguous in a satisfying, puzzling sort of way, November offers a triptych of scenarios revolving around a grim moment.

It's the lysergic soap opera going on among Kesey, Neal Cassady, and various pals, scribes, spouses, and hangers-on piled onto the rainbow-hued school bus that's at the heart of this rollicking road pic.

Taut entertainment that juggles brainy ideas about perception, predetermination and free will - and drops things in a messy third act where the vintage noir gets bathed in a bit too much Spielbergian glow.

You get faux feelings -- but faux of the highest, giddiest order.

It's totally down-to-earth, as real as a trip to the supermarket.

Engaging, though certainly not groundbreaking, I Went Down manages to quote from Plato and deploy a cheap joke about masturbation (twice). As gangster movies go, it's a charmer. [3 July 1998, p.3]

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

Smart, curious and brave.

A heartfelt project, scrappy and engaging, The Way has its way with audiences despite, not because of, its sentimental excess.

A charmingly off-the-wall little tale. Black doesn't do anything he hasn't done before (in fact, he's already done his remake of King Kong!).

Scott's reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood has more heft than it does humor, more soulful brooding than snappy thrust-and-parry retorts.

Rize shows how clowning led to krumping, and argues that its practitioners' fierce dedication to dance has saved countless kids from drugs, crime and gangs.

Happy Accidents is romantic perversity in reverse.

There are laughs here aplenty, and sexy, goofy, off-the-cuff charm.

An inspiring, educational, highly enjoyable documentary.

Directed by Fred Zinnemann with a feel for heartland values and belief in the need for community that Rodgers and Hammerstein urged so strongly, Oklahoma! is a hugely enjoyable film. [14 Sep 2002, p.D01]

Saving Mr. Banks, set in 1961, is smart, delightful.

Laceratingly funny Hollywood comedy.

In this it succeeds. Like the Bard said, better witty foolishness than foolish wit.

Parker has honored the core of the work and in the process turned a great memoir into a memorable movie.

It is earsplitting, crowd-pleasing, and, no doubt, 'bot-pleasing, too. If you told me I would get emotionally and viscerally involved in two machines punching the hard drives out of each other, I would tell you you were crazy. I would be wrong.

Lean, mean, and utterly compelling, Ma’s beautifully paced and remarkably understated 80-minute thriller Old Stone is a Kafkaesque satire about the soul-crushing effects of bureaucracy.

An altogether enjoyable ride.

The mostly British ensemble can do this stuff in their sleep, but Macfadyen and Donovan and Graves, especially, work up the necessary antic angst and silliness.

Cooper, who steered Jeff Bridges through his Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart, gets fiercely committed performances from just about everyone in Out of the Furnace.

Witcher makes a remarkably confident filmmaking debut, eliciting excellent performances from his leads and underscoring their romance with a sound track that flavors, rather than overwhelms, the story. [14 Mar 1997, p.03]

McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones bring a spirit of spontaneity to their interactions; it's not exactly seat-of-the-pants improv, but it doesn't feel blocked-out and belabored, either.

Besides Paquin, who delivers a once-in-a-lifetime performance as the maddeningly inconsistent Lisa, also wrenchingly fine are Jeannie Berlin as the best friend of the deceased and J. Smith-Cameron as Lisa's actress mother.

Apart from its anthropomorphic, allegorical angle, Zootopia is also a tale of female empowerment and a classic noir, too.

Somehow, this rollicking day in the life of a band of skateboarding Latino punk-rockers doesn't exude the voyeuristic smarm of previous Clark forays.

Inspired by the grand Technicolor epics of Hollywood yesteryears, First Knight, despite its flaws, is engaging fun. [07 Jul 1995, p.03]

A handsomely staged and craftily constructed tearjerker.

If we now take a woman's right to vote and to hold public office for granted, Suffragette reminds us that it wasn't that long ago when things were different.

Throw in some business with the CIA, add a small army of Serbian thugs and a mysterious Croatian beauty, and The Hunting Party picks up speed, careening through the forests where the Fox may or may not be hiding out. Whatever fate awaits, it can't be good. But it can be fun.

It's all dumb, but it's wonderfully, comfortably dumb in just the right way.

Has an odd magic about it - the magic of Darger's singularly peculiar dreamworld.

Suave, witty and wonderfully acted ensemble piece.

The Chamber of Secrets -- darker, scarier and somewhat better than "Sorcerer's Stone."

Like many graduate students, Love and Other Catastrophes is smart, droll and doesn't always know when to stop talking. [11 Apr 1997, p.03]

Aimed at tweenage girls and mushy romantics of all age and stripe, Penelope has a quick gait and a nice comic tone.

Fry, Gilbert and scenarist Julian Mitchell make the most familiar details of Wilde's downfall fresh and new. [05 Jun 1998, p.04]

A thrilling, gorgeous actioner about a massive tsunami that wipes a tourist town off the map.

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

A wild, wacky, wide-screen reimagining of the vintage radio serial and TV series, the film - with Armie Hammer in the hat and mask, galloping across Texas righting wrongs, and Depp as his trusty Indian sidekick, Tonto - is an epic good time.

An effectively unsettling mix of Southern gothic and Old Testament hugger-mugger, with shades of "The Exorcist" and even "Rosemary's Baby" thrown in.

The movie sometimes seems (like its title character) to drag its feet. It’s messy, but with the untidiness of real life.

This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.

By turns wry, rueful and explosively funny.

It's the cars, and the mega-horsepowered action, that matter most. With its driver-POV spinouts, wrong-way chases, and multilane median jumps, the movie is a roaring revel of an automotive fantasy.

That one sentiment repeats throughout: No matter how horrible the assaults, the schools' treatment of the women afterward was worse.

Still stands as a gloriously silly and twisted send-up.