Urgent and stunning movie.

Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of "Goodfellas" and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics. And then it lets its ghosts go, whacking and thwacking away.

It's a charmer.

Quietly and keenly observed, Summer Hours nods to Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (a country estate, a family reunion, an impending sale). Assayas displays a lucid sense of how personal history and family identity are inextricably linked to a physical place - here, to a house that is still busy accumulating its memories.

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

A powerful and moving contribution to the cinema of the Holocaust.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Brian Cox is especially good, and slippery, as Menenius, a Roman senator.

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

This time around, Julien Temple gets it right.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

At a lean - and decidedly mean - 77 minutes, the suspense-horror hybrid Them by French writer-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud is nothing short of revelatory.

If you've had enough of the loony tunes coming from Florida, this piece of absurdist serio-comedy is the perfect picture.

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

Hong, who makes his feature debut here, has a masterful command of rhythm, beautifully weaving each strand of the narrative around that momentous opening scene.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

A darkly comic, piercing, and occasionally painful study of a young woman's quest for identity.

Exceptionally graceful and accomplished, Ozon's film challenges our received notions of normalcy, intimacy, and love.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

Glazer has a daring sense of story structure that ratchets up the suspense, and his sense for sardonic black comedy is unerring.

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

The Dardennes are aces at these small-scale human dramas, and Two Days, One Night is almost without flaw.