You can't help but share the feelings, many of them subrational, that coarse through the soldiers as they live a hellish year in a hellish place.

One of the best children's movies in years. Spunky, inventive and filled with life and wonder.

Like the bits of home life its pioneers have brought with them to an alien landscape, the careful craft grounds the film in a reality that is as much felt as it is observed.

As storytelling, it's extremely effective.

The longer it goes on, the more you're swept up into the jet stream of good feeling.

What makes The Last Days stand above the many similar films about the Holocaust and its survivors, though, is the fluidity with which Moll structures and passes through his material. In this, he's ably accompanied by Hans Zimmer's eloquent score and the crisp, simple photography of cinematographer Harris Done. [19 Feb 1999]

Perhaps the most disturbing fact in the film comes in the text at the end: Paragraph 175 remained on the books in both halves of postwar Germany until the late 1960s.

Aronson's intriguing, complicated and well-filmed documentary will keep you talking for days.

This combination of fatalism, nostalgia and willfully naive optimism captures something essential in the Russian soul.

Boyle, one of the premier stylists in the world fills "Slumdog" with ebullient energy and ceaseless invention.

Flopped on its initial release, and it is a somewhat decadent and overlong production. But Masina's performance is, as always, engaging, and Fellini's glee at launching into color filmmaking is palpable.

Van Sant has been quoted in recent media reports as being done with the type of filmmaking that these four movies represent. If that's true, then Paranoid Park is a fine summation of what he learned from making them.

It ends on a random note, making an awkward plea for better ecological stewardship of the Earth, which looked so small and frail to the astronauts regarding it from the moon. But otherwise it's a satisfying and heartening reminder of what a glorious thing a small group of men once contrived to do.

A typically heavy-handed Spike Lee film that makes up for it by being a typically passionate Spike Lee film. [16 Oct 1996, p.C03]

Children of Men has some magnificent moments of moviemaking and is thoroughly infused with just the atmosphere Cuaron has aimed for. But it's so streamlined in its storytelling and unvarying in its tone that it's more deadening than transporting.

The film continually explores surprising, rewarding territory; even an erotically charged subplot dovetails nicely with themes of vengeance, mortality and renewal.

But this is pretty honest and true filmmaking, nonetheless; try as you might, you can't detect the leer of the satirist.

Something in the simplicity of its vision gives The Man Without a Past a dimension of heroic grandeur -- and that effect, too, seems to tickle Kaurismaki's funny bone.

For those unschooled in Latin jazz, though, it might be best to just pick up the CD.

What director Chen Kaige and his superb cast give us are larger-than-life passions, betrayals, and sacrifices, unfolding before the canvas of history. [29 Oct 1993, p.AE15]

The characters and their situations, while perfectly credible and funny on the simplest literal level, surely add up to something like a subtly farcical apocalyptic satire. [18 April 1989, p.D4]

The story is ingeniously intricate but never gimmicky or implausible. As it develops, the suspense grows about what direction the story could possibly take next.

Among the best of its kind, thanks in no small part to the utterly believable, vanity-free performance of Yolande Moreau in the title role.

Garfield is customarily strong and energetic as a desperate guy on the edge. Famous for her work in tight sweaters and halters, Turner was no thespian. But the combination of Garfield and Garnett, or something, fired a performance from her that is, in its way, perfect. [05 Mar 1999]

Trafic is a relative trifle but nevertheless delightful.

Though excellent in many ways, American Beauty is, finally, an uneasy mix of assured technique and simplistic satire.

Almost more valuable as a piece of foreign policy than as the highly accomplished work of cinema it is.

Far From Heaven would have been one of the great American films of the '50s; it is certainly the finest American melodrama of our time.