It has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids - and probably more than a few parents, too.

2 Days in the Valley has a real sense of place, and a pace that allows time to discover its characters' twisted troubles and fears. They may be a mess, but the movie, happily, isn't. [27 Sept 1996, p.03]

With this film Daldry, previously the director of "Billy Elliot" and "The Hours," proves himself the screen's reigning master at showing passion thwarted or repressed.

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

Unsettling, intelligent, and way-out-there.

Tautou, who looks even smaller and more fragile alongside her towering leading man, conveys the hurt and hesitancy that are pulling at her character's heart - and does so with seeming effortlessness. It's as though she knows this woman, deep down.

That rumpled grumpus Paul Giamatti seizes the title role in Barney's Version, summoning irresistibility and irritability to create a character as endearing as he is galling.

lLght and likable - a low-budget "Steel Magnolias" without pretense.

Touching historical fantasy.

An exotic throwback to the kind of movies that John Huston used to make, where on-the-lam expatriates, tubby guys with tinny accents, and sinister locals convene in a ramshackle but seductive foreign burg -- and corruption, conflict and come-ons from a sultry female or two ensue.

For its intended audience, Horton's agenda is overt: Listen, be a friend, and most important - have fun!

With every new installment of the comic book franchise, the scale gets bigger, relationships get trickier, new forces enter the fray.

Smart and gripping - at least until the third act.

Pazira, whose sapphire eyes blaze through the lattice of her slate-gray burqa, isn't much of an actress, as her singsong narration attests. But when not speaking, she has a commanding presence and is an effective witness to the ravages of war.

An elaborately presented feast that will taste familiar to the 'tween and teen audience for whom it is served. The four courses are love, war, faith and humor, served in no canonical order, and sometimes, simultaneously.

Even if you get lost - in the spyspeak, in the codes, in the comings and goings of grim-faced men with satchels full of documents they should not have - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is worth getting lost in.

Bittersweet and funny.

Offers a fascinating chronicle of the birth, glory days and waning years of a motorcycle-jacketed, bowl-haircutted quartet of middle-class geeks who unwittingly spawned the punk movement.

The scene when she's (Blanchette) babysitting Ginger's boys and takes them to a diner - and confides about her electric shock treatments ("Edison's medicine"), her breakdowns, about the side effects of Prozac and Lithium . . .. it's genius.

There's enough here to entertain - and gross out - the kiddie crowd, and parental units, too

With a moody overlay of songs supplied by Okkervil River and Shearwater, In Search of a Midnight Kiss also serves as a millennial's answer to Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

Polley's performance is pitch-perfect.

For its mesmerizing first two-thirds, Van Sant keeps the film tightly focused on his subject, superbly played by Penn and intimately shot, home-movie style, by Harris Savides. But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic.

Caouette's fractured history is imbued with heart-crushing sincerity.

Amid this unrelenting ferocity, Marshall gives his characters emotional depth, and elicits terrific performances from the cast.

If Running Scared had come out in 1994, before "Pulp Fiction," it - and Kramer - would be hailed as blazingly original. But questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here.

Unlike most films about teenagers, the performances are happy-sad-realistic. Lerman, who plays the least expressive of the three principals, does a fine job at suggesting the active inner life of an externally inexpressive youth.

Where so many Holocaust documentaries remember the past and preach not to repeat it, Shanghai Ghetto remembers the past and teaches the relativity of experience.