Its overall effect is haunting, hypnotic and moving in a profound and unexpected way.

The movie misfires: It's numbingly cold and soulless, and the zeitgeist stays far beyond its reach. But it's so visually striking you almost don't notice, its relentlessly somber mood has a certain masochistic appeal and, while hardly a career-redefining performance, Hanks is as winning as ever.

Director George Ratliff plays pitch-perfect on the tautly wound strings of our innermost fears that nothing -- not love, wealth or intelligence -- can protect us from the monsters we harbor.

By 2020, when NASA's Orion lunar spacecraft is scheduled to launch, it's unlikely that any Apollo veterans will still be alive. Sington has done us a service in helping preserve their memories.

Makes the translation with all its wit, incisive dialogue and eccentric characters intact, and then some.

Captures the open-air rock festival experience more completely than any previous film of its kind.

A warm-hearted and understated entertainment that's blissfully free of the heavy-handed crudity and other elements that have ravaged 21st-century Hollywood comedy.

It's a barrage of visual stimulation so excessive that it's hard to sort it all out. But it's often funny, its texture can be breathtaking and its pleasures likely will grow with repeated viewings.

A quirky little film with an offbeat trajectory that rattles through the bones of story with eyes open to the texture of experience and the dimensions of character.

Katharina Otto-Bernstein's oral history of Wilson's life and work, narrated by Wilson, with a handful of sycophants joining in on the choruses, is monstrously one-sided. It does, however, offer insights into the director's methods and motivations.

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.

Sometimes so intimate it's embarrassing, and the messiness at falling in love at any age is disquieting.

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

Always absorbing.

Some audiences will find it an endurance test and Reygadas doesn't make it easy with his confrontational imagery, but he provokes emotions not often explored on screen.

With more sympathy for Johnston's suffering and less reveling in the fruits of his madness, The Devil and Daniel Johnston could have been a great film instead of a disturbing one.

The script (by Richard Russo) is solid, the performances are witty and fun, and the movie is a most agreeable way to spend an hour and a half.

Thornton has made so many bad movies and become so notorious as a talk-show eccentric that it's easy to forget what a good film actor he can be.

The period detail, the makeup effects, the computer-generated transformations, and Jerry Goldsmith's brassy score are all excellent. The Shadow also manages to make fun of itself without ever letting the self-parody get out of hand, or disintegrate into camp. For what is essentially a summer slugfest, The Shadow also has unusually rich character performances. [01 Jul 1994]

As much as I enjoyed the movie -- and I laughed all the way through it -- the truth is that the big screen adds nothing special to the "Simpsons" experience.

The movie undeniably comes alive and brings down the house every time it goes into one of its many outlandish, Mad Magazine-style spoofs of television commercials. [11 Apr 1990]

The most surprising thing about The Rocker is how enjoyable it is.

It's more clever than smart, but Paul Fox directs with the same easygoing attitude of its slacker hero and finds some modest truths (also lower case) behind the props.

Hot Rod is a cousin to the comedies of Will Ferrell (for whom it was developed) with a younger skew, a kooky '80s nostalgia (complete with a pitch-perfect synthesizer score by Trevor Rabin) and a low-key amiability that keeps you rooting for Rod and company to triumph.

Plenty of visuals but little of the rhythm, flow or characterizations that made the earlier film an instant children's classic.

It's a pleasure to see and hear so much wit in a big-budget comedy, and the fine British cast of supporting actors makes every bon mot a tasty verbal morsel.

The film's story - about a gringo loser (Warren Oates) who digs up and decapitates a body to claim a reward - seems much less gratuitously shocking today, and its dated brand of macho pessimism has a nostalgic appeal. [14 Jun 2002]

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

The film is a hopeful, rollicking, rocking, humorous, heartbreaking journey.

More reinvention than remake, this black-humored, blood-soaked adventure is a colorful if impersonal audience pleaser done up in a showy, fluid style with a tongue-in-cheek flair.

Hip-hop is not the beat I dance to, but you don't need to be immersed in the culture to understand the heartbeat it sets in the lives of Brown Sugar's main characters.

A first-rate student film, but not much more.

Truly raunchy but it's more sweetly stupid and silly than anything.

The thing is far too absurd and broadly played for its own good.

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.

A disturbing, and disturbingly funny, twist on adolescent love, and Shiota captures the emotional avalanche with understanding.

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.

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

A passionate, well-made documentary that stresses how time is running out for a peaceful solution.

Call it "E.T." for a new generation.

At its best, Company Man hums from one piece to the next, a harmless, good-natured, often silly spoof with a few cutting barbs and a comic showman's love of the well-executed gag.

Anyone who goes in this movie expecting a rollicking comedy is in for a shock. Its scant humor is dry as the Sahara and, like all Dickens stories, its upbeat ending is never quite convincing enough to offset the horrors of the journey toward it.

Hypnotic and fun.

The real gift of Elf is the simple pleasure of a sweet and funny comedy that genuinely embraces its message of holiday cheer and still has fun goofing with it.

It's cumulatively entertaining, and a fascinating and nostalgic time capsule of its era. Watch for the cameo by Brigitte Bardot.

There are a lot of terrific creative energies at play in Robots and they overcome an overreliance on amusement park sensibilities in the animated adventure.

When the monster shows up, pretty early in the film, everything becomes much more interesting, as it smashes buildings in midtown Manhattan like some sort of Rudy Giuliani, 9/11 nightmare.

A family-friendly remake funnier, fresher and more affecting than the flavorless original.

The fact is no one has a better understanding of the corruption of ego and power, or is more qualified to encapsulate it in a defining moment of Hollywood Gothic.

Has a flag-waving dumbness at its core.

Elevated out of the music-documentary genre to become something of an intriguing mystery -- and one with no neat solution.

The battery of startling shock cuts can get repetitive and the plot has a few potholes, but the palpable atmosphere of vulnerability keeps the drama knotted in tension and the audience rooted to the teens in peril.

Hugh Grant is one of the true phenomena of new millennium moviemaking. In an era in which the broadest and most scatological comedy imaginable rules, he's built a career for himself as a sophisticated light comedian very much in the style of his hero, David Niven.

Director Brown has made a career of chronicling the history of American folk music, and Pete Seeger: The Power of Song is a worthy companion piece to his 1982 debut, "The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time?"

The picture juggles three story threads. It's an excellent character study, a surprisingly effective father-daughter drama and a caper movie littered with surprises.

The real humor comes, once again from Murphy, whose Donkey is so genuinely funny and clever that he very nearly steals the film. Except that it's stolen by Banderas as a rogue Puss In Boots.

The reason Balls of Fury works as well as it does, aside from its low aspirations, is because of the charm of Fogler in the lead. Like Jack Black, but not as sarcastic, he brings a winning enthusiasm to the role.

Breathtaking visual accomplishment.

Martin, who hasn't really clicked in a movie in years, hits the target this time with an Inspector Clouseau who is even more relentlessly annoying (and strangely endearing) than Sellers managed to be in his last several outings.

Bullock has abandoned all her usual cutesy mannerisms, and Reeves is as low-key and convincing as he's been in a role. Whatever else the film is, it's a competent and enjoyable star vehicle.

The echoes of Douglas Sirk melodramas and Lassie movies just add to the fun.

The commentary alternates between witty insight and opinionated bunk, but it's always fun -- and a must-see for movie buffs.

Takes a humorously gentle approach to the culture clash between the primitive and the modern. With wonderfully natural performances by the children, this is a family movie that crosses cultural boundaries in a celebration of the magical possibilities inherent in everyday objects.

There is an element of murder mystery and an edge of conspiracy thriller to Chris Paine's documentary about the rise and fall of General Motors' EV1 (Electric Vehicle 1).

Westfeldt's screenplay and Cary's direction combine to make it the best Manhattan love story since "When Harry Met Sally."

At times a bit stilted, a common quality of first-time directors who try too hard to sculpt every scene, but it's refreshingly bereft of slick cynicism and smart-ass snideness.

Bekmambetov's tone is so gravely serious that the drama tends to become arch and theatrical, despite sardonic punches of dark humor. But his imagery is striking (his imagination overcomes his limited budget), his style is assured and he's given the subtitle adaptation a dramatically dynamic dimension by giving the words the presence of an incantation taking physical form.

Mullan is a great choice as Frank, playing the silent guy with all kinds of baggage perfectly.

Brokedown Palace does have some plot implausibilities but Kaplan, manages to turn some hashed story lines into something substantial and emotionally affecting.

It's a simple film with a direct message, but the glimpses of the surrounding social culture that has adapted to the horrors give this Third World "How Green Was My Valley" its identity.

Overall the movie is a mess, with a mixed-up mythology at its core. It may not be a new holiday classic, but at least it's funny.

In Arcand's skilled hands, this sassy assembly comes together to be a comedy, a satire and a character study that's somehow not a bit condescending.

It moves so fast you almost forget it leaves the characters in its wake.

Isn't so emotionally powerful as the Oscar-winning "When We Were Kings" but which -- in its more intimate way -- still packs a punch.

An old-fashioned Western with all the classic elements -- buddy loyalty, stalwart heroes, despicable villains, plenty of gunfights and marvelous wind-scoured desert landscapes -- marked by some modern ideas about relationships.

It's an elegant nail-biter.

The simple, unpretentious storytelling of Unleashed is a rarity in the glut of underwritten and overproduced action films that dominate American screens today.

Life on the freeway is hell, but what comes next for these workers might be worse.

Somber and violent but undeniably stylish and unsettling thriller.

Mario Van Peebles, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his father, illuminates the soul of a man driven by a belief in himself and a love for his community.

It's a rare film that gets smarter as it goes along, injecting a satisfying dash of pragmatism every time it seems ready to slip into either unearned idealism or cynical fatalism.

It's a sumptuous mood piece.

Ends up being empty, anti-climactic and overlong.

This is an adrenaline-pumping, devilishly well-made thriller set against the downfall of an American family.

It's a superior film in every way to its predecessor "Kiss the Girls."

The movie constantly verges on being a parody, but Moore's performance stays miraculously away from caricature.

As good as the film is in so many ways, it also altogether rings a bit false and contrived.

For the most part, it's imaginatively staged and consistently entertaining.

Zhang is a master of detail and spectacle. There is also plenty of comedy, particularly in the scenes with linguistically challenged translators.

It makes for chuckling entertainment and it's fun to watch as it's happening. But its New York characters are not a bit believable, there's no real bite to the humor, and the film never adds up to be more than the sum of its parts.

Although the start of the movie is a little fragmented, and the last quarter turns predictably rote, the middle is heartfelt, wonderfully diverse and empowering.

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 by far the most faithful of the three versions, and beyond this integrity it also offers an ensemble of graceful performances and an epic evocation of 1920s China -- though, like its predecessors, it's far from a perfect crystallization of the novel.

Writer-director William Richert's black comedy about political conspiracy is an amusing forerunner of TV's "Dynasty." [02 Jun 1990]

Entertaining and eye-opening.

The script keeps to the point, the performances sparkle with originality, the direction of Jean-François Pouliot mostly has the right touch and the film ultimately generates some of the distinctively eccentric appeal of a classic Ealing Studio comedy of the 1950s.

Fernando Meirelles's MTV-grandstanding worked for "City of God," but it's just not necessary for, and gets in the way of, a script this literate and solid. In the end, The Constant Gardener works in spite of, not because of him.

An original, well-crafted plea that uses restraint instead of titillation to make a cautionary tale that aches with pathos and power.