A subtle, unsparing portrait of families whose fragile dynamics fray under pressure. Its strength lies in the complexity with which the characters are written.

This handsomely mounted documentary takes the same, indulgent tone that at lot of Thompson's friends and associates seem to have had.

The good news is that it comes closer than any of its predecessors, hitting the mark or coming close to it on almost all fronts. With "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" being split into two films, the final installment stands an excellent chance of getting it right.

This is a strikingly original story about human feelings.

A true film buff's film about a film buff.

Gore looks as energized and purposeful as Mother Earth looks sickly and mad as hell, which is no doubt why many commentators suggested it was less an environmental action statement than a test balloon for future political ambitions.

GLADIATOR breaks no new ground, but it pays off scrupulously, fulfilling--in fact, catering to--audience expectations at every turn. This may not sound like much of an achievement, but when theaters are full of movies that don't deliver on their implicit promises, it's nice to see a movie that gives audiences exactly what they've paid for.

While Gilroy deploys the occasional exploding car, the film's climax is all words -- angry, carefully sharpened words -- with the stopping power of large-caliber bullets.

Delightful because it's intensely sincere.

The original English scripts certainly were peppered with sly, topical asides aimed squarely at adults. Paul Bassett Davies' updated screenplay attempts to follow suit, but what passes for topical these days is pretty much limited to industry inside jokes and constant allusions other movies. Thankfully, the animation itself is thoroughly inspired.

Seething with suggestions of perverse pleasures and inchoate horror, this dark fairy tale won't win the Pennsylvania-born, London-based Quay brothers any new fans -- it plays to the converted, and the converted know who they are.

Paxton (who also produced) and Marguiles turn in fine, affecting performances, Wahlberg is better than you might expect, and the story is powered by a knock-out soundtrack.

It's a film that deals with natural emotions and commonplace decisions creating uncommon situations. Bud Yorkin's direction is also top-notch.

If you're looking for nonstop, no-holds-barred exploitation, look no further. Pam Grier's first solo starring role is an enormously entertaining black action classic.

A keen satire, MANDABI is not only Sembene's first comedy and first film in color, but also his first in Wolof, the language spoken by most Senegalese people. Its critique of a postcolonial state is much more narrowly focused than those of his earlier short films, and, as the first Senegalese film to be distributed commercially in Senegal, it more than got its point across.

A cut above the noisy, pop-culture joke-larded norm, and it's much more than a "Happy Feet" knockoff.

Cheadle and Ejiofor are riveting together; they have the kind of apparently effortless chemistry that makes every scene they share a delight. With a dynamite soundtrack under their feet, the two of them rock the house.

Opening with the Mohandas Gandhi epigram "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," it humanizes the bombers without excusing their actions.

Whatever the project's "reality," it's insightful as well as entertaining, and the inclusion of real interviews with people both inside and outside the business means it functions as both an intelligent critique and a dire warning.

Neither a prequel nor a sequel. Nor is it really much of a horror movie: It's a bizarre, bloody family drama that puts its predecessor into a larger social context.

This compelling and horrifying study of random violence seldom lives up to its promise, but it still packs a powerful wallop.

Sentimental, formulaic, predictable and shamelessly manipulative, Marcos Carnevale’s tale of late-life love is also genuinely heartbreaking and heartening.

Exceedingly stagy and theatrical, even by 1930's standards, but is nevertheless very funny and highly enjoyable.

One of the more graphically violent movies ever made, Magnum Force is shatteringly effective.

It's handled well by veteran director J. Lee Thompson, with strong cast support and excellent production values that make it all lavish, rich, and often breathtaking.

First-time writer-director Rian Johnson's gimmick is that his SoCal teens talk like film-noir yeggs and dames, slinging hard-boiled shade and spitting out terse, rat-a-tat dialogue peppered with slang that was yesterday's news 40 years before they were born. But the result is, against all odds, marvelously entertaining.

This is one of the best political thrillers of the 1970s.

The result is a film that's comfortable and familiar, but at the same time feels fresh, fun, and original.

The film's heart is Magdiel and the modest dreams that get him through the day but may also be the death of him.

Although the film contains a subtle antiwar message, it's not necessary to look for any rhyme or reason in the script; just enjoy all the derring-do.

The result is slick, mainstream entertainment with just enough surprises that you don't have to feel like a fool for enjoying it.

Like Night and Day and Words and Music--film biographies about Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart, respectively--Rhapsody In Blue has little to do with the real life of its subject, but, as is the case with those films, its subject's wonderful songs are the main attraction.

An observant and sensitively played drama about adolescent sexuality, unrequited love and heartbreak.

ALFIE is a surprisingly successful exercise in dramatic irony: the title character, a charming mediocrity who fancies himself a ladykiller, delivers a running commentary on his tawdry sexual conquests and penny-ante criminal ambitions, cheerfully oblivious to an audience that knows more about him than he will ever know himself.

Many of the script's observations sound as though they were lifted directly from the pages of Baxter's book, and they're too platitudinous to impart much wisdom to anyone who's been in and out of love at least once in his or her life. But it's nice to see these ideas played out by a fine cast.

Williams gives a fine performance, the rest of the cast is also excellent, and director Sidney Lumet's eye for detail is sure throughout this authentic look at the dirtier side of police work.

The script is spiked with cheeky, occasionally hilarious encounters, like the trio's stroll through a lazy Outback town in flamboyant space-age drag, or Bernadette's deliciously unprintable riposte to a hostile woman in a bar.

The dialogue is minimal but sharp, the pace swift and the action sequences suitably loud and brutal.

As lightheartedly as the film plays, Morrison manages to say quite a few serious things about immigration and otherness.

An excellent low-budget horror film from director Sole, whose impressive grasp of filmmaking technique and eye for the grotesque keeps the viewer on edge throughout the movie.

Not quite as heart-wrenching as the original version, this remake is still pretty good and does benefit from being filmed in color.

Anyone looking for the comfort in a tense thriller ending in a satisfying restoration of order and psychological security will be bitterly disappointed, but Haneke isn't in the business of encouraging comforting illusions.

Though screenwriter Dianne Houston spent time observing the real-life Dulaine, her screenplay is a showcase for triumph-of-the-underdog sports-movie cliches and coming-of-age-through-adversity moral lessons.

Semi-Tough is periodically funny and frequently on target in its satire, and it boasts a strong performance from Reynolds.

Lavish, interesting, evocative but strained and self-conscious, The Cotton Club is all watchable curiosity.

Filmmaker Barry Hershey's impressionistic documentary about the casting process is the antidote to years of comic "audition montages," those guaranteed laugh-getting freak-show parades of no-talents mangling monologues and pulling nutty stunts in hopes of standing out from the crowd.

Director Peter Yates takes Tesich's basically wobbly story and makes much more out of it, driving the tale and the characters at a hectic pace and providing some truly unnerving moments.

The acting is consistently good, with Liotta, in particular, creating a masterful portrait of implacable, blue-eyed terror--a man equally at ease explaining his vocation to a class of schoolkids ("I'm here to be your friend") as staging a cold-blooded murder. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Chinese director Ann Hu follows-up her tepid 2000 debut "Shadow Magic" with another luscious historical drama that, thankfully, is a lot more interesting. The plot is no less melodramatic, but here melodramatics work along with the film's theme, not against it.

Presley's one really good musical, mainly because it features a female costar, Ann-Margret, who can match the coiffed one in the charisma stakes.

The three leads--particularly Pryor, in an essentially non-comedic role--are remarkable.

This is a professional machine of a movie that compresses huge amounts of information into its two and a half hours of screen time. But it's so weighed down by detail, it fails to generate any real suspense.

Delivers plenty of sharply funny moments.

This is a fast-paced movie with a bright and witty script and plenty of scary adventures which Durbin cleverly manages to survive.

Tarzan movies had been around for years when Road To Zanzibar, the second of the "Road" pictures, took the opportunity to satirize every jungle picture lensed up to that time. The script was funny, although much of the humor reportedly derived from on-set improvisations.

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.

The film's occasional jarring shifts in tone are a liability, but not a fatal one: It's a character-driven piece and the beautifully-crafted characters mask the narrative flaws.

A wonderfully creative, bizarre, delightfully terrifying horror film that never fails to surprise.

A gripping, old-fashioned WWII spy thriller.

An impressive first feature from Melvin Van Peebles has a black American soldier, Baird, stationed in France and visiting Paris on a three-day pass.

An entertaining thriller that stumbles occasionally on overlong dialogue sequences.

The pace of this movie is a bit slow, but Siegel's deliberate, sparse direction works to the benefit of a film where time is all his characters have. Surprisingly, there are few exciting set pieces and relatively little violence, yet Escape is relentlessly tense.

It should come as no surprise that Wes Craven's return to the horror series he created is the strongest of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels, but even his fans might not have expected the ironic depth and self-reflexivity he brings to this chapter.

Indie director Bezucha has held on to just enough individuality to breathe a little life into the cliches.

They're frank, funny, resilient and altogether captivating.

The battle of wits is peppered with funny lines and the suspense seldom flags.

It's a great place to visit, even if you wouldn't want to live there.

The gritty location shooting, the absence of a soundtrack and the casting of non-professionals in key roles help capture an all-important sense of place with almost documentary precision.

The same super-heated visual imagination that made Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" such a darkly thrilling delight is very much in evidence in his sequel to "Hellboy." It's a shame that it's at the service of such a blandly conventional story.

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.

Engrossing documentary about the life and times of publisher Barney Rosset, who spent much of his career advancing the cause of free expression, is a flawless match of style and subject.

Potentially the most controversial movie of 1995 and arguably a masterpiece, this edgy, downbeat film falls somewhere between social document and peep-show.

Luis Orjuela's sweet, slight comedy is about a middle-class Colombian family and the huge, cherry-red Chevrolet Bel-Air convertible that conveys them through several years worth of life's little dramas.

This time Stallone both wrote and directed the film, and though his handling of the actors and camera is less assured than John Avildsen's in Rocky, he keeps things moving at a good pace and delivers another charming performance himself.

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.

Moon is a small-scale film, but, thanks in no small part to Rockwell, its mix of thematic grandeur and human drama makes it a worthy successor to those 1970s science fiction films that inspired it.

The success of this picture (perhaps Moore's best in the Bond series) can be attributed to the marvelous direction of Glen, who had previously worked as a second-unit director on earlier Bond movies. Not surprisingly, the stunts are some of the best in the series.

Though at times the film relies a bit too much on slapstick humor, skilled director Robert Stevenson (working on his 19th Disney film) keeps the action from getting too out of hand

Kathy Bates, so memorably creepy in "Misery", delivers what may be 1995's most underrated performance in this implicitly feminist melodrama.

A delirious fever dream of pulp-western conventions by way of 1950s Hollywood melodrama, Thai filmmaker Wisit Sasanatieng surreal oddity unfolds in heavily manipulated colors so rich they seem ready to leap off the screen, punctuated by spasms of over-ripe dialogue, floridly dramatic songs and maniacal villainous laughter.

Style oozing from virtually every frame.

It's mostly very crude, often very funny and a little bit smarter than you might otherwise think.

A terrific debut film for both Van Heflin and for Fred Zinnemann in the director's chair.

There's nothing subtle about Pelegri and Harari's culture-clash romp, but it's sometimes frantically funny; that it's thoroughly forgettable is an issue only if you expect it to do more than poke easy fun at the thorny issues it raises.

In terms of bringing the book to life, Twilight is a complete success, so much so that most of the film's flaws work within the context of the story.

This is a doggedly eccentric film which some will reject out of hand. Others will find it profoundly moving and life affirming.

A better rock'n'roll parody than The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and one of director Brian De Palma's more original efforts, Phantom of the Paradise combines elements of The Phantom of the Opera and the Faust legend into a fairly entertaining, but only sporadically successful, horror-musical comedy.

One of the most genuinely haunting ghost stories in recent years, The Changeling is much eerier and more effective than the overrated and bombastic Poltergeist.

Edwards' direction is effective, although he relies too heavily on overhead and boom shots to show his action scenes.

The voices are all well suited to the characters, and the film is a delight for children as well as adults who appreciate good animation and brisk storytelling.

The person who can resist a formerly homeless senior citizen gradually restored to sufficient stability to the degree that he can take in his own "castaway cat" is hard-hearted indeed.

The film is a pleasant breeze that refreshes, mostly because it's a rare, thoughtful comedy clearly intended for grown-ups.

This is a funny, entertaining comedy that handles its touchy subject with great skill and sensitivity.

Starman is a wonderful film that combines science fiction, road movies, and romance into an engaging, very entertaining whole.

It aspires to greater moral ambiguity than the average crime thriller, and if it doesn't entirely succeed it nevertheless avoids the lazy moral bankruptcy of movies like "Lethal Weapon 4."

The Birdman of Alcatraz has great production values, moving if sometimes plodding, overly deliberate scripting, and efficient direction from black-and-white specialist Frankenheimer which strives mightily to overcome the essentially static nature of the storyline.

One of Scorsese's most commercial undertakings, THE COLOR OF MONEY relinquishes none of his unique style and vision, using a swooping, gliding camera and countless trick shots to maximum impact.

A generally gripping actioner, the film can also be read as a percipient satire of a society irreparably split along lines of class and race.