It's a buoyant, often thrilling piece of animation that more or less does for the Central African rain forest what "The Lion King" did for the East African savanna.

The new movie year's poignant love story to beat.

Throughout, it's clouded -- for me at least -- by a nagging sense that it's straining too hard to build the media clash into more of an historic event than it was.

A marvelous piece of cinematic storytelling, acted to perfection by Sihung Lung (the father in "The Wedding Banquet"), fueled by an ingratiating sense of humor and so infused with the sheer joy of Chinese cooking that it will probably make you rush right out for a Chinese meal. [05 Aug 1994]

Not quite up to the exalted level of the two predecessors ("Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2"), be assured it's still the most eye-popping and thoroughly entertaining animated film to come down the pike so far this year.

The director's tenacity has resulted in a breathtaking as well as heartbreaking adventure of life and death.

Stanley Nelson's documentary shows how a religion becomes a cult, and how people are deceived by an ideal.

In the face of intolerance, Two Family House lovingly celebrates the triumph of love and acceptance over prejudice.

Danny Aiello is right at home as owner Louis, a paternal Italian father to all but his own son, reigning over the throng from his corner table like a benevolent lord and maybe underworld gangster.

It takes a strong stomach to sit through its two-plus hours of non-stop brutality (much of it involving very small children).

Several times, Hotel Rwanda teeters on the edge of making a unique, visionary statement about our times, but can't quite do it. Too bad. If it could have pulled itself together in one brilliant scene, this may have been a great movie, instead of just a very good one.

Aoyama's monochrome images are filled with a simple shadowy beauty and his scenes are rich in tender sensitivity and empathy.

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

The faces of its inarticulate characters tell the story, and Majidi has put some amazing faces on the screen.

It's aimed squarely at a young dating audience, and is not likely to be hugely captivating for anyone out of that demographic.

Condon's direction is steady and fearless, Neeson and Linney are individually excellent and together they create an inspiring chemistry for a truly adventurous marriage.

Dizdar humorously compares and contrasts extremes in economics and lifestyles and looks at the west through the eyes of an outsider.

Plays in spots something like a stage play smartly brought to screen.

It's a consciousness-raising personal odyssey in the tradition of such recent indie hits as "Sideways" and "About Schmidt" -- only less obviously comedic and, as always with Jarmusch, blissfully unresolved.

For all its moodiness, despair and disconnect, I've Loved You So Long is all about acknowledging human error and embracing ties -- to family and life -- that can't be undone.

The movie offers one authentically terrific performance: Beach as Hayes. He's so painfully sympathetic in the role that he absolutely breaks your heart, and he looks like the front-runner in the best-supporting actor Oscar race.

While Look at Me at times falls into familiar plotting, it never offers false hope or false characters.

It all feels like a performance for the camera: von Trier as madman producer taunting the elder filmmaker.

The movie is never engaging on anything but a superficial level, and it gradually gets decidedly tiresome.

Gradually, it becomes clear that Campion is taking an experimental, almost documentary approach to movie biography - avoiding clear villains, grandly dramatic moments, and the kind of phony movie dialogue so characteristic of the traditional Hollywood biopic. It's a bold and risky method, and sometimes it induces boredom. But somehow it works, giving us a extraordinary sense of one woman's life and the forces that made her, and a subtle, powerful feminist statement. [21 Jun 1991]

The new black-and-white print is gorgeous, the film plays well in this broader key and it sets the historical record straight.

It works on several levels, and stands out as a wistful meditation on the psychological cost of 9/11.

Is it possible to have yet another expensive excursion into this genre that seems in any way fresh, original and alive? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

Control Room is even more effective in showing the dilemma of the people who make up Al-Jazeera. In a sense, these are "our" Arabs, in that they're Western-educated, conduct their business in English and seem to believe in the basic American principles.

Ullmann has honed a too-long and sometimes relentless film that delves into the selfishness of passion but also captures the elusiveness and unpredictability of love.

This bracing portrait of a woman who painfully accepts her responsibility as a citizen is a revelation.

Affliction has rarely been so sensitively explored.

An absorbing and fulfilling experience -- even though it ends with a question mark.

The formula has rarely been done as well as it is in this goofy, audacious, visually stylized omnibus of what-ifs that operates on its own peculiar logic, and powers along with the force of a truck on the Autobahn.

What gives the story resonance is the tenderness and sacrifice and even innocence del Toro reveals amid the savagery.

The mayhem is presented sparingly enough to be suspenseful, some of the sequences are genuinely terrifying and, compared with Hollywood's last zombie movie, the Robert Rodriguez half of "Grindhouse," it's a masterpiece.

Despite the cat-and-mouse games between cop and criminal, this is less a battle of wills than one man's battle for his own soul. Nolan bravely treads where few American films dare to delve -- into the world of ambivalence and ambiguity -- and emerges with a compelling portrait.

In the lead, Anderson ("The X-Files") is competent but never quite makes the character come soaring to life.

Control is director Anton Corbijin's first feature, and he too frequently makes the mistake of falling back on his rock video skills.

But too much of this movie is unstructured and stylistically haphazard. And by the time we get to its highly predictable conclusion, Gas Food Lodging is just one more formula coming-of-age drama. [28 Aug 1992]

If the film has a weakness, it's an ending that's so vague and open to interpretation that it's not at all clear how director Andrew Wagner ultimately wants us to feel about these self-absorbed characters and their precious literary concerns. But the performances carry the day.

A dazzling movie, gorgeous to look at, involving on both emotional and intellectual levels, and often thrilling.

Winner of the top prize at the last Berlin Film Festival, the film is sporadically powerful, sensitively acted and full of music, used with imagination and flair.

Almost perfect ghoulish family entertainment. [24 Aug 1990]

Despite some iffy moments, Lighting is the closest one to get to the music from which, as Hubert Sumlin notes, "there is no retiring. You stay with it until the end."

Ultimately successful at what it sets out to do, even if it's not as much fun along the way as the original.

It's a nicely crafted little ensemble piece, but -- like so many films that have become the rage in France in recent years -- it's surprisingly light and forgettable.

Behind the narrative twists and contrived dramatic complications is a searing and scary look at dysfunction.

It's an exhilarating film, largely because of Carville's charisma. [7 Jan 1994]

Andrew Bujalski's refreshingly modest look at life in the directionless netherworld between college and career is the rare film that finds its story in the minor contradictions and simple conflicts of ordinary people doing, well, not exactly nothing, but nothing important.

It definitely gives us our money's worth in the sheer volume of its imaginative fantasy creatures and it's that rare superhero-movie sequel that's better than the original.

Writer/director Raoul Peck never gives us enough intimate moments to let us feel we know the man on a personal level, and he doesn't have the narrative skill to economize the necessary exposition or steer a clear storyline.

The artist's life and times were turbulent and tragic, but the effect of the movie is the opposite: it's somehow a very calming, almost Zenlike experience, and it left me with a peaceful glow that I managed to carry around for the rest of the day.

Forster carries the movie with an effortless grace and professionalism, creating a character of surprising nobility who is the very opposite of the Willy Loman caricature that's been the de rigueur salesman stereotype in movies of the past 50 years.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

Most successful as a tribute to the martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle. It fails, however, as a well-reasoned documentary on the subject of the relationship of music to social change.

Sandler and Watson make something out of their underwritten roles, and that they do is testament to their talents: They make this punchy romantic comedy more engaging than it should be.

A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.

The film walks a fine line between contempt for Polanski's crimes and sympathy for his trials and his screwed-up psyche, and it manages both while showing us why he fled the U.S. rather than face the corrupted judicial circus.

A highly original and unusually powerful drama that deserves comparison to the great Scandinavian films of the past.

In its austere visual understatement rests a ton of emotional power.

It's just the kind of film that you'd expect a jury led by Quentin Tarantino to choose, a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity.

There are two reasons Ramsay succeeds with a story that might at best be called morbid: She visually transforms the dreary expanse of dead-end distaste the characters inhabit into a poem of art, music and metaphor -- and she has the perfect actress to embody Morvern.

Vital and alive. Frustration and malaise rumble through every richly textured frame, but behind it all is a restlessness and a desire for something better.

By most of the standards by which we judge movies, Jungle Fever is pretty bad. Scenes seem structured solely to provide an excuse for characters to deliver speeches, everything seems heavy-handed, obvious and didactic - and false. [7 June 1991]

No one does this genre better than actor-writer-director Christopher Guest.

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

Set in a precinct house, the film shows its theatrical origins. [25 Oct 2005]

An immensely enjoyable cross-cultural parable full of appealing characters and well-crafted performances. [14 Feb 1992]

Seems like very tame stuff, with little in the way of graphic sex and all the baggage of a run-of-the-mill art-house costume drama.

So stuffed with Maddin-ess that it never manages to get past the glorious surfaces. McKinney strides through his role with a knowing wink, and the sheer volume of creative imagery is as distracting as it is entertaining.

Ripe with offbeat Americana, Beesley's rockumentary is also a portrait of growing up in a white-trash Okie ghetto.

Like Spielberg, even if the content is questionable or the performance is missing, his scenes always manage to be visually thrilling.

The first half of the movie is repetitive, and threatens to become more about Steidle than the conflict. The second half picks up considerably as we see him actively trying to alert the U.S. government to the atrocities.

The stars ultimately carry the day, the film cumulatively builds both an emotional power and tender wisdom that's very affecting.

It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity.

"James" is both genuinely exciting as an adventure and genuinely charming as a fantasy, plus it doesn't look quite like anything we've seen before. [12 Apr 1996]

The result is rich, lush -- simply exquisite.

Emitai (1971) remains Sembene's masterpiece and his most important achievement. [03 Aug 2001]

When movie historians talk about the greatest Hollywood comedies of all time, they invariably mention this classic, 1937 screwball romp that showcased Carole Lombard's most endearing movie performance. [19 May 1995]

In a farce like this, where the story is merely a string of martial-arts movie cliches lined up to be parodied, that has its own rewards.

A nifty little neo-film noir that's a lot more intriguing and watchable than half the films that make it to the multiplexes.

It's not his (Scorsese) best film, but it's his most accessible and most thoroughly entertaining.

The film manages to make the ordinary extraordinary. It takes visual risks, tells its story subjectively through images and moves confidently to a stunning, imaginative climax.

This is full of talk in the European art cinema tradition: intellectual conversations (often in multiple languages at once), gentile dinner conversation with an international all-star guest list.

In his lifetime, Fuller longed for a restoration of what he considered his most personal film. Schickel's version is a labor of love that, despite the controversy it is bound to ignite, comes close to fulfilling the director's vision.

It's a well-acted but rote and strictly by the book "war movie."

Unfortunately, once the "be yourself" story line is resolved (singing and dancing go together, who would have guessed?), the film is only half over.

A perceptive, fascinating and relatively evenhanded look at the most radical arm of the American student rebellion of the Vietnam era.

While young Coppola is a pro with her camera, she'd be wise to brush up on her storytelling skills.

There are scenes in this movie that give you well, goose bumps, that make you proud to live on the same planet with creatures so exquisitely, instinctively and spiritually lovely. [13 Sep 1996]

The three stars communicate the fears and dreams and frustrations of teenage girls with subtlety, sensitivity and dignity.

Harris genuinely seems to be at one with the character, and his movie is eerily alive.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

And, of course, the film's biggest selling point is the performance of China's reigning superstar, Gong Li. Playing a sexy, shrewd but strangely suicidal character who is a far cry from the stubborn courtesans and determined peasant women characters that made her famous, she's as enigmatic and irresistible as ever, and demonstrates once again that she is the Garbo of China. [21 Dec 1995]

While the characters lack the quirks and affectations that have enlivened the impulsive figures from past Dogme films, the passion of the players and Bier's sensitive direction give these utterly normal figures a vivid aliveness, along with dignity and everyday beauty.

It captures the excitement of a breaking star, it generates a raw and unsettling emotional power and it honors the aesthetic of hip-hop in way that's never quite been done on film before.

An inspiring story of pluck, but its politics fall flat.