In this film the lovers are seeking the impossible through the possible. The knowledge of that impossibility makes the scenes all the more powerful. This is the core of Lawrence's novel, and Ferran has understood it.

Extraordinary--delicate, seriously disturbing, and lovely.

The chief pleasure in the picture (set in Los Angeles) is in watching Hopkins spin off another of his nutty self-possessed intellectual criminals--this time it's Hannibal Lecter lite.

Entertaining though The Hoax is, the film that I imagined before I saw it was better.

Bier directs with a sense of motion, pleasant without pushing. Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Jacob, is an actor who absolutely belongs on the screen, a gentler sort of Jack Palance.

A story that is still healthfully discomfiting to remember.

It is too weak to say that Herzog disregards conventions of narrative structure and editing: he is there to punish us for attending his film and to make us enjoy it. Other directors have at times made masochists of us: Herzog excels at this, and he doesn't often do it more stunningly than in Cobra Verde.

Loach's cast fits perfectly, and his directing has his usual extra tang of commitment. He provides almost a sensory response to his material: we seem to feel the textures and scent the air.

The picture tries hard for addictive mystery, but it is full of scenes that promise insight and don't deliver.

The dialogue is bright, historically styled yet lithe; the characterizations are graphic even with minor people.

It is the two leading performances that make the film seem almost to reach down and embrace us.

Sissako makes his point: Africa's best treasure is its humanity.

A documentary, thoughtfully made.

Melancholy but enjoyable.

Overall, the effect is presumably what Eastwood wanted: we are present at a momentous event, not watching a movie.

Like Ceylan--like many a fine director--Coixet has made her film less as a drama than as the traversal of a state of mind, a mood.

Burman is particularly good at the tiny details that become recognition points in daily patterns.

Despite the fact that parts of this film remind us of past pictures with comparable themes, the director and his actors make it immediate, gripping.

At the last, despite the modern touches in Bennett's screenplay, The History Boys fills the traditional bill. Wellington would probably not be too upset by it. Eventually it tells us that Waterloo is still in pretty good hands.

Every moment of Longley's film is interesting, and the more we watch, the more clearly we realize that the film cannot solve anything for us.

Admittedly, the setting does heighten interest, but this film is much more than an ideational travelogue.

This film is a valuable signet of Wilson's carefully articulated independence.

The picture is spectacular.

McGrath says that he considers his film to be lighter in tone than TC 1, which is baffling. The reverse seems the case.

The segments are so cleverly arranged--Apted includes past pictorial references for each of the people we revisit--that now there is something almost mystical involved. It is as if a wizard were giving us an overview of forty-two years that mortals were possibly not meant to see.

An engrossing documentary.

Especially in the moving moments, this film prods us into a kind of reproof. Kushner is now fifty, a prime writing age, and we want more.

Whatever the virtues of The Queen--and it certainly has them--it simply would not exist without Mirren.

A good Listless Film carries a double melancholy for all: it makes us sad for its characters and sad for the world that has thus affected them. Old Joy is such a film.

This is the fourth film directed and at least co-written by Beauvois. (He has acted in a number of pictures, including a previous one of his own, and he is in Le Petit Lieutenant for a while.) He is a clean and sure director, with a good selective eye: he knows where we ought to be looking at any moment. We can hope for more Beauvois films with worlds of their own.

Embedded here in a culture of formalities, with some of the arcs and gestures of that culture, it almost becomes an opera of its own.

What Burger and his colleagues have done is to entrance us with a richly acted, beautifully produced story.

Stone has concentrated on one of the catastrophe's stories and has fashioned it well--with almost palpable physical detail, and with performances that never sink to exploitation.

Chabrol insured the power of this dangerously difficult film with perfect casting. The two lovers are so well acted that their story--and its finish--are incredibly convincing.

So much of this adaptation is engrossing that the script's additions are jarring.

If only Cantet and Robin Campillo (who based their screenplay on stories by Dany Lafèrriere) had balanced the sexual and political elements more acutely, the result could have been searing.

As directors, Harari and De Pelegri have just the right light-fingered glissando touch. Not a moment sags. Their cast relishes and fulfills the tempo.

To see the flight captain and co-pilot checking the plane before takeoff, to watch the varied passengers settling into their seats, is more agonizing than watching passengers board the ship in all those "Titanic" films. With United 93 we see these people unknowingly stepping into a history that is still in terrible process. But as a work in (let's call it) the Akhmatova mode, it does not and could not succeed.

One particular bit of luck for this reissue is the fact that Melville's cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, was on hand to help with the restoration of this thirty-five-year-old film. The result is a paradoxical beauty. Very many of the scenes are in sunlight--Melville avoided such facile stuff as shadows for suspense--yet they are chilly. The seasons vary, but the general effect is of a bright winter day that is freezing.

Whatever the outcome of all this hugger-mugger, as yet unresolved, Stolen gives us hints about a special sort of muscle.

Harron's work here is unclear in its theme or purpose. Was she showing how a woman managed to find a woman's way to success in a man's world? Was Harron interested in Page's delusion about what she was doing? Or did she want to scoff implicitly at the customers who made Page's career possible? We are left wondering.

Ford would probably have grumbled about some things in this picture--some moments of confusion about who is who--but he might have been pleased to see that his influence, so marked in many countries' films, had reached China and Tibet.

Whatever the plot, it is soothing to be in the company of Fanny Ardant, who plays Catherine and whose twenty-five-year career is dotted with small treasures.

Holofcener's new film is extraordinary: it engages us from beginning to end without strong narrative, or narratives. It lives through the quality of Holofcener's dialogue and the performances that she has drawn from her actors.

The brothers have given us another treasure. Once again they have made a drama of redemption, and once again they convince us that it is possible.

It has long been clear that Shepard is a rare double talent. He has flourished, rightly, as a playwright, and he is also a compelling film actor. His face does more for the reality of this picture than anything he wrote in the script.

The cast is so good that a kind of counterpoint arises between the riskily lachrymose story and the firm verity of the acting.

Sophie Scholl is not as devastatingly moving as "The White Rose," but it, too, evokes awe in lesser beings.

Sitting in front of Tristram Shandy for an hour and a half lets us enjoy the fact that, smooth though its making is, the picture is winking at us.

Jarecki says that his film doesn't precisely answer the question in his title. He is mistaken.

It contains little that will be new to any informed viewer; yet it fascinates for all of its 140 minutes.

One aspect certainly is remarkable. The dialogue is, at least to an American ear, authentic. Allen doesn't mention any aid on the script, so we are to assume that he wrote it himself.

As with much art of our time--music, painting, sculpture, theater--Caché in a certain way affronts us. Its deliberate contravention of our expectations, and not necessarily stodgy expectations, is part of its intent.

So in all the tumult about this film, the eruption of its subject into wide attention and the consequent revelations about cowboys' lives in the past, let us--without forgetting the American sources of the screenplay--acknowledge the anomaly that the director is Chinese.

The real success of Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed this debut feature, is that, through credible dialogue and sensitive performances, the basic idea overcomes its cleverness and is affecting.

This multiplicity--of people, stories, settings--is both the weakness and strength of the film. It is not easy to follow all the various threads, to get the pith of every scene. Still, this very abundance gives the whole picture a sense of authority.

It is the central performance that holds us. Cillian Murphy glows.

The present film-makers have retained the essences of the plot and characters but have moved the ambience toward the next stylistic era, romanticism.

Bellochio, who began his career in 1965, has made some of the most trenchant Italian films on political themes, and Good Morning, Night is one more of them.

The daring achievement of Jarhead is that it is not a film about war, about combat: it is about being a soldier.

Even though no reasonably well-informed viewer will learn much factual information from the picture, it grips; it even torments, because it lets us move and breathe and shiver and resolve with two particular young men.

But the best of the story is that there isn't much--as such. A slice of living is put before us. Some things happen. That's all.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that an allegory is "an extended or continued metaphor." And to think that this definition was coined when a French film called Innocence was still very far in the future! But how aptly this film proves the point.

The picture has enough good feeling and chuckle to take it out of the parochial.

But the contrast between setting and story isn't all that bars North Country from fulfillment. The major trouble is Theron. She plays Josey as well as is needed, but she is simply too beautiful.

García wanted to paint a canvas of nine elements, rather than one large element; and, though only a few of the vignettes are related, the film leaves us with a sense of wholeness, not of stunt.

Jacques Richard has fashioned an adoring tribute to this wonderfully maniacal man.

All four of the roles are written with pungency. There is even an implication that the two adults realize the triteness of the situation and that they--the characters, not Baumbach--want to speak from inner sources, not from a script. Baumbach pulls this off with some sting and wit.

A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony...With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.

To play for an audience of one that is only a few feet away is different in concentration and shade from playing in the theater, and Madden, though the script lags a bit, has nonetheless helped his actors to render what were once theater scenes as film sequences.

A lively, long, intelligent documentary.

A bit scattery, but it simmers with Shicoff's intensity in lending his faith and being to the role.

Extraordinary--vivid, stripped, intense.

But Anker's real success here is himself. He was obviously able to get these men and women to open up to him. And thus, quite obliquely, they remind us of a threat. As everyone knows, American symphony orchestras are in trouble. Attendance is dropping, and managements are trying various maneuvers, even stunts, to attract people.

One of the best elements in the adaptation is Caine's blending, like le Carré's, of the past and the present so that one can enrich the other. There are no stilted flashbacks: both past and present are treated as present, which gives the film a texture of depth.

The screenwriter Angus MacLachlan and the director Phil Morrison and an astonishingly perfect cast have quietly made a daring picture.

What fascinates is, first, that these comics treat the joke the way jazz musicians might treat a theme that each of them plays differently; and, second, that the passage of this joke from one comic to another is like the bonding of a profession.

Not many of us, I think, would want to see many films made this way, possibly not one more, but this one is an intriguing glance at the director-as-god, deigning to treat human frailty with imperial sway, assuming that his art justifies this slender material.

In the leading role Michael Pitt is neither good nor less than good. He simply mopes along druggedly for the film's ninety-seven minutes. Van Sant's inculcation of this non-performance is clearly part of his dogged negativism, his intent to purge his film.

The screenplay of Saraband feels concocted, not absorbed from life in sense and soul like so much of Bergman's work.

Kaminski, who is as good as any cinematographer working today, matches the chromatic tones of shots to their content in ways that can only be called exciting.

It seems quite possible that Me and You marks the arrival of an artist who may affect--disturbingly yet helpfully--films and audiences to come.

The film is emotionally and visually sustained, so it is pleasant.

The fact that Pitt and Jolie have not been associated with this type of action is something of a help, but what was needed was the off-balance tickle that--to fantasize--Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell would have given it.

Crowe is, in his unique way, astonishing. Even at his biggest moments he seems both convincing and somewhat reticent.

Unusually for a soap-bubble film, Après Vous runs almost two hours and very nearly sustains its length. Five minutes of condensation toward the end would have benefited it. But Salvadori floats everything, hammers nothing, and gets maximum buoyancy out of Camille Bazbaz's jaunty music.

Both these stories, which of course develop further, are more engaging than they may sound, because Desplechin directs them so intelligently and because they are so well acted.

The insinuating quality of 3-Iron is irresistible.

The film is old-fashioned because it exists. No one, to use an ever-dubious line, makes films like this anymore.

Well-knit, generally lucid documentary.

The most important aspect of the stories about all five characters is the way they are told. Attal and his editor Jennifer Augé have found an attractive playful style: they never let the stories rest, almost juggling them, and keep them gamboling before us.

Jaoui directs with flow and affection, and she plays Sylvia sensitively. Bacri has the right middle-aged assortment of humors.

Overall Nina's Tragedies is another instance of a subject discussed here lately--a foreign film that is seen one way at home and another way abroad.

The name of Hugo Colace ought to be known to the film world. He is the cinematographer of an Argentinean film called Intimate Stories. Not since some Tibetan films have I seen such vastness, sparsely inhabited, almost ringing with immensity.

All political thrillers, good or less good, have moral implications...Walk on Water, one of the better ones, has grave moral implications and does not ignore them or merely utilize them.

Like some wines, The Best of Youth travels well. From its earliest moments the film is intelligently seen.

It's agreeable to see a picture that holds us without perspiring to do so. We are treated not as an audience but as café chums to whom a story is being told

In every aspect, his film is superbly made.