The critique of masculinity is far more thoughtful and compelling than the vague ruminations about war. Nonetheless Cruise's impassioned performance as Kovic is an impressive accomplishment.

This film exists only for its glamorous visuals, gorgeous Gershwin music, and the dancing choreographed by Astaire and Eugene Loring.

Lower case Hitch, but diverting and sleek, with the climax early on. [review of original release]

The whole lighter-than-air lark whizzes by like a brisk, kandy-kolored dream of the 1960s, flavored by a Saul Bass inspired credit sequence; a slinky, Henry Mancini-esque score; and a stunning array of period sets and evocative locales.

The film features good acting from almost everyone, the one notable exception being the annoying Cage who adopts a grating constricted voice for the role.

A series of heavily telegraphed, desperately played and incredibly unfunny sight gags, Silent Movie is truly a maddeningly insulting salute to the golden age of film comedy.

The movie is thoroughly engrossing from the opening frame to the end credits, and it’s a beautiful viewing experience.

Overall, the film falls into some comforting cocoon midway between affectionate spoof and adoring homage, much like Keillor's warmly nostalgic show.

The movie is at its best when it's most straightforward. Flights of fancy like the child angel perched on Melvin's ceiling or his conversations with the black-clad Sweetback, who appears to undermine his confidence at crucial junctures, seem forced and pointless.

Presents the salient points of this troubling case with gripping concision.

Wickedly funny and surprisingly sweet film may be the perfect star vehicle for Grant. He's full of piss and vinegar and has at long last set aside the wobbly, stammering persona best left at "Four Weddings and a Funeral."

Flawed but undeniably provocative and brilliantly acted by Gosling.

Though Hearst is the hook, Stone's unwavering focus is on the heady mix of social and personal dynamics that spawned the SLA.

Fascinating on a number of levels, and deeply disturbing through and through.

The drawn-out effect is deliberate -- director Babak Payami wants his audience to concentrate on the characters' inner development and their isolation -- but his strategy slows the film down to a crawl.

Ultimately, Dick subordinates scholarship to passion, which may be exactly what it takes to convince mainstream moviegoers that they should care about a system that shortchanges THEM when they go to the movies.

It's visually intoxicating, with its lavish ruffs and furbelows, stately homes and manicured gardens, jewels and silks and elaborately curled hair, but there's less to ORLANDO than meets the eye.

This is Wilder at his most acerbic and cynical, and the film was originally attacked by critics who considered it a monument to tastelessness. But the hypnotic performance he draws from sultry Dietrich shows his continuing mastery of the medium.

Unforgettably, Bastard out of Carolina makes a bold statement about a little girl's grace under inordinate pressure.

In the end, Bill emerges as someone truly unique and someone who we feel privileged to know.

There's lots to recommend this shoestring picture, not the least of which is Baron's acting ability.

At its best, the film is moving and thought-provoking, but at other moments it is unintentionally silly. It is not the story but the telling of it that is the problem; at 140 minutes, Maurice simply goes on too long.

Petersen is superb as the obsessive investigator who risks madness each time he takes on a case, and Tom Noonan is absolutely chilling as the psycho killer.

While this is a wonderful showcase for some fine acting--notably by Fonda--it is not great filmmaking, and one may be left wishing for the biting, off-the-wall satire of Dr. Strangelove.

Luxe MGM historical ransacking, locationed to the nines, beautiful to look upon, but with energy lapses in the soggy script of Sir Walter Scott's epic classic.

Although the film was cut by more than 30 minutes by United Artists, what is left of this satirical, intimate look at the revered character is intriguing and wholly entertaining.

Allen has done better than this, but The Purple Rose of Cairo is a sweet little film and an interesting diversion for his legion of followers.

If one can ignore the blatantly fictitious nature of this Hollywood "biography" of the still-controversial George Armstrong Custer, THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON is a wholly entertaining movie, fueled by Raoul Walsh's direction and Errol Flynn's energetic performance.

As in the best Hitchcock movies, suspense, rather than actual mayhem, drives the film.

Ribisi is painfully intense without being histrionic.

The acting is superb.

A grim neo-noir thriller.

Shattering documentary.

The Longest Day is visually stunning--its extraordinary camera movement and Cinemascope photography brilliantly augmenting the meticulously reenacted battle scenes. The only thing bigger than the film's scope are its stars.

Shelly was murdered before she could continue developing as a writer and director, and while this, her last film, is extremely uneven and undermined by an excess of quirk, Keri Russell's performance as a pregnant pie-guru is a charmer with a bracing streak convincingly desperate determination.

Strong stuff, intensely watchable, but definitely not for children.

It could have been a drab, weepy story, but Stern and Newman collaborated to make it an inspiring one that proves one is never too old to change one's life.

Wildly unconventional, corrosively satirical, savagely violent and vulgar, Natural Born Killers is more self-consciously radical (in form, if not necessarily in content) than any other major studio release in recent memory.

Not surprisingly, Bresson's stripped-to-the-bone adaptation eschews the traditionally heroic, spectacular, fabulous, and exaltedly romantic aspects of the legendary saga in order to lay bare the confusion and pain within the human soul.

In many ways, this is one of the best biblical films ever done. Mostly because it doesn't preach, just entertains, and in doing that, puts its lessons across with a minimum of effort.

Grimly realistic and often brutal, it exposes the inhuman conditions and paranoia that deepen criminal resolve among inmates.

This being a Michael Moore film, the filmmaker is as enraging as the subject: His belligerent court-jester shtick wears thin fast and undermines the segments on universal health-care systems in Canada, the U.K., France and Cuba.

Ricci's less flashy characterization of the immature Selby is equally skilled and meshes seamlessly with Theron's uncompromising performance.

The effect is one of gorgeous puppets, a removed perspective that makes some of the most powerful political and social events in history seem like the sad, desperate flailing of monkeys.

One of the Marx Brothers' funniest films, Monkey Business was their first to be written directly for the screen and is noticeably less stagy than earlier efforts.

Although it contains funny moments, the deliberately disjointed whole is too cute for its own good.

With virtually no music and very little expository dialogue, this is one of the rare films with enough faith in moviegoers to let them figure things out for themselves.

No doubt captures some of the horror and the chaos of the actual situation, but it makes for a loud, often confusing, and always bloody two and a half hours.

This hilariously low-key film is punctuated by inspired wish-fulfillment fantasy sequences filled with pro-Palestinian imagery that would be taboo in a western film.

The second film in Leone's Dollar trilogy finds the Italian director in better form than in A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More has better writing, superior production values, and more characters who aptly complement Eastwood's stoic Man with No Name.

Allen presents a host of anecdotes and remembrances of things past, but one wishes it could have been slightly more cohesive. One of the joys in this picture is the soundtrack of songs of the period that will delight anyone who lived in those radio days.

WOMAN OF THE YEAR is a marvelous comedy-drama, brimming with wit, style, and sophistication.

This well-done Hammer horror film features a thoughtful screenplay that finally injects some compassion and intelligence into the monster. One of director Fisher's best.

The result is hypnotic.

Mohammad Rasoulof's heartfelt and darkly comic second feature proves beyond any doubt that Iranian film is still alive and well, despite waning Western interest in one of the world's richest contemporary cinemas.

The film rises above the level of agitprop by avoiding sloganeering and using the real words of real people to tell its story. Its feminism, too, is real and unforced, with women simply being shown struggling alongside--and when necessary defying--their male counterparts.

Hope is wonderful, with something smart to say no matter what the situation. His smug behavior is very funny (far and away superior to anything he ever did in the television work that made him rich) and the pacing is as good as it usually is in these Hope comedies.

The movie does open up a lot of heretofore vacuum-sealed cans of worms. Does sex represent a sort of grand completeness that men secretly yearn for in their friendships?

Shakespeare himself couldn't have written better or more complex characters, and far from strange, by the end of this extraordinary film you couldn't imagine Shakespeare performed anywhere else.

Although engagingly played, the film cannot find a voice or climax.

It's a sly, subtle portrait of systematic hypocrisy.

Oliver! is better than most screen musicals of the 1960s, a period when oversized, poorly rendered songfests virtually killed the genre.

The result isn't an easy film, but it is rewarding.

The big surprise is so obvious that it makes the deliberate pacing seem painfully slow, and Kidman's prissy accent and tight-lipped performance are more than a little grating.

Lively if derivative romp.

The script pushes all the expected buttons at all the expected moments, leaving you wondering what could have been achieved with a more rigorous, unsentimental approach.

While Poirier's gentle touch is part of the film's overall charm, it's also what may lead some to find the whole journey a little draggy. Nevertheless, it's a good way to spend a couple of hot summer afternoon hours: It's often very funny, the acting is fine and the gorgeous CinemaScope cinematography manages to capture all the raw beauty of Brittany without ever coming off as pretty-pretty.

It starts slowly, but this contemplative drama's cumulative effect is genuinely haunting.

Considering that Disney couldn't help but trash Victor Hugo's novel in the process of reforming it for tender young sensibilities, this animated adaptation of his Notre Dame de Paris is pricklier and more disturbing than we had any right to expect.

Slow but charming film.

It features truly monstrous bogeymen in the Reavers, cannibalistic renegades who, legend has it, went to the edge of the universe and were driven mad by the abyss.

Weerasethakul mixes fact, fiction and filmmaking into a blend that's intriguingly obtuse, yet surprisingly revelatory.

Harsh and unsparing, Dumont's all-too-believable film charts with breath taking precision the distance between the unencumbered beauty of moving through space and the agony of inexorably falling to earth.

The supporting cast is uniformly strong, with Simon McBurney standing out as an oily representative of the British foreign service.

This is no film for the squeamish.

A tongue-in-cheek nod to gumshoes Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

A meditative film by visionary Soviet filmmaker Tarkovsky that lures viewers into its mysterious, mystical world and completely envelops them for a two-hour stretch.

The filmmakers know the tropes of spooky movies: Glowering shadows, squeaking playground equipment, eerie storms and half-glimpsed forms, but the film rests on Rueda's subtle, intense performance, rooted in every half-articulated anxiety that ever gnawed at a parent's brain.

Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker have done a tremendous job of sorting the facts from a tangle of fictions, and include perspectives from a wide variety of experts and testimonies from a surprising number of surviving eyewitnesses. Together, they do the whole, horrible episode justice, something awfully hard to come by in the state of Alabama in 1931.

Makes for a great story.

"There is no antidote for the human bomb," one Sri Lankan official flatly states, but Ziv's film offers a number of important insights into a phenomenon that's only gaining momentum.

Sure, like cotton candy: It doesn't do a thing for you, but it's wickedly sweet as it melts on your tongue.

What begins as a sorry exercise in cynical seduction becomes a case of amour fou.

Though occasionally repetitive, Gramaglia and Fields' admirably evenhanded documentary gives the Ramones the respect they deserve: Fans will be grateful and the uninitiated should listen and learn.

More reminiscent of Hitchcock's progeny than of the master's own films, Cedric Kahn's intelligently menacing thriller combines Brian DePalma's sexy style with the ice-cold cool tone of Claude Chabrol and the sense of mounting panic George Sluizer exploited in "The Vanishing."

Maguire and Douglas are extraordinary (though Douglas feels a little old for his role, which seems to have been written for a man in his early 40s); even Downey Jr. delivers a sharp, understated performance.

It's an ideal collaboration: A stylish director desperately seeking substance transforms the first, somewhat flat novel of a promising young writer into powerful and brutally honest film about a highly controversial subject.

SMOOTH TALK is trying to talk to a 1980s generation by using 1960s dialog. Faithfully adapted from a 1970 Joyce Carol Oates short story, the film's attitudes are better suited to that era than to the present. Dern (daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd), however, is the one element that makes SMOOTH TALK.

There isn't a one-note character in the mix, and they respond with haunting, subtle performances that feel utterly natural and unaffected. It's a striking debut for Estes, and a remarkable showcase for the cast.

Despite the frequent and elaborate sex scenes, the film's overall tone is both melancholic and alienating, suffused with the sad certainty of Claudine's impending death in Venice.

Very nearly a classic, this Americanization of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai does a good job of mirroring the major themes and attitudes of the original while re-creating that monumental film in an occidental setting.

While rich in ethnographic detail, the film ultimately recalls nothing more than pulp fictions like Robert E. Howard’s "Conan the Barbarian," which validate their worship of ubermensch-ian brawn by way of sad tales of childhood victimization.

Unlike this year's earlier Tibetan-themed biopic, "Seven Years in Tibet", Martin Scorsese's quietly devastating film really IS about the Dalai Lama.

The thorny heart of Steven Spielberg's sober, fact-based political thriller about Israeli retaliation for the murder of 11 Olympic athletes by Palestinian terrorists is the knowledge that vengeance is a self-perpetuating murder machine that drags successive generations into a mire of tit-for-tat bloodshed.

Harrowing, psychologically astute drama.

This cheeky fable rests on the slender shoulders of Etel and McGibbon, and the lovely, natural performances Boyle elicits from them are the film's real miracle.

If you've never seen a martial arts movie, this is a great place to start.

Pfeiffer is a revelation in her part, almost stealing the film. Her relative stillness, masking internal unrest, makes her character seem more authentically "period" than her co-stars, who have adopted no formal period mannerisms.