The film has accomplished something few documentaries manage: It's created a stir. It's got people thinking and talking. And avoiding the fries.

Heading South is strong in bursts, but the bursts are too diffuse for its best moments to last.

Funny and weird and surprising and action-packed and genuinely beautiful.

A handsome work of impressive sweep dotted with fine performances. It offers a few fine moments of wit, fear and emotional intimacy. But it rarely pulses with vital life.

A thoroughly credible and deeply entertaining biopic about a titanically famous film personality.

In this involving if slightly unfocused documentary, director Daniel Karslake takes a two-pronged approach in examining how religion has been interpreted -- some would say twisted -- into, at its worst, monomaniacal homophobia.

A dry, vicious and deeply moving little comedy that sort of takes the structure of a teen sports movie, then undermines that structure at every turn.

If the star does his utmost to make a one-dimensional character interesting, his director, Clint Eastwood, adapts Kyle's memoir — a life story rife with moral complexity — by hammering it flat.

It's better at being droll than laugh-out-loud funny.

It never exactly lights you on fire, but you always believe it.

You can sense the deep investment Donzelli and Elkaïm have in what they're doing, which isn't something you get at the movies every day.

All Things Must Pass is a labor of love by actor Colin Hanks, a Sacramento native who grew up on the store.

Frighteningly, grippingly real.

If it touches up against the syrupy at a very few moments, it's nevertheless consistently clear-eyed and convincing.

An affable, entertaining and poignant experience of the sort not normally afforded by space movies.

An achievement of accomplished filmmaking and superb acting, L.I.E. puts you in the tough spot of unraveling how you feel about what you've viewed.

Dani's feelings are complex, as she reacts to life's new everyday bewilderments, and much of her reaction is wordless. Witherspoon and Mulligan make Dani's feelings eloquent. [16 Nov 1991, p.C10]

Gran Torino amounts to one more elegiac movement in Eastwood's astonishing late-career symphony.

Everyone is in top form. Pearce, the Australian who's elevated everything from "L.A. Confidential" to "Mildred Pierce," sinks his gleaming teeth into the comic aspects of Trevor and doesn't let up. Smulders, now part of the Marvel universe, is edgy and fun. Corrigan is best of all.

There's so much to impress and delight you that the time flies by.

All the up-from-under satisfaction of an underdog getting over, with the added oomph of the truth.

The movie's a ride, basically. It's a slick, funny buddy-flick confection about a dork (Jesse Eisenberg), a Twinkie-loving hick (Harrelson), a hottie (Emma Stone) and a sassy kid (Abigail Breslin) who bicker and bond as they drive cross-country after a zombie plague.

If you enjoyed any of Frank's previous work, or thought "Brick" was the bomb, you'll love this.

A lot of what happens is gross, puerile and gratuitous, granted, but Helms and Galifianakis are truly funny in offbeat fashion, and the script allows Phillips room for some brilliant slapstick. You will not be ennobled. But you will be entertained.

The symbolic ending may strike some as a letdown but it's well-played by Sagnier, capping another in a string of memorable performances.

While Shepard just does his grim, weathered, Sam Shepard shtick, and Hall seems oddly miscast as the tense, prickly Dale, Johnson's easy, gritty charm is a much-needed buffer between their colliding obsessions.

Leconte's signature on the film alone makes it worth seeing.

A frequently transporting depiction of the early and middle life of Ray Charles, the film soars on remarkable performances, a convincing sense of time and place, and, of course, the glorious music for which Charles was rightly billed as The Genius.