This terrific film and its inspirational message have been filtered through an individualistic, American point of view, suggesting that anyone can make a better life for themselves if they are willing to work. And that's not the case everywhere.

A loopy, surreal, beguiling collage of a film, the writer-director's meta-biopic embraces its subject.

We feel it, in our hearts. And therein lies the great power of this small, wise film.

It's human drama, high and mighty.

To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.

You can feel the world closing in, which, I would venture, is exactly how Fassbinder wanted you to feel.

Supremacy has thrills, but without Potente's presence, it loses its soul.

The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.

A Most Wanted Man's cast - a mix of Germans speaking English, Americans speaking English with German accents, Russians, and men and women from the Middle East - is uniformly stellar.

In the end, Arbitrage disappoints a bit. The writing isn't as sharp, or sophisticated, as it needs be. And the cynicism exhibited by Miller and the circle of traders and tycoons he moves in seeps into the fabric of the story itself.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

An edgy, disturbing drama.

It's got one of the best kisses in movie history: Spidey, hanging upside down, delivers an open-mouth smooch to Mary Jane, a lip-lock for the ages.

It deserves to be more widely seen as a quite definitive exercise in mob psychology. [17 Apr 1998, p.16]

A cracking police procedural from Belgian director Erik van Looy, has a jaw-dropping premise so smartly executed that if this movie weren't in Flemish I'd swear that Michael Mann had directed it.

Blithely funny and on-the-money movie.

With its mix of Lewis Carroll and William Gibson; Japanese anime and Chinese chopsocky; mythological allusions, and machine-made illusion, offers a couple of hours of escapist fun.

Watts is extraordinary - she manages both the physical and emotional demands of the role, with soul-deep conviction.

A tale of childhood innocence and adult corruption - and the point where the two intersect - I'm Not Scared is a lyrical thriller inspired by the run of kidnappings that befell Italy in the 1970s.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.

DiCaprio provides one of those tailor-made Oscar turns - cocking his head at odd angles, twitching and gesticulating with childlike awkwardness, his face a mask of sweet innocence and uncontrollable tics. [4 Mar 1994, p.03]

Cold Mountain is the equivalent of comfort food: old-fashioned, earthy (lots of root vegetables), satisfying.

Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life.

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

Beefed up and twanging like a true cowboy, Cooper nonetheless carries the full weight of his character's achievements - and the questions that come with them - as he tries to find his footing back on Texas soil. If American Sniper fails at being a truly great film, it is no fault of its star.

While The Forgiveness of Blood lacks the narrative momentum of director Joshua Marston's previous film, "Maria Full of Grace" - it is nonetheless fascinating.

Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War deals with issues that may scare audiences away. Don't let it.