It's as exhilarating and moving a film opening as you're likely to experience. Sadly, the rest of Follow Me doesn't live up to this overture.

Although a voice-over prologue rumbles ominously in English, most of Night Watch is in the mother tongue, but even the subtitles do weird things - flying around in different sizes and fonts, punctuating the action.

It's larky, snarky fun.

There's a playlike quality to Complete Unknown (Marston's cowriter, Julian Sheppard, has extensive credits in the theater). That's not a bad thing: The talk is smart. The actors doing the talking are easy to like.

However charming Kingsley and Shaw are as the lovestruck pawns and Sorvino as the advancing queen, the premise is less playful than played-out.

If the words "Gentlemen, start your engines" set your heart pounding, this is the Imax experience for you.

The film's conceit - mopey strangers meet, form a band, and take to the dance halls - has a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let's-put-on-a-show innocence, and exuberance.

A massive compendium of youth-movie/pedal-to-the-metal cliches. But man, is it fast!

"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A. Boy, truer words . . ..

Filled with breathtaking shots of crazed nutballs on skis plummeting down pitched peaks at high speed, Steep is a visually exhilarating sports documentary that is also more than a little exasperating.

Like most great comedies, Hitch confects a sweetly appealing fantasy.

Startlingly original film.

Charming, emotionally resonant, yet nowhere as fresh and dramatic as its predecessor.

August: Osage County is the movie equivalent of Denny's Lumberjack Slam breakfast. If eggs, bacon, and toast aren't enough, throw in some ham, some sausage, pancakes, and hash browns. And then throw in more ham.

While I didn't love it, I enjoyed The Last Stand because it made me imagine the mutant powers I want to develop. I'm thinking along the lines of merging Rogue's suction abilities with Storm's controlled-rain skills.

They're all dressed up to kill, with no place to go.

As remakes go, Footloose is fine, serving up slightly fresher batches of cheese and corn. But why? Why?

The tradecraft is there, the film craft is there, but the craftiness of a great concept is gone. Any way Bourne can go through Treadstone again?

Because the movie is about addictive behavior dulling the pain of grief rather than in the larger drama of dealing with grief, the movie reduces the scope of Hoffman's performance.

Robert Altman's Kansas City is a hollow period piece, a costume melodrama that's all jazzed up without a story to tell. [16 Aug 1996, p.4]

Year of the Horse is an appropriately edgy, ragged salute to a rock-and-roll band that refuses - happily - to say die. [31 Oct 1997, p.04]

This peripatetic farce practically propels itself.

Wolf Totem has some of the most exciting, mind-blowing scenes of nature I've ever seen.

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

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.

A beautifully twisted, slow-burning psychothriller that may or may not all be taking place inside India's head.

May strain credulity, but it still leaves a memorable mark.

The good news is that this daddy/daughter reconciliation story connects with the ball. The not-so-good: It's a blooper.