It has its charms, but fails to strike a similar emotional chord.

Machuca is a quiet film, moving sadly toward its inevitable climax, the final scenes a lesson in the methods by which the military restores order to a divided country.

The result bears so little resemblance to the original that you have to wonder what happened. It seems more a remake of "How the West Was Won" than 3:10 to Yuma.

It's bloody brilliant.

It's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.

Genuinely funny and sweet, the film's "everybody wins" philosophy resonates beyond the feel-good surfaces.

Though it seems long and its pace occasionally lags, it certainly struck me as a well-mounted, gloriously eye-filling and often exhilarating entertainment that brings back some of the delicious excitement of the great movie musicals.

This collision of skate punk and pop-culture archaeology is the most entertaining slice of cultural history I've seen in years.

Breathtaking visual accomplishment.

Bruckner's restrained performance reveals a girl drowning in her own lack of self-esteem. When she finally comes up for air, she shatters the surface with a force that, in the hands of a less thoughtful director, could send her spinning down the melodramatic road to ruin.

As a portrait of a collaborative artist at work, the film is an invaluable document, not to be missed by anyone with more than a passing interest in theater.

The movie works amazingly well as a historical epic.

(Arteta's) yanked an eerily accomplished performance out of his lead actor.

An exhilarating musical experience.

An allegory of our times, Shotgun Stories is a tragedy of biblical scale and an intimate family drama. Unlike the more lauded films of last year, which glorified a national preoccupation with bloody deeds, Shotgun Stories is a passionate cry to end the violence and a reminder that we, as free individuals, have the power to determine our own destinies.

Bassett's portrayal of Turner's transformation from wide-eyed teen-ager to subservient star of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue is skillful and absorbing. It doesn't take long to accept Bassett as the ersatz Tina and immerse oneself in the story. On the other hand, Ike Turner (Laurence Fishburne) comes across as such a flawed and unredeemable human being that one is left with a yearning for his version of the Tina Turner saga. [11 Jun 1993]

It's a quiet anti-war film full of lovely, heartbreakingly assured performances and real situations and responses.

So extreme in its sacrilege that it achieves a kind of sacredness, The Holy Mountain is a transcendental feast of the grotesque and the sublime.

The restrained drama both punctures the mythic ideal of the samurai culture (trained as fighters, they mostly serve as clan bureaucrats) and spins a romantic portrait of one man who values principle over protocol despite the cost to his reputation.

A playfully offbeat, willfully wide-eyed tale of lonely, inarticulate people looking for connection in a disconnected world.

Think of easy jazz or soft soul, with Rudolph's cinematic improvisations soaring and circling the melody while adding quirky variations.

The style is dated, and its neorealism seems forced and ineffective, but it's still delectable, and mostly for the things Pontecorvo hated about it: its delirious '50s color, and its stars, particularly Montand at the peak of virility.

The film is so crisply acted and smartly drawn that you barely notice the cracks in the veneer.

Everyone who has ever enjoyed the music that came out of Detroit's Motown Records in the 1960s should see Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.

A riveting piece of movie storytelling, mounted with a genuinely epic flair, shot and edited in a no-nonsense, classic style.

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.

You don't have to be a teenager to appreciate the raunchy humor and the uninhibited overkill of Seth's porn-obsessed chatter, though it probably helps to be a guy.