An enjoyably trippy Japanese animated feature.

A comedy about friendship, faith and the acting life, Le Grand Role is unabashedly corny and tear-jerking - and still quite likable.

It's all head-spinning and lovely - and a little exhausting, too.

A sad and funny examination of issues of racial subjugation, cultural stereotypes and sexual mores. Although some of its filmmaking techniques seem naive and anachronistic now, there is much that is bold, inventive and poignant about Van Peebles' feature debut. [09 Nov 1994, p.E01]

"Lousy times make lousy people," someone opines, and maybe that's the point Romero's trying to drive home.

Although its origin-story machinations get the better of it, Ant-Man isn't a bust.

Not only are LaBeouf and Bridges terrific, but Jon Heder is hilarious as surfing fowl Chicken Joe. And Zooey Deschanel is saucy fun as penguin lifeguard Lani.

It's not exactly high art, but it's certainly high.

A movie that feels as if it should have been a masterpiece. As it is, it's flawed, uneven work but deserves careful viewing.

In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, The Machinist would have felt like a stunt. But Anderson, with a terrific assist from Bale, makes his character's plight achingly physical.

Deeply personal and filled with love, Maya Forbes' Infinitely Polar Bear is nonetheless a hard movie to watch - hard to watch comfortably.

Owing a debt to Scarface (the DePalma remake more than the Hawks original) and to the gangland opuses of Scorsese, Belly gets inside the gangsta culture with a wired authenticity. [04 Nov 1998, p.E04]

Throw in the music -- a wall-to-wall whorl of Eastern modal dirges, thumping rock and Celtic-y skirl -- and you've got a veritable cinematic rhapsody of war.

Jazzy and colorful, full of men and women in swell clothes driving cool cars, The Rum Diary has a bit of a seedily exotic Graham Greene vibe, and Robinson moves things along at a nice, casual clip, even in the film's more overheated moments.

Some movies skate by fast on slick action. Others snap with crisp dialogue. Nick and Norah springs high on the bounce of its hugely likable leads, Michael Cera and Kat Dennings.

It's the dynamic between the three leads, Rawlins, Sives and Henderson - and the young McKinlay, who's like a miniature Shirley Henderson - that is this oddball and bittersweet story's pulsing heart.

Mirren is icy and fierce. Rickman brings both levity and sorrow to his role as a soldier who has seen war from both sides: the conference room and battlefield.

Fry's film has the frantic energy and kaleidoscopic style of Waugh's feverish prose.

Marley celebrates the fact that its subject is still among us in the way that perhaps matters most: His music not only survives, it thrives.

One of the great things about this unpredictable, exhilaratingly goofy fable is how it shows that even the clueless - and the tragically morose - have a shot at redemption.

Like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," Sarah Marshall has all the ingredients of the Apatow brand. Alas, it's beginning to feel generic.

A conventional biopic made anything but conventional by the magnitude of its subject's life and accomplishments, and by Idris Elba's imposing performance in the title role.

Just misses being great. The dark shaman mysticism doesn't entirely mesh with the earthbound quest across the wild and glorious Southwest. And the ending, with its shoot-outs and sacrifices, has a choppy, unneccessarily complicated feel.

Tunney, brimming with coltish, neurotic energy, holds the screen like a true star. She brings the role, and the movie, to life.

Begins to take on a striking resemblance to the infamously bad "Eyes Wide Shut."

Deadpan, dead-on parody of a schlockmeister at work and play.

What the three pairs of actors lack in semblance (or resemblance), they make up for to a great extent in their performances.

The spike-heeled, postfeminist pajama-party sisterhood that is Charlie's Angels is back, and it's serious dress-up time.

The momentum Stiller has built up - his character's globe-trotting derring-do, the care and consideration on display in his directing - carries the movie a long way. Falling short of fantastic, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is still a fantasy to enjoy.

The Warlords, ultimately, tries to speak to the futility of war - but it does so by staging one gargantuan dustup after another.

A goofy combination of screwball farce and Dogma-style verite grit and gloom.

Signs is about God and family, too, but it's also about scaring the bejesus out of you -- and on that level it works like a miracle.

I don't think that a woman behind the camera necessarily affects the tenor of what is on screen, but never before have I seen a men-of-war film more notable for its psychology than its spectacle.

Half a century after its release, Godzilla couldn't be more current.

A melodrama painted in the saffron-and-turmeric hues of a Bollywood musical, Broken Embraces is the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," that moody account of obsessional love and double lives.

Gorgeous work, and its imagery and themes dovetail perfectly: a story about creating art, artfully created.

A violent, sexy, crazy actioner about supermarket products that rebel against their human consumers, Sausage Party is one of the funniest and most deeply offensive movies of the year (it's obscenely funny), which lambastes America's most sacred of sacred cows: religion.

For all its faults - and there are many, from shameless compression of events to milk the drama for all it's worth, to the gimmicky miscasting of several commanders-in-chief (Robin Williams as Eisenhower is especially egregious) - The Butler is an inspiring and important summation of the black struggle.

The movie isn't as deep as it pretends to be, but it does have several nicely unexpected twists going for it. And it has Williams - memorably creepy, chillingly sad.

The frenzy and off-the-cuff spontaneity of live '50s TV comedy is lovingly captured, and O'Toole won a best-actor Oscar nomination. [25 Dec 1998, p.22]

If Coixet's film is substantially more restrained than its explicit source material (Nicholas Meyer, himself a fine novelist and director of the second and best Star Trek film, adapted), it is no less provocative as a poetic meditation on love, sex and death.

There's a xenophobic element to Taken's premise, to be sure - the idea that travel, even to Western Europe, isn't safe for Americans, and that foreigners (Albanians, Arabs) are by nature shifty and sinister.

The film turns into a story of corruption on many levels, and it moves fast, without a scrap of fat in the telling.

Moon is a deceptively simple study of alienation, paranoia, and loneliness.

Its positive message about education, the value of hard work, and the power of social commitment make it a must-see for parents and kids alike.

Scorsese’s adaptation is overlong and at times insufferably self-indulgent, but contains sublime moments of transcendent beauty and a wealth of beautiful performances.

Rodriguez manages to work in some nicely cornball messages (family togetherness and forgiveness is good, Stallone doing comedy is bad) and theatergoers get to walk out with their very own way-cool cardboard anaglyphic eyeglasses.

With varying degrees of success, the filmmaker gets each musician to talk about the personal and musical roots that blossomed into his technique.

"March of the Penguins" - phooey! Those smelly little birds are built to survive in the frozen tundra, and nobody's asking them to pull a sled.

A shamelessly fun B-movie with A-movie effects.

This simple story of a Guy and a Girl and their music is very appealing.

Entertainingly creepy.

As a character assassin, Moore fails, because you can't kill anyone with contempt and sarcasm. And as an independent counsel prosecuting Bush for bamboozling America, Moore likewise misses his mark because many of the exhibits he offers as evidence are emotional rather than factual.

Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi is going for a quiet, thoughtful character study: a modern woman, sure of herself, but still trying to come to terms with her place in the world.

A goofy conflation of Coenian elements: the numbskull huggermugger of "The Big Lebowski", the La La Land surrealness of "Barton Fink", the Old Testament overlay of "A Serious Man."

The result is a funny and raucously lewd comedy fueled with enough penis jokes to keep an actual fraternity in stitches for a trimester.

Satisfying and spirited and laced with humor.

In part, the documentary answers the question of why some couples flourish and others flounder.

It is a keenly observed movie about loss of identity and finding love, in which Brooks serves up funny-ouch humor with slapstick heartbreak.

Boy begins with an epigram from E.T.: "You could be happy here . . . . We could grow up together." That's what the film is about - finding happiness, growing up, feeling like a stranger in a strange world.

A film that leaves cinephiles breathless and the mainstream movie maniacs scratching their heads.

A disconcerting experience.

A rollicking, mascara-smearing, intergenerational coed crowd-pleaser. Imagine "Sex and the City" negotiating "Terms of Endearment" with "The Golden Girls."

Shelton and her cast are so skillful that before long it seems we are not moviegoers watching a screen but flies on a wall witnessing real encounters and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

Partridge portrays David with immaculate timing and meticulous attention to detail. We feel for the character's pain, but never quite trust him.

Wahlberg does what Wahlberg does, bringing muscular conviction to his troubled, tough-guy role. The city may be broken, but the movie star's formula is working fine.

When the tobacco is extinguished what comes between April and Frank Wheeler is bigger, colder and more formidable than the iceberg that sundered Kate and Leo in "Titanic": shattered hope.

Croupier, immersed in a world of gambling, gamesmanship and crime, is a solid, seductive entertainment.

Cinematic dynamite.

Yummy and weightless.

Blitz captures the melancholy, the rage, the wackiness and drama of adolescence, and he gets winning performances out of his young stars.

A former Bean hater, I've been converted by Holiday, Atkinson's second, and far superior film version of his TV hit.

A delicately managed piece that is by turns intimately detailed and elliptical, and that's an approach that suits the tangled emotions of its two protagonists.

Bloody, bone-chilling fun.

Succeeds royally at building a sense of apocalyptic dread. It isn't quite so successful at sustaining that mood, and Fessenden resorts to blurry images of totemic spirit forces and stampeding moose specters to get where he's going. And where exactly is that? To a place designed to scare the bejesus out of us planet-pillaging consumers.

At its best, it's shaggily enjoyable and enjoyably shaggy. It's like steroids on steroids with Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, disarming arms industrialist, tossing off one-liners like comic grenades.

There is a lot to like here, a few things to love. Like the fact that someone in Hollywood can still assemble a cast this large and impressive — someone who does not work for Marvel.

A witty, winning inversion of the famous Arthur Miller play.

Although it often feels like a company-bankrolled promo film, A Lego Brickumentary answers all the questions both Lego novices and Lego nerds would want to know.

Like its characters, it has its faults. But overall, it is a movie of imaginative sympathy that gets into the skin of its characters, into their hearts, and, ultimately, into ours.

It is almost inevitable that Miyazaki, often compared to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, should have found in Diana Wynne Jones a kindred spirit.

For everyone who has ever asked, "What on earth do they see in each other?"

Brave enough to take up the war from the Southern point of view.

Flavorful and fun. "Muy sabroso y divertido," as Martin might say.

It's a tasty buffet of food gags, both visual and verbal. When they say "We're toast," they really mean it.

An epicurean dream where the dishes conjured up by the characters are as essential to the experience as the characters themselves.

An effectively spooky ghost story with Guillermo del Toro's imprimatur (he's executive producer), Mama is every adoptive parent's nightmare: What if the children you bring home start eating moths and toilet paper, and won't come out from under the bed? And when they do, it's only to do something hurtful?

Filmmaker Dabis based Amreeka on her own family's experiences in the rural Midwest during the first Gulf War. Although the drama heads on a predictable course, Faour brings intelligence and humor to her performance and Muallem, as the smart adolescent turned surly and scared, is likewise sharp.

Dark Blue World is "Pearl Harbor" without the product placements, without the Hollywood bombast, and certainly without the $100-million-plus budget.

Belle, with its country manors and its city slums, its snooty nobles and its fiery idealists, its ballroom dances and barroom conspiracies, brings these themes to a dramatic head: romance and race, privilege and justice.

At its best, Edge of Tomorrow plays like a tripwire time-travel thriller. As it progresses, though, the built-in repetition can, and does, grow tedious.

The Spectacular Now feels genuine in almost every respect, from the unflashy cinematography and the sparingly deployed music cues to the natural, unhurried performances of its two stars. They will get to you, truly.

With its polished mix of traditional and computer-generated cartooning, Treasure Planet doesn't exude the same suspense as the Disney original. You could say it's lighter on its feet -- but then there's less gravity in outer space, anyway.

It's riveting stuff, but unlike Tarantino's work - layered with casual irony, deadpan dialogue and encyclopedic pop-cult references - Killing Zoe is what it is and nothing more: a nihilistic crime film, steeped in carnage and chaos. [14 Sep 1994, p.E02]

Catfish, made on the cheap with digital video, cell-phone cams, and hidden mikes, raises all sorts of questions - about the imaginary realms that open when you click on your computer screen, about cyber-stalking, but also about journalistic ethics.

Although the story has more than a little Lion King deja vu-doo going for it, Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is likable as both a man, and then a bear.

For the most part, the film stays steady-on, celebrating one man's crusade - and one family's heartbreak.