The film is exquisitely realized, with a tremendous, naturalistic performance by Michelle Williams at its heart and a pervasive, assuring sense that Reichardt and Raymond have distilled everything nonessential from their story and imparted exactly the impact they wished.

It's a raw and honest film, and it keeps its feet firmly on the ground, even as The Ram flies through the air to deliver -- or receive -- another beating in the squared circle of life.

There are levels of complexity and nuance and intellectual rigor in The Hours -- it's clearly a film into which you could gain continued insight after several viewings.

Wonderful performances and the director's continual inventiveness make Junebug a particularly promising first feature.

Kenner mounts it all with a pleasingly fluent and varied style, which makes it more or less easy to absorb his arguments, even if they're familiar from other books and movies and are presented with unopposed certainty.

A haunting, melancholy fable, Tony Takitani is the kind of film that could seem tedious from a mere description. Approached with the right mind-set, however, it's a hypnotic mood piece on love and loss, one that knows -- at 75 minutes -- not to overstay its welcome.

Sleek Deco-inspired props and color scheme, startling special effects, eerie theremin-driven score, the drolly interactive mechanical man (Robby the Robot!), wide-screen CinemaScope presentation, Anne Francis' scanty outfits: to audiences in the '50s it all must've been future shock. Today, it remains a brilliant cinematic realization. [07 Nov 2003]

Stirring and haunting.

Watching The Queen of Versailles you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Incendies was likely a crackling thing to read, but it's not quite so vivid as a finished film.

Offers a charming reinterpretation of what it means to look for happiness and all the unexpected places that it may be found.

See Casino Royale for a Bond you've never seen before, and then imagine him in a film two-thirds the size. Here's hoping the writers of the next Bond movie employ the same personal trainer that Craig did to keep the script tight and lean.

A joy to watch.

The snaky cinematography pulls you through even when the writing doesn't, and the best performances keep you hoping that you'll feel the next one or the one after that just as powerfully.

It's a welcome change from a conventional birth-to-now biography, somewhere between the straight narratives of "Ray" and "Get On Up" and the fractured, Cate Blanchett-in-sunglasses, Richard Gere-on-horseback meta-fable "I'm Not There."

A fine, straightforward and engaging film that restores the salt, fire and humor that Hathaway and company drained from their source, Charles Portis' wonderful 1968 novel.

Entertaining and informative.

It breaks so sharply from the practice of contemporary horror film that it requires us to return to the most basic understanding of what it is to be frightened by a movie.

At the heart of Iris is love, between Iris and the camera, Maysles and his subject, and Iris and Carl. They nailed it, this crazy life, and they're still getting a kick out of it.

If Abrams didn't take many chances, he didn't make many mistakes, either. First, Do No Harm became Don't Mess With Success, and it worked. Show Me the Money is sure to follow.

The end result is the best documentary you'll see this year, as thrilling a competition as any Super Bowl and as suspenseful a story as any Hitchcock film.

The result is a film that outrages and fills the viewer with poetry that's at once epic and intimate, scandalizing and life-affirming -- a real work of art.

White God holds some fascination. But as an indictment of the evil that men do, it's all bark and no bite.

It's easy to imagine that some folks will find the film rapturous, but it's equally clear that there are others whom it will drive crazy.

The most compelling question dangling at its end is, "Didn't Steven Spielberg used to know how to bring a movie to an end?"

It's amusing enough and breezy enough not to disappoint. But it never dazzles or challenges or truly delights. And that leaves me fairly certain that whatever Bart Simpson would say about it probably couldn't be printed in a family newspaper.

A coming-of-age movie that stands apart from the rest.

A more sober, less in-your-face documentary than Peralta's great skateboarding flick.