In Creadon's most effective and inspired sequence, he gets Reagle to create a puzzle using the film's title as its theme. It's during the sequence that we learn the lofty rules of creating crosswords, including lateral symmetry and a maximum ratio of black to white space.

Faced with an artist defined more by his lyrics than his life story, Haynes delivers a song-cycle of a movie: vivid, exaggerated, contradictory impressions of a man who confounds a culture still looking to define him.

And the mostly stage-trained Sinise - who draws double duty here as director and co-star - distinguishes himself with an especially sympathetic performance and a lean, sensitive, almost delicate directorial debut that mark him as an industry force to be reckoned with.

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

Once you get the joke and grasp the aesthetic they're after, it's fun, and it almost works on the steam of its clever plot mechanics.

Dark farce, a four-handed game of sexual trumps.

Delivers the expected adrenaline-driven thrills with a fresh eye and a refreshing attitude.

In the end, this is a film about retribution and justice within unjust circumstances. Each character has a personal code of honor -- Arthur, Charlie and Capt. Stanley are all given their dignity -- and it's that code that sets the film apart.

But the irony of Les Destinées is that while Assayas is a pro at examining the inner workings of present-day connection and nuance, he's so overwhelmed by the sheer historical scope and detail of this massive saga that after three hours we're starved for emotional involvement with such inaccessible characters.

The annoying shaky-cam style so common to such indie dramas is toned down to a dreamy sway and the image drifts in and out of focus in scenes of heightened emotions. It's like waking from a daze and getting your bearings; the effect is both unsettling and calming.

With adventurous forays into questionable neighborhoods and stimulating tours through street markets, "Crossing the Bridge" is about the city as much as its music.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

At its best when exploring grieving and loss and anger, but Shear turns it into spiritual shock treatment.

Reminds us of just how exciting and satisfying the fantasy cinema can be when it's approached with imagination and flair.

Still, Kitano creates his own scary and compelling world in the film, and there's no denying his charisma as a star. Like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood (two action icons to whom he's often compared), the 51-year-old actor holds the screen with seemingly no effort. He's as watchable as a tired old rattlesnake. [11 Sep 1998]

Yellow Dog shows Davaa's growing refinement as a filmmaker, and that the success of "Weeping Camel" -- her master's thesis for film school in Munich that became an Oscar nominee -- was fully deserved.

Highly entertaining.

Stiller is enjoyably long-suffering, and De Niro convinces us that Attila the Hun would make a preferable father-in-law.

Above all, I'm Not Scared pays off our emotional investment. In the end, its elements come together with the kind of genuinely thrilling, deeply satisfying climax that even the better Hollywood movies just can't seem to pull off anymore.

The strength of Super Size Me lies primarily in Spurlock's character -- he comes across as an affable guy with a goofy sense of humor.

It becomes a dreamy study in stillness broken by suicide fantasies, flashbacks, and the hired killers, but even the violence has a meditative even melancholy quality to it, as if it's all been processed through the eyes of its Zen hero.

Rampling is fascinating as Ellen, the aging romantic who hardens her vulnerability with a materialist philosophy regarding the buying and selling of sex. The other two actresses give more superficial performances, with Young totally unconvincing as a Southern neurotic.

It's a fantasy of a crime epic, to be sure, but it's a glorious fantasy in which the unspoken bonds of brotherhood bathe every shootout and sacrifice in the light of myth.

Minghella does a good job of dashing any lingering image you might have of the Civil War as a conflict fought along neat geometric battle lines with the nobility of Appomattox.

An odd charmer with a whisper of autobiography (Blitz makes his film's protagonist a stutterer, just as the director was in school) and it's made even better by young lead actor Reece Thompson.

Peled's film, much of it shot clandestinely with smuggled cameras, is commendable in its fair depiction of the problems faced by the textile industry.

Michell captures the awkwardness of real-world behavior with gentle, unforced humor.

An utterly nihilistic, harrowingly upsetting vision of hell on earth.