Together is a likely candidate to become that one foreign-language film that jumps out of the art houses each year to become a mainstream phenomenon.

The performances are immaculate, especially Dafoe and the always-magnificent Mirren, who rarely gets a vehicle this worthy of her talent.

Dillane gives such a layered, detailed, utterly convincing performance as a man struggling with an inescapable and suffocating burden of guilt that he quickly makes us forget that he's too old for the part.

The movie works best as spectacle: as a piece of old-style, non-CGI, on-location epic filmmaking.

For anyone looking for something as real or engaging as Biggie's music -- or a good introduction to it -- will be disappointed by this mediocre celluloid life-after-death.

A pleasant, old-fashioned kind of a love triangle.

Some audiences will find it an endurance test and Reygadas doesn't make it easy with his confrontational imagery, but he provokes emotions not often explored on screen.

When the veterans of this war are finally allowed to tell their own stories, we will have something worth listening to. Body of War is just election year claptrap.

An incomprehensible mess -- so boring and numbingly unworkable that it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking.

The movie is so well-cast, sympathetically acted and delicately directed -- and so genuinely touching and funny -- that it leaps right out of the narrow confines of the family bonding formula.

Entertaining and eye-opening.

As the film loses its focus on the "Protocols" phenomenon -- it becomes too scattered to have the impact Levin is after.

Director Neil Burger manages to make his technical deficiencies and clumsy interviews work for the credibility of his story rather than against it, and he builds an eerie, naturalistic suspense that's believable enough to raise an authentic goose bump or two.

Anderson is a hopeless romantic in a cynical world, and for a brief moment he makes the case that true love is the only power that can crack time and space.

This a film where men on both sides of the line are seasoned and efficient. Men after Mamet's own heart.

Very slick, very compelling and not nearly as predictable as it sounds.

Basically lives up to the old adage that the final work in a trilogy is invariably the weakest.

Ultimately feels hollow and slapdash.

The texture of Manic feels honest and the chemistry of the kids is well observed, but even the modest breakthroughs are dramatic conventions that favor the symbolic over the genuine.

The result is a movie that washes down without much thinking or introspection, provides some laughs and a tear or two, and dishes up a little something to mull over with its messages about friendship and loyalty in the face of naked ambition.

The film is such a good-natured and easygoing ride that it's ultimately very hard to resist.

There's no mistaking the fact that this hybrid misses the impact of the Disney classic, and even that of the excellent 1934 MGM version. Both of these films are surprisingly hard-edged and every bit as thrilling -- and scary -- as Stevenson's 1883 novel.

Whatever you think of her performance, Foster has certainly made all the right choices as a producer, and come up with a movie of taste, integrity and considerable emotional impact. [23 Dec 1994]

For all the clumsy scenes and cloying performances, director Patricia Riggen puts her adults through tough choices and hard consequences.

Lacks the cohesive flow of "Fantasia" and suffers from an attention deficit that seems to mark and flaw our current fast-paced technological era.

Not terrible, but distinctly disappointing, not nearly as engaging or thrilling as its premise seems to promise.

Writer and first-time director Thomas Bezucha certainly knows how to create warmth, ambience and situation.

Quite a bit of fun. In fact, in its own good-natured, silly way, it works better than most of the year's other adventure-gutbusters.