Hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," though it is not for the fainthearted.

The problem is not that the film debases the book but that movies themselves are too capacious a home for such comedy, with its tea-steeped English musings and its love of bitty, tangential gags.

The Interpreter is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness--about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls--is at once laudable and vaporous.

Has a slapdash feeling to it.

This is the first occasion on which Moodysson has lost his balance, allowing his wrath to outweigh the charity that he used to extend to even the most boorish of his characters.

What binds and clads the new movie most thoroughly, however, is not storytelling but the high pressure of atmosphere.

Antal has concocted a phantasmagoria-outlandish and jumpy-but, at the same time, the movie is three-dimensional and weighted, with a melancholy soulfulness that becomes surprisingly touching.

A tender, indignant, but also very worldly movie.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

A perplexing compound of the silly and the glum.

It's emotionally more alive than anything Allen has done since "Sweet and Lowdown," in 1999. I was absorbed in it, and I liked parts of it. And I wish to God it were better.

As this matron on the loose, Allen is rancorously funny.

We're supposed to be overwhelmed by magic, but what we see is fancy film technique and a lot of strained whimsy.

Considered as a sequel, Be Cool is not an insult, but it’s a lazy, rhythmless, and redundant piece of moviemaking.

The Best of Youth takes its chance--almost unheard of, these days--to bloom and unfurl like a novel.

Maybe some of the audience should wonder if they aren't performing the Devil's work by sitting so quietly through movies that turn wonders into garbage.

As a piece of acting, Ganz’s work is not just astounding, it’s actually rather moving. But I have doubts about the way his virtuosity has been put to use.

Turtles Can Fly has little space for mawkishness, and the kids are far too cussed to be cute. It is, in every sense, the more immediate achievement: it hits and hurts the eyes (the rainy days are lousy enough, but the skies of royal blue, above such grief, feel especially insulting), and it also seems to bleed straight out of the headlines.

"Deep Throat" bore an X certificate. Inside Deep Throat is an NC-17. Neither is suitable for grownups.

I certainly came out of Nobody Knows feeling numb; only later, reflecting on the fact that the movie was inspired by a true story, did it occur to me that the numbness could have been deliberate, and that what suffused this picture was a mist of anger.

This is not just pliable filmmaking; it is an exercise in worldliness, in a feel for the cracks and warps of circumstance, which is all the more startling when you learn that the director is thirty-one.

There are too many rancors--hatred of life, hatred of others, hatred of their means to happiness--to contend with here, and the loveliness of the verse beats fruitlessly against them, as if against a wharf.

The movie re-creates Sam's miserable days with enough sympathy to come within hailing distance of such emblematic works of American disillusion as Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day."

We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.

The film turns into a triumph for Don Cheadle, who never steps outside the character for emotional grandstanding or easy moralism.

Brilliantly entertaining.

Spanglish chokes on an excess of sincerity and guilt, and, in retrospect, its failure may turn out to be momentous for a sincere and guilty community--Hollywood liberals in a state of post-election dismay.

Has a beautifully modulated sadness that's almost musical. Eastwood once made a movie about Charlie Parker ("Bird"), but this picture has the smoothly melancholic tones of Coleman Hawkins at his greatest.