The whale special effects, computer-generated of course, are genuinely spectacular.

The camera is fixated on the face of Alice, the lead character in The Girl in the Book. And no wonder. There’s a lot going on there.

There’s such a thing as something being too personal. James White is that thing.

DiCaprio’s performance is an astonishing testament to his commitment to a role.

Cross occasionally lets their more promising moments go slack. The staging of a few scenes suggests home-movie limitations. But enthusiasm counts for a great deal in a project as ambitious and strange as Second Nature.

This is easily the best “Trek” movie since “Khan,” giving the rebooted franchise ample reason to proceed at warp speed.

The film feels long and slow, and the subject matter familiar. We never quite get caught up in it, despite the appealing cast; a thriller directed at a snail's pace simply isn't very thrilling.

Through a deft combination of physical comedy, teenage angst and small-scale exploration of a fascinating premise, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” remains smartly committed to the emotional lives of its characters and their intermingled fates.

There's something about Fiscuteanu's quietly desperate performance (with much of the emotion conveyed through his eyes), that gets under your skin.

Directed by Carlos Saldanha, who co-directed "Ice Age," the film feels visually richer than its predecessor (thanks to all that plain white ice melting) but has the same brand of uncomplicated all-ages charm.

The young hero of the marvelous "Kirikou and the Sorceress" is back and displaying his lifesaving wits against both supernatural and environmental foes. Four stories derived from traditional African folk tales have been strikingly animated, with just enough scares to keep small eyes glued to the screen. [11 May 2006, p.H16]

What seems like a meandering comedy of police ineptitude eventually tightens into a gripping character study that defies genre conventions.

While it may have seemed revolutionary in its time, it now suffers from the disadvantage of looking like one more Asian movie about alienated youth. [18 Feb 2005, p.I20]

Unfortunately, King Arthur is somewhat less compelling than the "Lord of the Rings" movies; there's serious intent here, but an often thudding execution.

A not-bad entry in the Pinhead series Clive Barker started. [29 Oct 2002, p.E1]

Miyazaki's films never stop at their brilliant surfaces. Spirited Away is a fairy tale in the classic tradition, a growing-up fantasy riding the rapids of the subconscious.

Call me a sucker for white-trash humor, but it's mercilessly funny. [19 Sep 2003]

Mann, as he showed two years ago in "The Insider," is a wonderfully idiosyncratic storyteller, sketching out a plot line with quick scenes, jumping into the middle of a story and letting us figure out who's who.

Whether the new scenes make "Apocalypse" a better movie is debatable; for me, they were fascinating but not essential.

One of the movie's chief charms is Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour's lyrical score, which almost suggests an anti-"Lion King" approach. The music isn't in a hurry to dramatize its story or make epic statements. The same might be said of writer-director Michel Ocelot's delicate animation style and his handling of small moments. [30 Jun 2000]

There's a thrilling sense of transcendence that won't let go from the first masterfully constructed frames in Ridley Scott's modern epic of ancient Rome. It's that very rare feeling that you're settling into a movie whose individual elements are so finely attuned they fuse into a singular construct of pure entertainment.

Director Hayao Miyazaki brings a welcome sense of humor to this adventure story. [05 July 1991, p.16]

"There's nothing about this place worth filming," insists one character, but Kiarostami always comes up with something: a Tati-like scene in which a canister rolls down a street, all but waiting to be kicked, and several exotic glimpses of urban life, including a turkey salesman who carries a couple of unplucked birds through the Tehran streets. [26 Feb 1999]

The story line is not much more creative than your average suspense thriller, but "Perfect Blue" does break new ground as an anime film and it offers a dark examination of fame. It's what would happen if Britney Spears went to hell. [01 Oct 1999]

Better Than Chocolate is essentially a 101-minute sitcom that runs out of energy (but not vulgarity) long before it reaches its predictable finale. [27 Aug 1999]

The more this new Haunting tries to impress with its state-of-the-art techniques, the more it recalls how much Wise accomplished with eerie lighting effects and mysterious noises on the soundtrack. [23 July 1999, p.F1]

Some of this is fun, some of it is extraneous, and by the end of Muppets From Space it's hard to tell the difference. [14 July 1999, p.E3]

The script can seem random and shapeless at first, but in retrospect that seems intentional. Assayas creates a sense of people who really can't see the forest for the trees. [27 Aug 1999]