Vintage Terry Gilliam, a pour not to all tastes but one certain to please lovers of "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

Several notches above the usual gay-themed indie, and mostly manages to avoid -- or at least legitimately deploy -- the gratuitous throbbing beefcake scenes that are part and parcel of the genre.

Sisterhood is Stand by Me for girls, as sullen, plucky, melodramatic, exuberant, athletic, graceless, crafty, artistic, arrogant, modest, helpless and resourceful as its teenage heroines.

This quiet, aching film - punctuated by dead-on music choices, a blues song, reggae, the requisite Leonard Cohen - doesn't answer those questions. It's enough to raise them.

The performances in Girl, Interrupted resonate, but the movie does not.

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."

As scatalogical affairs go, Flushed Away shows remarkable buoyancy.

There's humor in it, and sadness, and an acid-tinged humor that is miles away from the branded levity of "Friends." More power to Aniston for feeling the need to try something different, and then doing it -- well.

With Insomnia, his third feature, Nolan, 32, has proven himself a precocious master of the thriller, unsettling the audience with a brief image of blood seeping through fabric.

For those who have seen Tarkovsky's moody original, let me say that Soderbergh skims the fat from the 1972 film. What's left is a rich stew of longing.

The sequences with the melancholy Faunia are monochromatic and those with Lester perfunctory. Benton too neatly -- and too hastily -- wraps up a story that would surely exert more power if it were messy and unrushed.

A promising filmmaking debut, Star Maps defines a landscape where everyone has a dream - and where a lot of people will do a lot of things to achieve that dream, however misguided and delusional it might be. [22 Aug 1997, p.10]

However improbable this sounds, The Brady Bunch Movie is to the original television show what real grass is to Astroturf. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

The line between ha-ha funny and sorrowful reverence has been crossed - more deftly than you'd think.

Shamelessly entertaining.

It's giving nothing away to say that Munro makes it to Bonneville, and breaks the record - which apparently still stands - on his two-wheel contraption.

If The Golden Bowl -- isn't charged with electric emotion, well, that's not what Henry James or James Ivory is about.

At once a shocking, baroque freak-out and a finely tuned, brilliantly paced surrealist black comedy.

Plays like an exalted episode of "Miami Vice" or a stealth version of "Shane."

It's pretty formulaic stuff, and earns its R rating with profanity and unapologetically gratuitous female nudity, but somehow has a winning knuckleheaded charm.

In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Kempner gives us a balance of artist and alter ego, introducing us to a woman we'd like to know even better.

If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."

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.

An unusually atmospheric outing. Splatter fans may be disappointed, because Nakata isn't interested in a body count.

Roos introduces the possibility that perhaps two partials add up to the whole truth, and in so doing creates a provocative love story that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

The Second Mother is an interesting look at generational and class divides in Brazil, without the feel of a lecture or lesson.

A surprisingly moving drama - a throwback to the small, character-driven indies of yesteryear.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.