The performances are uniformly top-notch. It was a treat to see Ortiz, an actor known on screen mostly for his impressive cameos in movies like "El Cantante," in a leading part enabling him to express his considerable emotional range.

Though the story dawdles at times, the visuals are splendid.

Cluttered as it is colorful, Robots is a visual delight.

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

Fraser and Elfman are goofily endearing even if they seem more sincere acting opposite the rabbit and the duck than they do each other.

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

With a moody overlay of songs supplied by Okkervil River and Shearwater, In Search of a Midnight Kiss also serves as a millennial's answer to Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, "The Edge," devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

Fast Food Nation picks up, and drops off, various members of its cast, sometimes without a satisfying resolution. But its final scenes, inside a real working meatpacking plant, on the killing floor, are brutally to the point.

With a thumping score and whirling cinematography, District 13: Ultimatum delivers two or three awesomely choreographed chase-and-fight-and-chase-and-fight-again sequences. The dialogue (in French, with subtitles) is not this movie's strength, nor should it be.

The Salvation is severe and bloody stuff.

Unfortunately, Turner's performance is as forced as Serial Mom's humor. Both boast false smiles but can't mask the fact that there's something sinister in the suburbs and about this movie. [15 Apr 1994, p.03]

Tokyo! is a must-see for the Gondry segment, and a strange, diverting pleasure for the rest.

The Naked Gun 33 1/3 has the feel of a movie with too many jokes off the cutting-room floor. Through it all, Nielsen's consummate timing and ability to come through in the klutz makes things seem more amusing than they are. [18 Mar 1994, p.3]

A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.

Richard Wenk's script, taut and enjoyable, pays homage to those police procedurals, with a nod to the Brazilian hostages-on-mass-transit documentary, "Bus 174."

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

As an exploration of a man who really did take the road less traveled, the film is fascinating.

Greenwald's film is filled with an infectious love for the region's songs. It could hardly be otherwise, given the level of musical talent she recruited for Songcatcher.

Despite some fine, nuanced acting (it's Lane's movie, to be sure), Unfaithful doesn't get much deeper than a romance novel.

Monsters, like a serpent eating its own tail, comes back on itself in ways that haunt, and hurt.

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]

One of the most insightful films about the War on Terror since 9/11.

The contrast in lifestyles is striking, and I suppose one of the themes that Babies is trying to get at is that despite chasm-wide economic and societal differences, infants are really all the same.

It's grown-up, deadly serious, and free of the ham-handed romantic subplots that mire so many films from the region in ick stew.

Pulls off a neat trick: It's a poignant, sweet-natured love story in which what most of us would call kinky sex - domination, submission, some enthusiastic spanking - is featured prominently, but not pruriently.

The marching bands' duels are as fun as the cheerleader wars in "Bring It On."

An interesting choice for a Valentine's Day outing, He Loves Me is a weird, bubbly cocktail -- effervescent charm and troubling pathology, shaken together.

A thriller fusing the primal elements of "Bambi" with those of "The Blair Witch Project."

Franklin has enormous fun using these varied technologies to ramp up the suspense in a movie that is the most purely entertaining thriller since "No Way Out."

If Emmerich had any sense, he would have ceded the direction of the battle scenes to his star.

Like some murderous version of "Working Girl," the ruthless exec and the seemingly naive underling go at one another - turning the film, at a pivotal moment, into a satisfying whodunit.

Attenborough's underrated 1977 epic A Bridge Too Far fashioned an antiwar statement from the foolhardiness that stranded 35,000 paratroopers behind German lines in an attempt to take key bridges. [02 Feb 2002, p.C01]

While it might not have the laughs-per-minute ratio of the "Naked Gun" movies (but then, what does?), it is a reliable titter generator for boomers and their echo boomlings.

Shamelessly entertaining.

Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

It's hard to say with assurance whether the flaw is in Bloom's performance or in Monahan's politically correct conception of Balian, precociously secular for a Crusader.

Silverman is wickedly fast. Her timing kills.

A taut, tricky thriller.

Lost in a time warp of its own doing (or non-doing), Hitchhiker's Guide just doesn't seem terribly original.

A Cat in Paris is thrilling, and a thrilling example of traditional ink and paint cartooning.

A parablelike melodrama with obvious symbolic meaning.

Charming is such an overused, film critic-y designation, but The Way Home is that, and more.

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.

The sameness of the two movies doesn't make the second feel like a re-tread. If anything, it feels comfortable.

The film, with its painterly juxtapositions of dockside industry, green hills, and cloud-scudded sky, is full of misguided motives and fairy-tale fraud. But it rings true at heart.

A gentle fable about how the young boy from Zurich struggles to fit in rather than stand out, Vitus is both a cautionary tale for pushy parents and an endearing, if eccentric, empowerment fantasy for precocious children.

The resulting drama is more deeply felt than it is deep. But I can't think of another film so frankly dealing with what we expect from friendship, so tenderly showing how friends can fail in one area, yet be there in another.

What is lacking in this version, with its hasty third act and abrupt denouement, is the surprise that their union may be the deepest love either will ever know.

Instead of gleaning something from real life, the great minds behind Friends With Benefits slapped their ideas together based on screwball classics, "Sleepless in Seattle" bits, and a keen analysis of Hollywood hackery.

A superbly creepy story.

If there's a psych ward for motion pictures, It's Kind of a Funny Story should check itself in. Boden and Fleck's film suffers from bipolar disorder: manic and silly one minute, moody and muted the next.

Until Steak(R)evolution gets repetitive, it's fascinating to see how everything, from culture to politics, affects what we eat and how we eat it.

An enjoyably trippy Japanese animated feature.

If you love Les Mis the stage musical, my guess is you will love what Hooper and his bustling company have done. But when you hear "Master of the House" and you think of the Seinfeld episode with Elaine's gruff dad belting the tune before you think of those shifty innkeepers the Thénardiers, then you may want to steer clear of this grand endeavor.

If time and space hooked up and got so hammered that they staggered beyond inebriation into delirium, the result would be Hot Tub Time Machine.

Fans of swooping helicopter shots, alleys filled with backlit geysers of steam, and jump-cut editing that makes MTV look like Ingmar Bergman will relish the intercontinental intrigue and huggermugger that is Spy Game.

An engagingly knuckleheaded comic vehicle for former Saturday Night Live trouper Will Ferrell.

While components of Eastwood's film are excellent, in particular Kelly's quietly tenacious performance and the evocative period details, Changeling is a film of parts, not a unified whole.

There is a lot of finger-pointing. Assertions are made, theories offered, but not much in the way of certainty.

What's touching about Rocky Balboa, the sixth chapter in the saga of Philadelphia's lord of the ring, is the small-scale stuff. Not the spectacle of the has-been, now 60, connecting with a punch. But the sight of an actor connecting with a character.

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

There's humanity here, on all sides, and a gentle wisdom beneath the raging rhetoric.

In the wake of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" - a far better film, and one with a less strident, less obvious agenda - Green Zone arrives looking strangely anachronistic.

A downer of a drama.

The treasure of the film is the unearthing of the family bond, magically played by Douglas and Wood.

Boasts rich texture, sly vision and rueful humor.

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

The River Wild is not a picture that tries to break new ground or even part fresh waters. Yet it is a crisp and exciting exercise, and while it may not be a watershed in Streep's career, she shows that you can take the plunge into an action movie and go swimming without going slumming. [30 Sep 1994, p.03]

A jubilee for McDormand and jolly good fun for most everyone else.

Undertow has the plain, stark, disturbing quality that marked the original "Cape Fear" and "In Cold Blood."

Simplistic and corny, this adaptation by director (and co-writer) Stephen Sommers nonetheless delivers the goods: exciting animal stunts, breathtaking subtropical scenery (India and a jungle-ized Tennessee and South Carolina) and a likable if not exactly three-dimensional cast of characters. [23 Dec 1994, p.03]

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

The film is better on mood than on message, sharply etching the professional desperation behind the forced gaiety.

Without doubt one of the scariest, creepiest, gut-churningly unsettling pictures to come along in ages.

Give Saldanha's film an A-plus for visuals and a B-minus for story.

Like Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," Malkovich plays a star long past his glory days in The Great Buck Howard, but continuing to do the only thing he knows. The tone of the two films couldn't be less alike, but the story arc of the central characters graphs the same.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

Susanne Bier is a bomb thrower. The explosives in the films by the Danish director are emotional and provoke torrents of tears, richly earned.

In many ways, City of Men is like a Portuguese-language version of David Simon's "The Wire."

Forster and his team have also mastered the discreet edit, leaving a lot of the blood, gore, and zombie slime to the imagination. (It's still a pretty convincingly creepy affair.)

A running joke about hipster clichés is tiresome, and the movie's plot threads are uneven. But watching Field work her magic is so delightful.

A deadpan, dead-on comedy.

A remarkably weird and wonderful exercise in psychological terror featuring a virtuoso performance by Scottish actor James McAvoy.

Poignant, funny and clear-eyed about some tough topics: homophobia, racism, AIDS.

Sadly too often (and I'm unsure whether this is the result of voices that echo when bounced off stone walls or because the acting is all over the place), the characters create the impression that English is their second language.

While Pierre Thoretton's film boasts vivid archival footage of some YSL couture collections, Bergé's lugubrious tone renders everything black.

Binder has written himself a scene-stealing supporting role as Shep, sleazeball producer.

My guess is that The Dreamers will have a certain resonance for those of us who discovered movies and sex at the same time during the '60s. For the rest of you, the film is a curiosity about cinegenic youths baring their bodies while thinking they are baring their souls.

While the film starring Abigail Breslin as a resourceful 10-year-old is faithful to the Kit books, it's pokey where it should be perky.

At the multiplex where so many holiday movies feel regifted, This Christmas is a gift.

Keanu doesn't go far enough. Key & Peele was searing and incisive about race and American culture, and Keanu doesn't even scratch the surface.

Megamind has momentum and dazzle.

The Signal has its share of things to say about urban paranoia, road rage, addiction - whether to sex, drugs or, more dangerously, consumerism. But it stands apart from other pictures of the same ilk by using its apocalypse as a backdrop to a bitter-sweet love story.

A goofy screwball romp that affords a gaggle of A-listers the chance to hambone around in antic style.

Core, a cinematographer who helms both camera and directorial duties here, creates a vivid sense of time and place without letting the period music, clothes or art direction intrude. The performances are likewise understated and unpretentious, especially those of Wahlberg and Kinnear.