Nat King Cole croons a Christmas chestnut, an opera wafts into the ether, Latin jazz sways. It's all terribly atmospheric, and if you're in the mood for atmosphere, 2046 delivers.

The upside: Chow has energy and invention to burn. The downside: He doesn't know when he blisters his audience.

It's the stuff of nightmares.

A defiantly offbeat and accomplished piece with a dream ensemble acting out one man's nightmare, it deserves not to fall through the cracks.

Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas. His most gorgeous, too, with the peaches'n'strawberries'n'cream palette of early Technicolor films.

Ramsay's child actors are nonprofessionals who can only express what they feel — which gives her film an unusual degree of emotional authenticity.

A beautiful eyeful of puckish whimsy and dark-humored mystery, Hukkle (it means hiccup in Hungarian) is a little gem in which nature and humankind commingle, where coincidence and causality collide in a chain of odd, even murderous, events.

Much of Finding Dory is funny, and fun. But there's something kind of haunting about our heroine's memory thing. If you forget where you are, and who you are, and why you are - isn't that called Losing Dory?

Bale is extraordinary, grinning like a kid, displaying wily intelligence, sinewy resolve and spirit - and a bit of craziness, too.

Offers dazzling cinematic family fun, and a mad medley of tunes.

Featuring seasoned warriors reflecting on whether we can best fight violence with violence is enormously compelling.

David Gelb's thoughtful and wonderful documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, explores the dedication of this humble, bespectacled man, and the Zen-like focus he has for his work - or, as many would claim, for his art.

Moss and Waterston are incredible, and even though Queen of Earth is purposefully not a readily digestible film, they keep it intensely interesting.

Paddington is perfect for today's audiences, so long overfed on comic-book fodder. The bear's impeccable manners, perfect diction, and earnestness make him the ultimate anti-Bart Simpson.

The movie is a snapshot collage of flyover America, but also, perhaps, an homage to the soon-to-be-lost world of brick-and-mortar gambling.

There's a melancholy sweetness here, a gentle humor that speaks to the angst and awkwardness of girls turning into women, and the awe of boys watching the transformation from afar.

Wetlands is one of the most daring, visually arresting, innovative, and imaginative examples of filmmaking to come out of Europe in recent memory.

Fly Away Home falls a little short of classic status, but it is easily one of the more appealing family films to come flying this way in quite some time. [13 Sep 1996, p.03]

Heartbreaking? Sometimes. Involving? You bet.

It is a difficult and demanding movie, one that rewards the persevering moviegoer just as Pollock's difficult and demanding paintings ultimately reward the steadfast.

Madly entertaining and just plain mad.

Best of Enemies offers a bracing view of a pivotal time in our recent history, as Vietnam and race riots scarred a nation's soul, and as the Establishment and the Counter Culture exchanged epithets and blows.

Blessed are the Pythons for making holy wit of the Holy Writ.

Bier knows what she's doing, and the performances are expert and affecting. But this meditation on love -- and love's bad timing -- is also improbably accommodating to its characters' respective longings.

The real drama -- and poetry -- in 8 Mile are in those fiery face-offs, the hip-hop battles, as Jimmy rat-tat-tats his rap in deft flashes of spontaneous combustion.

Loaded with Hitchcockian hugger-mugger, this is a genre Polanski clearly revels in.

It's the living jungle of Kipling's stories that we could once see only in our minds.

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