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.