Allen has avoided his usual stable of jokes and one-liners, and the result is a film that feels and looks fresh from the maestro of urban angst.

Foxx is magnetic in the lead, and the subplot in which he bonds with his Saudi police liaison (Ashraf Barhom, giving the movie's best performance) is touching.

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

The film is not without its flaws, but it sports a terrific production design that integrates magically into the story -- as well as another top-notch performance by Anthony LaPaglia.

What makes this film truly chilling is the fact first-time feature filmmaker Scott Elliott and his writers somehow make every step of this descent harrowingly believable.

Cronenberg is one of the cinema's true originals, and a trip to his spooky world is always a harrowing, thought-provoking experience.

The only downside is that Bier's vision of upper-middle-class America does not always seem authentic.

There's something essential and emotional missing in this character-driven piece. It's more an admirably performed and observed study -- of a time, place and three very different people -- than it is the heartbreaking and engrossing story it could have been.

A fresh, well-written comedy that doesn't lag, casts its actors against type and has a real love for its characters.

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

The film is so full of ideas and so dense that its narrative splinters, moving tangentially, and ultimately is weighed down by its rant and rhetoric.

Ken Loach's new film, "Ladybird, Ladybird," takes us deep inside the true story of a woman who is a long-term victim of brutal men, and examines her predicament with such intimacy and ambiguity that the experience becomes the very antithesis of cliche. [27 Jan 1995]

It's remarkably bright, funny and sweet for a film that wades through so much sleaze, though it can't escape all of the weirdness it worms through.

As good as it is in pieces, its protagonists are distancing, its story is tangled, its film-noir cynicism is oppressive and unglamorous, and it just doesn't leave us with the satisfying unity of the kind of great movie it wants to be.

It's absorbing and often excruciatingly suspenseful, and it gives Viggo Mortensen a strong, change-of-pace vehicle to follow up his "Lord of the Rings" triumph.

Not since Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" has such an irreverent carnival of African American stereotypes been so irreverently sent up.

A summer movie that knows it's a summer movie. You don't go to this film for the story, but for the scenery: Bikini-clad girls riding waves, surf photography as beautiful as it is breathtaking, sun, surf, sand, even a little PG-13 romance.

The overall saga is moving, the performances are first-rate, the production values (which do not rely on the usual cartoonish CGI effects) are strong, and Carion captures the special insanity of stalemated trench warfare with an unusual horrific flair.

An inspirational portrait of an unwanted kid who brought culture to a world that had known only violence.

Once the story moves up north to Indianapolis, things become pat and predictable. But for its first 80 minutes, Great World of Sound hits all the right notes.

In the film's stronger moments, the artist in her definitely seems to be saying that the impulse to retreat into cultural fundamentalism carries dire risks, that much of what is old and traditional needs changing and there are some things about the detested process of globalization that are wonderfully liberating.

Most films about illegal immigration are set on the Mexican border, and Frozen River is free of the stereotypical characters and situations of that familiar setting. It also offers a rare look at modern Native American life, exploring the ambiguity of what it means to say that the laws of the white man cannot be enforced on Indian territory.

After an excellent setup, the movie becomes bogged down in chase scene after chase scene on its way to its inevitable ending.

Brosnan pulls out all the stops in his quest to be the last word in crude boorishness, only slightly relieved by the midlife soul-searching. Whether the public will buy him in this extreme role is another question. But it's a fearless, and fairly skilled, comic performance.

The film uses '70s rock songs especially well to establish mood and act as the bridge between sequences. Director Zanuck's use of actors is also hard to fault. She gets strong, no-nonsense supporting performances from Gregg Allman, Sam Elliott and Max Perlich; and Jason Patric and the always-reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh could not be more believable as the tragic, doomed, criminally naive lovers. [10 Jan 1992]

Garbarski recovers from the melodrama with a final image that is so sweet, so simple and so understated that one is tempted to say it is perfect.

Perhaps because I expected nothing - the movie struck me as one of the better comic-strip translations, and one of the better films of the genre. It's fast, colorful, entertaining and a clear cut above its most immediate predecessor, 1994's "The Shadow." [7 June 1996]

Vividly captures the joy of sailing.