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.