Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

On the whole, the movie is a success. I still hope that children and their parents will read this wonderful book together, but it's nice that there's a movie they can see, too.

With no frills and no commentary, Howard and company have made the kind of absorbing thriller we have in mind when we wistfully sigh, "They don't make movies like they used to."

Ethereal.

Fly Away Home" is directed by Carroll Ballard, who made "The Black Stallion" and "Never Cry Wolf." In other words, it was directed by a filmmaker with talent, taste and subtlety, working from an understated script by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin.

The film itself never felt quite so densely plotted as Yimou apparently had hoped.

A grim, well-realized film from New Zealand. It is an impressive first feature for its director, Lee Tamahori, and a splendid dramatic vehicle for its stars, especially Rena Owen, who gives a gritty portrayal of a Maori woman fighting to stand her ground in a violent ghetto household.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

Nunez's style is quiet, simple and deliberate, but the film never drags.

Now "Rod Tidwell," with Jerry Maguire as a supporting character, would be a movie to pay to see.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

Less ambitious than the highly successful "Secrets & Lies," Career Girls has its own modest merits - a real sense of wit, much of it expressed in Hannah's sharp verbal sallies, and a melancholy truth that both women realize.

Mangold's vision is bold. There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

This movie has the jaunty good cheer of another great movie about hit men, "Prizzi's Honor." And that is high praise indeed.

The scenes with Stalin and his frightened underlings, his giddy yes-men tip-toeing around him, are written and directed by Duncan with a grace, agility and comic deftness one rarely is treated to at the movies these days.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

There isn't much to recommend this movie until Pacino and De Niro finally share the first of their two scenes together.

Nil by Mouth is slow to get going, and meanders before its impact scenes in the second half. Still, its final intensity can leave you exhausted. If you stay with the picture, it's a powerful experience you're unlikely to forget.

Buscemi is after a slice of life with a grown-up slacker. The trouble is that, in the end, this isn't terribly interesting.

This movie has everything but Humphrey Bogart, and I'm sure he's sorry he was unavailable.

With this marvelous premise to launch it, the film fails nevertheless. The trouble is that none of the dialogue is funny enough to fulfill the expectations that Brooks' full-bodied stand-up comedian delivery promises every time he opens his mouth.

Sometimes, when you watch a Stillman movie, you can't help thinking that the guy ought to get out more.

Hung skillfully evokes the oppressive congestion, squalor and heat of Ho Chi Minh City. (Amazingly, given the controlling nature of Vietnam's socialist government, the warts-and-all movie was shot on location.) But he is less successful at developing the character of his characters.