Sington's smartest decision was to let 10 of the astronauts speak for themselves. The film juxtaposes their personal stories, both their doubts and machismo, with the titanic achievement of the lunar landings.

Think of this stylish, quirky and quite grisly feature from Marjane Satrapi as a meeting of "Psycho," "Dexter" and "Dr. Doolittle."

As the title more than hints, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is all about a leap of faith, and faith is exactly what this picture requires of us. Make the leap, and you'll be delighted by a movie that's sugary goodness, a guilty pleasure.

Rosaline ultimately sparkles in this cheeky telling of the greatest love story never told.

The film’s director, who would make an excellent character witness for the defence, raises the questions but frustratingly doesn’t answer them in an otherwise compelling documentary.

In resisting the urge to roll over into the sappy-dog genre, Buddy instead elevates the stories it tells: It’s ultimately about love, resilience and lessons we can all take in.

As director Michael Noer struggles to tease a theme out of a string of exploits, Papillon remains as entertaining as ever.

An excellent cast (including Michael Shannon and Hillary Swank) hit the right notes in an evenly wrought family drama that rings true.

If hell is other people, then high school is a four-year journey through all nine levels of Dante-ish misery. But while most teen-centric films skip over this harsh reality, The Edge of Seventeen embraces it with a refreshing zeal.

As director Maren Ade builds one extended set piece after another, you will gradually spy her brilliant fusion of form and function: the languid pacing reproduces in the audience the feeling of Ines’s excruciating discomfort and desire to see her father shuffle out of the scene.

The Bronze often feels like an extended skit, but Hope is so refreshingly unladylike and the movie is so refreshingly cynical about gymnastics that the results are surprisingly amusing.

Simple but engrossing.

Baby Driver is fast and furious and fun as hell, but its cinema of cool may melt down in the coming years, another artifact of reckless, headstrong youth.

Though nothing much happens in the plot, the interplay between characters is always sharply observed, with funny, off-kilter dialogue: Whether it's a clumsy pickup attempt at a bar, a couple fighting about which of them cares more about the other, or the attempt by relatives to console each other at a funeral -- while sharing lines of cocaine -- the scenes feel both spontaneous and deftly constructed. [1 Nov 1996, p.D3]

The soundtrack is effective and overt – from the badass rock blare of Billy Squire, Bad Company and AC/DC to the atmosphere compositions of the indie musician Julia Holter to the riveting nu-blues of Willis Earl Beal. The camera work is slick, too; tricky sound-editing notions are pulled off with aplomb.

Josue’s film is not consistently effective in bridging her personal story with Shepard’s well-known legacy, but there are striking moments that explore the limits of forgiveness.

In a better entertainment world, Owe would have won a special Buster Keaton Great Stoneface award at last year's Academy Awards.

Bullock, easing into her mid-40s with box-office mojo intact, remains the star attraction as the annoyingly endearing Mary. You simply can't imagine another actor of her stature pulling it off.

WAG the Dog is a cozy political satire, the warm-and-fuzzy kind that is always entertaining yet never disturbing.

Overall, it's a satisfying example of the classic thriller, with a nifty digital update for these times.

It doesn’t all hang together, but its furious, ramshackle energy does the job, and maybe that’s all that matters: Outrage, after all, aims to spur action, not land four-star movie reviews.

It's an intense and tense time, unsurprisingly, and superbly realized by Lixin's unflinching yet compassionate eye, the Zhang family his microcosm for the Chinese macrocosm.

Presented the usual way, the film would be enchanting. In 3-D, however, Coraline is completely engrossing. Selick uses the technique brilliantly to enhance the comedy and horror that mingle in his more "family-friendly" version of Gaiman's dark story.

The animation also feels half-caught between inspired and derivative . . . Thank goodness, then, for the songs.

Ultimately, We Forgot to Break Up’s broken social scene offers a lot of hum, but not enough rattle.

For all its aches and pains, the heart of You Can Live Forever doesn’t so much beat as skip, haltingly and disconcertingly, as it tries to keep its own lifeblood pumping.

Heartfelt in tone, imaginative in scope and rendered with a seemingly endless well of aesthetic wit, the romantic-comedy is a worthy addition to the Pixar canon … until the characters start speaking.

Foster is, as always, exceptionally compelling to watch as she tries to puzzle out Lilian’s motivations. And the actress is surrounded by France’s finest men of a certain age. Auteuil, Amalric and Vincent Lacoste do their due diligence as performers, even when Zlotowski’s screenplay asks them to abandon all pretenses of rationality.