Very much a '70s-style paranoid thriller, with a mood, tone and cascade of plot twists that are highly reminiscent of his 1975 classic, "Three Days of the Condor."

The results are being billed as a reunion of the "Titanic" star team, but anyone expecting a similarly gushy romantic idyll is in for a shock: it is an uncompromisingly dreary view of two self-deluded people incapable and unwilling to understand one another.

The sum of the movie is devastating. One takes out of it a sense that the human cost of our endless adventure in Iraq is going to be incalculable, perhaps catastrophic -- a psychological time bomb that will be exploding for decades to come.

The sharpest journalism thriller I've seen in years: an absolutely riveting drama that doesn't glorify its subject in the slightest and shrewdly says a lot of very sad things about the state of modern journalism.

That rare thing at the movies these days: a new experience. It awes us with its technological feat, it sweeps us up in its mystical spell and, with its final scene -- it takes us to an emotional climax of almost unbearable poignancy.

Not only is it an enormously entertaining study of a curiously American institution, it also manages to be a nail-biting competition film, an engrossing group character study and a wonderfully graceful comedy of manners.

I can't think of another movie that more fluently communicates the special agony and ecstasy of the game of chess.

It's an exhilarating film, largely because of Carville's charisma. [7 Jan 1994]

For all its unevenness, Bobby is a powerful, poignant movie and its ending -- played over a long excerpt of one of RFK's most compassionate speeches, voiced with none of the cliches of political rhetoric -- was, for me, the movie year's single most devastating sequence.

Though it's unflinching in its depiction of homosexual affection, the marvel of the movie is the dexterity with which it transcends the specificity of its characters and gay theme to be a universal human statement and profound political epic.

For all its moodiness, despair and disconnect, I've Loved You So Long is all about acknowledging human error and embracing ties -- to family and life -- that can't be undone.

Movie magic is only as powerful as the imagination that casts it. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki's imagination is the most creative in animated filmmaking.

The two women -- as well as the always marvelous Bill Nighy as Blanchett's "older" husband -- run roughshod over its third act flaws and, with their exquisitely detailed performances, make it better than it is. It's an actor's triumph.

In a disarmingly entertaining fashion, this multiaward-winning German bittersweet comedy seems to encapsulate all the emotion and drama of that profound geopolitical event.

For all its excesses, it's an absorbing, disturbing, savagely beautiful "trip" movie, and an extraordinary -- perhaps even outrageous -- personal vision of the one A-list filmmaker who truly deserves the adjective "maverick."

Jacob's Ladder is also undeniably spooky. It creates and maintains a mood of paranoia, its special visual effects are original and nightmarish, and it has at least three sequences as haunting as anything I've seen in some time. [2 Nov 1990, p.9]

Potter 3 is, in its heart of hearts, a teenage angst movie...Cuaron has done a masterful job of bringing off this shift in the Potter paradigm without disrupting any disruption in the established style of the series and without any pandering concessions to the teen-movie genre.

Pawlikowski has made a gorgeously ambiguous film -- based upon a novel by Helen Cross -- that is blessedly hard to tag; in fact, it's a compilation of genres and moods -- comedy, romance and diabolical thriller -- and that is its core strength and freshness.

After a somewhat shaky start, the film gradually settles in to become another extraordinarily powerful and explosively acted drama that deftly probes the moral responsibility of an artist in a totalitarian society.

The Reader is significant because -- like another film opening today, "Valkyrie" -- it asks us to see not just the Jews but the whole German people as victims of the Holocaust, and to view Nazism as more a product of explicable ignorance than inexplicable evil.

Olivier Dahan's sprawling portrait of the life of Edith Piaf is the kind of grand, passionate historical drama that no one seems to be able to pull off any more.

Played by Lucy Russell with a defiant, unapologetic embrace of aristocratic privilege, Grace is a maddening yet fascinating character.

This collision of skate punk and pop-culture archaeology is the most entertaining slice of cultural history I've seen in years.

Even if you don't like the stories, the filmmakers seem incapable of finding a corner of Paris that is not photogenic.

Perhaps the most ingeniously imaginative element in Son of Rambow, a film exploding with imagination (some of it scrawled directly over the film in animated expressions of Will's private world), is its very conceit.

An imaginative self-profile of producer Robert Evans, could well be the most totally irresistible movie of the summer.

There's a real gee-whiz kick to the fantasy of being the brainiest kid on the planet, and a down-to-earth quality to Jimmy and his not-so-bright, but ever-so-stalwart best buddies.

Explores cloudy, discomforting realities of the Holocaust not usually addressed in such films.