It's so spry and lively and warm that you want to dance to it.

Uses a deft mix of archival footage and interviews with historians and some very articulate Panther veterans.

This is one of the Duke's better Westerns. [14 Oct 2005, p.47]

Here the homages/critiques of old craft and form are often laughably mangled, and nothing sexy, profound or illuminating results. For all its prettiness, it's the sort of picture that gives the arthouse a bad name.

Twisty pulp entertainment at its highest level.

If there's one thing missing, it's a sense of purposeful, immediate outrage. You can't help but wonder why this film wasn't made 20 years ago, when it could have saved these men some time behind bars.

Controversy aside, there's no denying that Kinsey was a pivotal figure in 20th-century America, and one whose fascinating story makes for a fascinating film.

If dissonance is your dish, you'll find Beautiful People tempting indeed.

Little spectacle but much bittersweet sensitivity.

It's all jolly bad fun, but the primo aspect of the exercise is the phenomenally intense performance by Kingsley as a careening sociopath who is every bit as dangerous to his friends as to his foes.

An engaging chronicle not only of a memorable game but also of an era that seems at once more innocent and combustible than our own.

The dose of reality is bracing and welcome after all the hothouse talk that preceeded it. Dear White People is a first feature, lively and intelligent and thought-provoking, by a writer-director whose best movies are yet to come.

An engaging exercise in mature poignancy, existential consciousness and deadpan drollery, Broken Flowers is a return by Jarmusch to the road movie structure of such films as "Stranger Than Paradise," "Night on Earth" and "Dead Man."

It's no insult to the rest to say that this is one of those films that sells itself on the strength of a single performance.

It's duck soup for cinephiles.

Like "Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers," it fills in our sketchy impression of that famously reticent generation of ordinary young men who were asked by a frightened world to accomplish an extraordinary feat. In this case, the homage takes the form not of a photograph or a statue but of a deeper, more sympathetic understanding of their experience. A finer tribute is hard to imagine.

Youth may be wasted on some of the young, but the two aspiring Norwegian novelists at the center of Reprise, director Joachim Trier's debut feature, try desperately to avoid that particular cliche.

A fascinating and frustrating film in turns, created out of scorching passions and built around a fascinating performance but rambling and choppy in the telling. It can overwhelm you and puzzle and repel you, sometimes within moments.

As the film accrues intensity and awakes the demon lurking inside its protagonist, you can see it as something more than a retro-cool crime story. Rather, it's a parable of good and evil and the nature of man.

It's a film possessed of its own force, wit and style, and it builds to a rousing climax that absolutely pays off in crowd-pleasing fashion. It knows what it is, doesn't try to be what it's not, and hits you with drop-dead force. In short, it's terrific.

Highly entertaining chronicle of a dream unfilmed.

It's a treat to be diverted by a film that actually has a brain.

The real star is Attah, a Ghanaian street kid plucked from obscurity, who imbues Agu with just the right mix of terror, brutality and the last remaining vestiges of boyish innocence.

Lacks the poetic and romantic resonance of "Crouching Tiger," but it's got kicks aplenty -- of both the physical and the sensational kind -- and it lands them again and again.

In the annals of monster movies, one name stands above all the rest, way above: Godzilla.

The combined effect is, as I say, small but sincere. McCarthy may prove to have something bigger in him, or he may be a miniaturist content to build little stories and fill them with all the humanity they can bear. If that's the case, there are far less worthy ways to spend a career.

There are more compelling stories to be found in the comic book world, and there are more expressive directors than Jon Favreau. But on the bases of wit, verve, spirit and whiz-bangery, it's pretty tough to find fault with.

Impressive and engrossing as it is, the reality alone is not what makes Salaam Bombay so compelling. Nair tells an interesting episodic story, and her leading lad is a natural actor. [05 Nov 1988, p.C06]