It's a rare film that gets smarter as it goes along, injecting a satisfying dash of pragmatism every time it seems ready to slip into either unearned idealism or cynical fatalism.

The movie also is designed to be an actor's showcase for Norton and Giamatti, two of the best movie actors of their generation. Each has his moments of fire, but some element is missing from the script that would make this duel of the titans riveting.

Kurosawa leaves much of the explanation enigmatic but he fills the film with an eerie emptiness, where suicides erupt out of nowhere and mankind dissolves in an oily smudge of hopelessness, adrift between life and death.

What results is, for a film purporting to reflect the nobility of a beloved book, the propensity to slip occasionally into the fart and belch slapstick that passes for humor in just about every present-day animated movie. It's a misstep that pulls us out of our awe for the carefully studied world the filmmakers have lovingly labored to create.

A rare flub for the usually spot-on director and cast.

Speaks in the raw mumble of the dirty South. A regional film in the truest sense, it does for Memphis what its producer, John Singleton, once did for South Central Los Angeles.

A sweet-spirited, extremely well-cast little comedy.

Touching, transcendent love story.

Somehow the movie works like a clock. Its scenes and sensibility are all more than familiar, but it exudes a kind of nostalgic spy-movie charm and, at the same time, is so fresh and free of the usual thriller nonsense that it all seems to be happening for the first time.

An extraordinarily exciting, absorbing and satisfying movie. Not quite "Seabiscuit," but comfortably close.

Works best of all as an epic. It wonderfully creates a world of fractured deco elegance and endless human duplicity in which everyone is on the run -- exactly the kind of incisive, seemingly effortless historical spectacle that the French have learned to do so much better than Hollywood.

It's well-written, well-cast and skillfully directed in every scene, and, at the same time, it doesn't come together with enough impact to be hugely memorable.

Fascinating.

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.

Its overall effect is haunting, hypnotic and moving in a profound and unexpected way.

The film below it is such an entertaining and poignantly bittersweet take-down of a good man's midlife crisis that the translation still works like a charm.

There's a dark and demented little psychodrama of self-inflicted madness beneath the narrative contrivances. Vigalondo's direction makes it work more like a waking nightmare than a genuine experience, and he gives it the quality of madness.

While most of the film is well-written and acted, there are some difficulties. Aniston's Olivia is hard to figure.

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 tasteful, richly textured, exquisitely nostalgic drama that carries with it an enormous emotional punch. [09 Oct 1992]

Caro Diario is an alternately charming and unsettling mood piece that communicates well the offbeat world view of a self-confessed '60s-style rebel. [21 Oct 1994]

John Sayles ventures into August Wilson territory with Honeydripper.

An often touching and always intriguing look at the fall and rebirth of a nation and the resilient spirit of its women.

It's pure fluff, but as irresistible as cotton candy.

Rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

[Jarmusch] seems...to introduce gratuitous bloodshed that is out of sync with the engaging, offbeat tempo and dark, comedic moral fable that has come before.

The movie grabs us from its heart-pounding opening sequence and pulls us inexorably along its trajectory with the grip of the last gruesome act of a Greek tragedy. Its fascination is not what happens but HOW it happens.

Pitt won the Best Actor award at Venice for his Jesse...Yet it's Affleck who impresses most as the wary, skittish Bob.