If the arrival of The Crow - a visually dazzling and hyperkinetic action movie - is an occasion to mourn the loss of Lee, it is also ample reason to celebrate the protean gifts of its director, Alex Proyas.

In effect, The Client is a clever and pliant variation on the classic Hitchcock situation that puts a kid, instead of an adult, between the authorities and villainous criminals.

Forget the end and there is much to enjoy here.

The raw emotions on display need no translation. David Mackenzie directs the film in a piercingly realistic style. His ingenious decision to forgo a score makes Starred Up even more immersive, because all you hear is the dehumanizing din of prison.

A challenging film populated with characters who are depressed, on antidepressants, or strung out on mood-altering drugs, The Dead Girl is a downer with resonance.

Populaire plays like a musical - you expect anyone, at any time, to break into song.

Mild but engaging romance.

Buoyed by the appealing Hart and Grenier.

A conventional, button-pushing but emotionally affecting tale.

A satisfyingly screwy New York story.

At times soppy, sentimental and shamelessly romantic, at other moments bursting with clever barbs -- and now and then zooming in on something telling and poignant -- Love Actually is just about impossible to dislike.

Silva expertly maintains the tension, asking the audience to interpret Raquel's bizarro behavior. His diagnosis is a pleasant surprise.

Closer, in the end, lacks a certain heft. The language and the actions of the characters are brutal and devastating. The movie itself, a little too nice.

Jurassic World, like its genomed nemesis, is bigger, and it is pretty scary. But it's not nearly as cool, or as smart, as "Jurassic Park."

Hate, love, bigotry, empathy and chance are the uninvited guests at Monster's Ball.

Digging for Fire, like last year's "Happy Christmas" (also with Kendrick) and 2013's "Drinking Buddies" (with Johnson and Kendrick), is not a film for fans of taut, crafted dialogue and definitive endings. Conversations drift and weave, as do the people having them. Narcissistic melancholy dukes it out with beer-and-pot-stoked merriment. There is longing. There is foolhardiness.

A perfectly lovely, if uninspired, movie that suffers from following on the trotters of "Babe," the one about the piglet advocate of barnyard brotherhood.

With its icy symphonic score (courtesy of Iceland’s Johan Johansson) and a palette of rainy-day colors, Arrival is at once majestic and melancholy. It’s a grand endeavor, and Adams, at the center of it all, brings pluck and smarts and a deep-seated sorrow to her role. This is her movie, no doubt.

By turns rowdy and rueful, The Switch is a comedy with serious ramifications, not least of which is the question, what makes a family?

Bayona's moves are deft, the atmosphere oozes with anxiety and grief, but the big payoff - like the big payoff in The Sixth Sense, another film The Orphanage has more than a bit in common with - never comes.

I was with the movie until its head-scratcher of an ending, too oblique for its own good.

While the characters are B-movie thin, the dialogue standard-issue, and the CG and matte effects only passable at best, it's undeniable fun to behold the likes of serious thespians Hawke and Dafoe slumming around in this cheeseball stuff.

Fans of Brooks and his wry, dry neuroticism will not be disappointed as he whines and whimpers around New Delhi.

All of the elements that made The Matrix a mass-cult phenom -- breathtaking physical gymnastics wedded to the brain-cramping mental and spiritual kind -- resurface in Reloaded.

At its best, Nanny McPhee Returns has the playful surrealism of "Babe," if "Babe" had been directed by Terry Gilliam.

The story hooks us because stars Helen Mirren and Julie Walters look as fetching in woolens and Wellingtons as they do in the altogether. But it reels us in because it is about people who for so long have paid lip service to making a difference that they are profoundly altered when they actually do.

All Muppet capers, whether they involve low comedy or high seas, require the romantic conflict of Kermit and Piggy. Fortunately, the frog and the pig are worth waiting for. And like all great thespians, they leave you wanting more. [16 Feb 1996, p.3]

A crowd-pleaser of immense proportions.