Zambrano shows an impressive sensitivity toward his actors and their characters and never allows hopelessness to quash hope in this lovely film.

Sweet and sour and sexy.

Chabrol's deliberate and drawn-out observations often work against the dramatic tension, but his gift is making the audience believe that emotion and obsession trump logic for these deluded characters.

With less lampooning and satirical asides, Sicko may be less "entertaining" than Moore's previous films, but it's also more affecting and effective.

It's the kind of stunt that gets Oscar nominations and accolades. Theron turns it into a raw, bristling performance that deserves them.

Played by Lucy Russell with a defiant, unapologetic embrace of aristocratic privilege, Grace is a maddening yet fascinating character.

Rivets our interest for its entire lengthy running time. And it does this without any of the usual war movie clichés, false heroics, barracks-humor nonsense or grandstanding absurdities.

The Divine Intervention of the title lies somewhere between hope and fantasy. In a world in which Santa Claus is assaulted in Nazareth, what do you have left?

Although entertaining, Rize is a somewhat duplicitous undertaking.

Anyone who claims to support the troops owes it to them to see the film and hear their stories.

Director Mohammad Rasoulof has fashioned the ultimate metaphor for a society adrift from its culture.

This unusual journey behind prison bars is not only a plea for the rehabilitation of incarcerated criminals, but a testament to the redemptive powers of art.

It's messy and unsettled, but Bellocchio's distaste for the cynicism and mendacity is potent and sincere.

The film is a melancholy but poetic meditation on the fragility of the gift of life.

There are hints of madness in all the characters, and it gets creepier and more surreal as it goes along until it finally comes to a showstopping climax that took me completely by surprise and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.

It's filled to overflowing with mischievous gags for kids and adults alike, tickling the periphery of the story and crammed into every frame with playful abandon. It gives potty humor a good name.

Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, is a curiously engaging, genuinely haunting movie that rises above some dubious handicapped jokes and strange casting decisions to be truly special. [11 Jan 1991, p.5]

The character crossovers between narratives, however, are too contrived to work.

The spirits of Jim Jarmusch and Kevin Smith hover over this breezy slacker comedy set on a comatose Sunday afternoon.

The film's strength is compelling character relationships and Whedon's trademark dialogue, a smarter version of the cliched action-movie barrage of wisecrack under fire, only better executed, laden in personality, and enriched with evocative western colloquialisms of a frontier culture.

The movie is an extraordinary personal adventure that views everything through the eyes of its hero as it carries him from one apocalyptic situation to another.

The embittered men make fascinating subjects.

In a genre that has been battered by the cheap grotesqueries of special effects, it is a pleasure to be unsettled by something as simple as an invasive beam of light in the shadows of a haunted house.

A gentle and often beautiful study in opposites.

If the new Ocean's Eleven is mostly Clooney's show, he's more than up to the task of carrying it. Indeed, this could be his career-defining role: The twinkle in his eye has never seemed more disreputable, his devil-may-care charm has never seemed so appealing, and he dominates the movie with the graceful ease of a Golden Age Hollywood star.

A 108-minute film of a two-minute song.

Cedric Kahn has caught the irrational compulsion, nail-biting tension and unpredictability of plot that is Simenon at his best.

A terrific movie about middle-age malaise and a comedy of unusual wit and drollness.

The song may be somewhat familiar, but Sach gets understated performances from his entire cast and finds interesting harmonies as they play out their clashing duets.

Had Araki chosen to illuminate, rather than exploit, the traumatic aftermath of child molestation, his wallow in the horrors of Mysterious Skin might have had a purpose. As it stands, his film is just another trashy look at America as the land of imbecilic perverts.

It's so earnest it hurts.

The casting also works. As the Khan, Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano ("Zatoichi") is all effortless charisma, and Chinese actor Honglei Sun (as his best friend-turned-enemy) and Mongolian actress Khulan Chuluun (as his faithful wife, Borte) are just as effective.

Some will find the surprise pleasant, others unpleasant. Whatever it is, it's the least commercial, most somberly heartfelt movie ever made by the cinema's most commercially successful filmmaker.

Actors Laia Marull and Luis Tosar explore the intricate details of a relationship based on the laws of attraction and repulsion, in which the intellect is repeatedly devastated by primal passion.

The film is thriller, comedy and rite-of-passage story, but Boyle never loses sight of what's at its core.

Bounces between funny and chilling.

The familiar majesty of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline is replaced with anticipation and imagination. The sense of hope and wonder is the greater for it, and the sense of promise glows from the screen.

What's left at the end is an emotionally restrained vision of harsh, impoverished lives, more thoughtful than affecting, and never less than gorgeous, but so unfocused it leaves only scattered impressions.

Fascinating as these spiders and frogs must be to one another, a human being need not be put into such close proximity to their private dances.

The two young actors -- Hutcherson and Robb -- are terrific and unpretentious.

Works well as a metaphor for a more innocent time.

Jewison handles this rich tapestry of non-linear scenes with the skill of the old pro he is, and carefully modulates the drama to create the maximum emotional impact.

It's not an instant classic, but it's imaginatively drawn, full of charming characters, alive with action sequences and blissfully free of the snickering scatology and endless pop-culture references.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

Visceral, alive and very scary.

Garcia's dialogue is wonderfully crafted, short, sharp and resonant, and her elegant direction is delicate and handsome.

It's an old-fashioned Soviet road movie, filled with kind souls of the otherwise desperate (and at times predatory) world.

It's a dissection of how the media found and fed and nurtured the story in their insatiable need for content to fill their news hours and talk shows, how it just as quickly turned on them and transformed the story from celebration to vilification, and how the public turned right along with them.

Joaquin Phoenix is as good as he has ever been in James Gray's Two Lovers, a discomfortingly honest drama about the frustrations of love and desire.

The attainment it achieves is in the depths of pointless, mean-spirited exploitation.

When Riyadh's family jokes about the purple stain that marks them as resistance targets after they vote, the black humor speaks volumes about them as individuals, as Sunnis and as Iraqis with a dream of a better way.

Deliciously dark tale of insidious seduction.

Gunnarsson masterfully weaves these strands into a bold, multilayered tapestry surrounding a powerful story.

It's a beautifully crafted, almost perfectly sustained little drama that skillfully makes a subtle, bittersweet point.

Berlinger and Sinofsky, with their knack for penetrating the diabolical pretensions of weak and disaffected human beings, have brought Metallica to its knees.

Where you might expect either overheated teen melodrama or cartoonish farce, Nobuhiro creates a lively, engaging, character-driven piece with flourishes of offbeat humor dancing around the dynamics of the foursome as they pull together in rehearsals.

More like the kid shows that populate Nickelodeon.

The flaw in the movie is that it can't give a plausible reason WHY this patriotic Catholic family man turned traitor, and the script annoyingly addresses this lack several times by saying, "The why doesn't matter." Actually, it does. We want some reason.

A few scenes are a bit coy and the "big secrets" threaten to pitch into melodrama, but Birmingham keeps bringing the film back to the delicate dynamics of the relationships at its heart.

Ok, I admit at first I was just laughing at the sheer gutsiness of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But after 10 minutes, I was laughing at the script.

Boyle gives us some truly harrowing sequences and a succession of images that stick in the mind like a bad dream.

Brooks has made a movie that is about separation from convenience and having to deal one-on-one with a stranger in a strange land. The result is a profound and moving movie.

It's a taut, unexpected study that asks many questions about retribution and redemption.

Penn's direction is amazingly sharp and intuitive, full of masterful touches that give an epic dimension and scope to the parable.

The film is weirdly fascinating in its own maverick way.

If not cinema magic, The Dinner Game is still a workable screwball comedy.

It's all so visceral that it overwhelms the near-abstract story and smothers what passes for characters.

Not only feels real, but it avoids preciousness and cute eccentricity and, in its lean, almost grave, cut-and-dried delivery makes more of an emotional impact because we're able to imprint our own memories of adolescence upon it.

Those willing to give themselves up to Lynch's sensibilities will find a hypnotic and richly textural experience that challenges them to make their own connections through the imagery, echoes of repeated dialogue and metaphor.

Captures the pain and desperation of adolescent powerlessness and humiliation with powerful intimacy, strung out to almost 2 1/2 lazy hours of stories that wander through an ever-widening group of characters.

In Creadon's most effective and inspired sequence, he gets Reagle to create a puzzle using the film's title as its theme. It's during the sequence that we learn the lofty rules of creating crosswords, including lateral symmetry and a maximum ratio of black to white space.

Faced with an artist defined more by his lyrics than his life story, Haynes delivers a song-cycle of a movie: vivid, exaggerated, contradictory impressions of a man who confounds a culture still looking to define him.

And the mostly stage-trained Sinise - who draws double duty here as director and co-star - distinguishes himself with an especially sympathetic performance and a lean, sensitive, almost delicate directorial debut that mark him as an industry force to be reckoned with.

Not quite a masterpiece perhaps, but a visually stunning mountain drama, and an absorbing look at a dying culture.

Once you get the joke and grasp the aesthetic they're after, it's fun, and it almost works on the steam of its clever plot mechanics.

Dark farce, a four-handed game of sexual trumps.

Delivers the expected adrenaline-driven thrills with a fresh eye and a refreshing attitude.

In the end, this is a film about retribution and justice within unjust circumstances. Each character has a personal code of honor -- Arthur, Charlie and Capt. Stanley are all given their dignity -- and it's that code that sets the film apart.

But the irony of Les Destinées is that while Assayas is a pro at examining the inner workings of present-day connection and nuance, he's so overwhelmed by the sheer historical scope and detail of this massive saga that after three hours we're starved for emotional involvement with such inaccessible characters.

The annoying shaky-cam style so common to such indie dramas is toned down to a dreamy sway and the image drifts in and out of focus in scenes of heightened emotions. It's like waking from a daze and getting your bearings; the effect is both unsettling and calming.

With adventurous forays into questionable neighborhoods and stimulating tours through street markets, "Crossing the Bridge" is about the city as much as its music.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

At its best when exploring grieving and loss and anger, but Shear turns it into spiritual shock treatment.

Reminds us of just how exciting and satisfying the fantasy cinema can be when it's approached with imagination and flair.

Still, Kitano creates his own scary and compelling world in the film, and there's no denying his charisma as a star. Like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood (two action icons to whom he's often compared), the 51-year-old actor holds the screen with seemingly no effort. He's as watchable as a tired old rattlesnake. [11 Sep 1998]

Yellow Dog shows Davaa's growing refinement as a filmmaker, and that the success of "Weeping Camel" -- her master's thesis for film school in Munich that became an Oscar nominee -- was fully deserved.

Highly entertaining.

Stiller is enjoyably long-suffering, and De Niro convinces us that Attila the Hun would make a preferable father-in-law.

Above all, I'm Not Scared pays off our emotional investment. In the end, its elements come together with the kind of genuinely thrilling, deeply satisfying climax that even the better Hollywood movies just can't seem to pull off anymore.

The strength of Super Size Me lies primarily in Spurlock's character -- he comes across as an affable guy with a goofy sense of humor.

It becomes a dreamy study in stillness broken by suicide fantasies, flashbacks, and the hired killers, but even the violence has a meditative even melancholy quality to it, as if it's all been processed through the eyes of its Zen hero.

Rampling is fascinating as Ellen, the aging romantic who hardens her vulnerability with a materialist philosophy regarding the buying and selling of sex. The other two actresses give more superficial performances, with Young totally unconvincing as a Southern neurotic.

It's a fantasy of a crime epic, to be sure, but it's a glorious fantasy in which the unspoken bonds of brotherhood bathe every shootout and sacrifice in the light of myth.

Minghella does a good job of dashing any lingering image you might have of the Civil War as a conflict fought along neat geometric battle lines with the nobility of Appomattox.

An odd charmer with a whisper of autobiography (Blitz makes his film's protagonist a stutterer, just as the director was in school) and it's made even better by young lead actor Reece Thompson.

Peled's film, much of it shot clandestinely with smuggled cameras, is commendable in its fair depiction of the problems faced by the textile industry.

Michell captures the awkwardness of real-world behavior with gentle, unforced humor.

An utterly nihilistic, harrowingly upsetting vision of hell on earth.