Lin energizes the grungy palette with stylistic zing, a hopped-up pace and understated humor. His cast carves out vivid characters and the open-ended aftermath takes stock of the moral scarring without moralizing.

A mix of the poetic and the polemic, the film is oddly abstract and untethered.

Like a surprising run of recent movies, Meet the Robinsons is based on a picture book (William Joyce's "A Day With Wilbur Robinson"). Unlike most of them, it achieves liftoff.

Yedaya is respectful and sensitive of everyone in Or's life and creates a beautiful, complex and rich relationship between mother and daughter, loving and protective of each other, but not of themselves.

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.

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

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

There's plenty of ammunition here for liberal conspiracy theorists, which surely will limit the audience to those already in Jarecki's political camp. Which is too bad, for it is a sobering history lesson as well as a political polemic on foreign policy and the growth of war into America's biggest business.

Wilde (Fry, in a wonderful performance) comes off less as a sexual martyr than a man who foolishly lets his obsession for an unworthy young lover (Jude Law) lead him into big trouble that he might well have avoided. The only totally sympathetic character in the movie is Wilde's wife (Jennifer Ehle). [05 Jun 1998]

It's all about the sheer visceral rush of mega action.

First-time feature film director Max Farberbock has given a terrific visual style, resonance, sense of hope and power to the material.

Best of all, the second Potter movie reunites its adult cast: Harris, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, John Cleese, Alan Rickman, Julie Walters and others -- a veritable Who's Who of British actors that single-handedly elevates the proceedings out of the kid's movie genre into something special.

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

A punch in the stomach of a movie. It is as ugly as it is beautiful, as full of peaks as of lows. It's a character-driven movie about people on an emotional edge who are ridding themselves of the things that can no longer work without inflicting damage.

All told, Knocked Up works more in spite of its low humor than because of it.

It's boldly acted, absorbing and satisfying as a history lesson and chock-full of extravagantly brutal battle sequences.

The sensuality is never salacious, merely curious, and the message is empowering ... at least within the confines of the insular community.

It also boosts the punch of the movie that so many of its action scenes evoke the Iraqi War news footage of the past month, and the "X-Men" premise -- people persecuted because their difference makes them seem threatening -- carries even more relevancy and weight than it did three years ago.

A spellbinding action-drama, skillfully built upon a scary corporate conspiracy, chock-full of enjoyable downbeat performances.

It's both innocent and bizarre, with a mischievous sense of fantasy marked by simple but striking cinematic magic.

Cruise is a man whose youthful cockiness has aged into self-assurance and cool confidence. It's a masterstroke of casting. The dynamism of Collateral, however, comes from Jamie Foxx.

Daniels gives a career-best performance.

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

The entire film is shot in split screen. Each of the unnamed characters is photographed separately in their own slice of space, the images sutured together with a purposeful imperfection, with occasional overlap and rare moments of union. It gives them the appearance of dancing around one another, almost touching but never getting past the years of emotional scar tissue, even as they work their way to her hotel room.

Has a slight bite.

The film is a strange, nostalgic, suitably outrageous ode to a very real revolution in consciousness.

The most pure of Mamet's works to come to the screen.

Singer deftly crafts a sleek, unusually tight film that balances comic-book adventure, pulp opera and the fear of being different.