The Secret of Roan Inish freely mixes Celtic myth and everyday reality. But "Roan Inish" is a different kind of ride, less intentionally rollicking and more reverential.

An independent film so enamored of itself it refuses to have any fun.

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

Troubling and troubled.

At its best when it's hovering around the muted dysfunction between a father and a son, who never understood each other to begin with.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

It is an important work, and a very good one.

At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.

Delpy and Hawke begin to grow on you and Linklater and his actors achieve a point midway through the film when the characters are so attractive and smart and emotionally daring that you'll be happy to spend the night with them.

While I was watching "Lone Star," I realized that what makes Sayles a good and socially responsible person - his ability to look at one thing a hundred different ways - is exactly what makes him a muddy filmmaker.

With its fine courtroom scenes, excellent performances, great writing and superb direction it reminds me more than anything else of Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune."

Like many French movies, in the retelling this one boils down to an unremittingly silly set of characters and situations.

I suppose Kusturica can justify the 167-minute length by the historical breadth of the movie, but it simply doesn't sustain one's interest, significant or not.

Misses some creative opportunities to really drive this story home, but it's a naturally haunting story nonetheless.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

Yellow Submarine takes a magical mystery tour through the history of art and spends a splendiferous good time splashing in the pop art of it all.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

You may have surmised that Americans have held the copyright on turning out awful movies about serious musicians (especially musicians with physical or mental afflictions), but along comes the high-gloss weepie.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story.

Franklin juggles it all with wit and style, and suddenly you feel fine that this is only Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel. Several more are just waiting to be adapted.

The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.

Gets blue-ribbon results from its thoroughbred cast of improvisational comics.

You find yourself absorbed in simply looking at them to the extent that it's hard to hear what they're saying. It's a nice dilemma for a movie to present.