Addressing the heartrending issue of children living with HIV and AIDS is enormously complex, but Blood Brother accomplishes the challenge with sufficient grace and empathy to give hope to anyone concerned with this global affliction.

Director Overbay, working from an effective screenplay by his wife Ginny Lee Overbay, slowly ratchets up the tension in quietly compelling fashion.

Paris Memories is a mystery movie, with Mia, like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, following various leads and fractured memories to get to the truth. It’s also a story of emotional renewal, chronicling the phases of recovery that follow in the wake of a major catastrophe, with all the ups and downs that entails.

A documentary that, like its subject, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is eminently sober, well-mannered, highly intelligent, scrupulous and just a teeny-weeny bit reassuringly dull.

As loving a portrait as this film is, it’s not entirely hagiographic either and I don’t think Ray and Saliers would ever let it be anyway. Throughout the one-on-one interviews, you get the sense that these people are their own biggest critics.

The result is infectiously enjoyable.

The episodes are uninteresting and the characters one-dimensional. Unlike the multicharacter tapestries of such filmmakers as Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, the pretentious whole here is ultimately less than the sum of the parts.

The film lacks narration or music, but the devastating images speak for themselves.

The movie observes and dramatizes, yet seeks no overriding social moral.

The movie never really gets below that surface. It sticks to the mean streets of Los Angeles without much introspection or analysis. But those surfaces are slick and beguiling.

Mayfair's picture feels like the work of a seasoned veteran rather than a newcomer, but this isn't necessarily a compliment. It's sensitively poetic and tremulously delicate to a fault, with every beat seemingly accompanied and underlined by an intrusive score from Ton That An which is heavily freighted with plangent strings and mournful piano notes.

Ben Foster goes through more than one striking transformation here, changing body and soul while neither shying away from nor overdramatizing the uglier aspects of the man’s life.

Creating a highly unusual and welcome look at schizophrenia that neither demonizes those with the condition nor patronizes them as suffering martyrs, the British drama Eternal Beauty pulls off a tricky feat.

The carefully laid foundation of suspense and dread, with its symmetries and crisp dialogue, is squandered in a clumsy pileup of credulity-stretching cataclysmic events.

A choppily told tribute to the Apollo astronauts that makes striking use of never-before-seen archival images.

In her brave first feature, Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic tackles the theme of war's aftermath.

Fascinating on social and theological levels, the film is less compelling as a straightforward narrative. Still, adventurous filmgoers will be rewarded by its unusually open-ended storyline.

Funny, bitter and sometimes bleak, the picture draws much of its appeal from a deadpan performance by star Matti Onnismaa.

Kusama: Infinity presents a creative life that is worth exploring, even by those who've been scared away by the crowds.

Woody Allen has lightened up. He's playing this one for laughs, going back to old times, and viewers should find it a welcome respite from his more recent, tightly-coiled important works. A murder mystery, in the fluffy "Thin Man" style, starring Allen and Diane Keaton, this TriStar release will appeal to those who prefer Allen's work up through "Annie Hall." It's thin fluff, but that's when Allen is his most weighty. [9 Aug 1993]

A trapped-in-a-house thriller pitting thieves against an unexpectedly resourceful victim, the lean and mean pic offers scares aplenty and at least a couple of game-changing twists.

Sorkin both entertains and makes you lean in to absorb every detail of this wild tale, which boasts a stellar cast to help tell it.

The Reckoning: Hollywood's Worst Kept Secret is generally effective as a fast-paced primer on the sexual harassment scandals that have swept show business in the last year but doesn't really add much to the story that we don't already know.

The greatest failure of the film, written by David Wolstencroft, is its inability to enter into the lives of the Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutu alike. The movie never moves beyond the tragic facts to show us the human face of either victims or perpetrators. All we get are white people shaking their heads and cursing Western governments.

Denzel Washington ventures into the dark side as a seriously corrupt narcotics cop in Training Day, and the results are electrifying. So is the picture, thanks to taut, sinewy direction by Antoine Fuqua and a compelling script by David Ayer (The Fast and the Furious).

Unfocused, overly long documentary raises provocative questions.

Shines a much deserved spotlight on this unheralded artist.

A visually enthralling undersea travelogue.