Works well as a metaphor for a more innocent time.

Jewison handles this rich tapestry of non-linear scenes with the skill of the old pro he is, and carefully modulates the drama to create the maximum emotional impact.

It's not an instant classic, but it's imaginatively drawn, full of charming characters, alive with action sequences and blissfully free of the snickering scatology and endless pop-culture references.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

Visceral, alive and very scary.

Garcia's dialogue is wonderfully crafted, short, sharp and resonant, and her elegant direction is delicate and handsome.

It's an old-fashioned Soviet road movie, filled with kind souls of the otherwise desperate (and at times predatory) world.

It's a dissection of how the media found and fed and nurtured the story in their insatiable need for content to fill their news hours and talk shows, how it just as quickly turned on them and transformed the story from celebration to vilification, and how the public turned right along with them.

Joaquin Phoenix is as good as he has ever been in James Gray's Two Lovers, a discomfortingly honest drama about the frustrations of love and desire.

The attainment it achieves is in the depths of pointless, mean-spirited exploitation.

When Riyadh's family jokes about the purple stain that marks them as resistance targets after they vote, the black humor speaks volumes about them as individuals, as Sunnis and as Iraqis with a dream of a better way.

Deliciously dark tale of insidious seduction.

Gunnarsson masterfully weaves these strands into a bold, multilayered tapestry surrounding a powerful story.

It's a beautifully crafted, almost perfectly sustained little drama that skillfully makes a subtle, bittersweet point.

Berlinger and Sinofsky, with their knack for penetrating the diabolical pretensions of weak and disaffected human beings, have brought Metallica to its knees.

Where you might expect either overheated teen melodrama or cartoonish farce, Nobuhiro creates a lively, engaging, character-driven piece with flourishes of offbeat humor dancing around the dynamics of the foursome as they pull together in rehearsals.

More like the kid shows that populate Nickelodeon.

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.

A few scenes are a bit coy and the "big secrets" threaten to pitch into melodrama, but Birmingham keeps bringing the film back to the delicate dynamics of the relationships at its heart.

Ok, I admit at first I was just laughing at the sheer gutsiness of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But after 10 minutes, I was laughing at the script.

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

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 a taut, unexpected study that asks many questions about retribution and redemption.

Penn's direction is amazingly sharp and intuitive, full of masterful touches that give an epic dimension and scope to the parable.

The film is weirdly fascinating in its own maverick way.

If not cinema magic, The Dinner Game is still a workable screwball comedy.

It's all so visceral that it overwhelms the near-abstract story and smothers what passes for characters.

Not only feels real, but it avoids preciousness and cute eccentricity and, in its lean, almost grave, cut-and-dried delivery makes more of an emotional impact because we're able to imprint our own memories of adolescence upon it.