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.