A serious, handsome, excruciating film that radiates total commitment.

What a pleasure it is not to be hectored by a director as we laugh our own little laughs, watching a profound story unfold.

Dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past.

Has a whirligig wit, and 11 songs crammed into its 67 minutes: that's more melodic content than in most Broadway musicals.

Japanese Story is a simple, austerely told tale. But there is something memorable, even haunting, about it.

A grand and poignant movie epic about what is lost in war and what's worth saving in life. It is also a rare blend of purity and maturity -- the year's most rapturous love story.

Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment?

This is spellbinding reality cinema about duplicity and, worse, ignorance at the highest level.

As reversible misunderstandings grow into irreversible tragedy, it slowly dawns on you that this is a superior, heartbreaking film.

The second half of the film elevates all the story elements to Beethovenian crescendo. Here is an epic with literature's depth and opera's splendor -- and one that could be achieved only in movies. What could be more terrific?

This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.

The Farrellys need to remember this: Sappiness is easy, comedy is hard.

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

Emma Bolger is -- no other word for it -- magical in the role...In her way she encapsulates In America's virtues. It's a realistic movie, but one that's always aware that transformative hope may be just around the corner.

Triplettes is terrific…there's no competition for the fall's most imaginative delight. In that race, Triplettes can already take its victory lap.

Not for everyone. The plot is full of holes, and its language is worse than it has to be. But it has some swell supporting performances and a lot of vulgar inventiveness, and best of all, it plugs into -- and electrifies -- the mostly unacknowledged grimness that lies just beneath our holiday cheer.

Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite.

As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss or feathers.

Master and Commander is to movies what Russell Crowe is to acting. With subtlety and power, it explores the complexities of men at war, even with themselves. It puts the passion into action, and the thrill into thought.

This fine, persuasive movie will have to serve as his testament, and it's a fitting one. How many men can say they wrote their own epitaphs in their own blood?

Enough of Curtis' lovably crazed characters do succeed in finding love in all the unlikely places that you leave the theater with your heart humming happily. He has his dark -- well, darkish -- side under control. Which is to say that he is an Englishman, well practiced in masking pain and absurdity and descents into sheer goofiness with mannerly behavior, sly irony and stiff upper lips.

The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s -- people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore -- stupid us --but we ought to be glad someone does.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

Somehow, by a narrow margin, the film doesn't quite make it. Potter recolored his work a little more sunnily, and it is, perhaps, too compressed; it needs TV's room to digress.

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

Even when the movie sags and strains a bit in Act III, Clooney keeps it flying with old-fashioned movie-star allure. He's got it all: Cary Grant's looks and, inside, Bob Hope's snake-oil-salesman soul.