Surprisingly good follow-up to the original tough crime drama.

James Ivory's direction is meandering in the best sense: Rarely obvious or predictable, he quietly builds a complex portrait of a intimate family.

The usual fine performances from Bergman's regulars combined with a script that is not as ponderous as much of the director's other works earned THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1961 and an Oscar nomination in 1962 for Best Screenplay.

Singleton gets points for exposing the hypocrisy of "politically correct" institutions, but stilted dialogue and cardboard characterizations undermine the message.

A star vehicle for rapper Ice Cube (who also cowrote and coproduced), Friday is a lighthearted, comedic presentation of the realities chronicled in dramas like "Boyz N the Hood."

Sturges's direction, given the confining nature of the settings, is masterful, and the cinematography headed by Howe and pieced together by many others is sometimes stunning.

This sequel may be a bit thin on plot, but who cares when Jackie Chan is at his daredevil best?

The story eventually resolves itself a little too neatly, but it never devolves into a freak show or a fable, thanks in large part to Farmiga and Stahl's deft, quirky performances.

Neither a buddy-buddy action-comedy nor a pyrotechnical showcase of explosions and stunts, NEXT OF KIN--an intelligently made and moodily atmospheric action melodrama--provides solid, satisfying entertainment while demonstrating just how effective a fully realized genre film can be.

An enjoyably ironic rethink of a beloved fairy tale.

Elegant and stylish in the best Agatha Christie tradition--a thoroughly entertaining if poky whodunit.

Diablo and director Jason Reitman never undercut Juno, whom Page brings to a fully rounded life (no pun intended) that verges on the frightening: Her vulnerable center doesn't belie her formidable exterior -- it just makes her more than a sitcom-patter machine.

On a narrative level, Troell seems to occasionally take on more than he can handle; from time to time he leans toward an ensemble approach, with multiple, intersecting stories, but the film lacks the length to sustain this, so we are left with fragments of substories that never fully blossom.

Kenan and Kel share a wonderful comic chemistry that has a lot in common with the anarchic goofiness of Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis, leavened with a good deal more mutual affection.

All dressed up with no script to go, but a feverish nerve jangler nonetheless.

Indecent Proposal is as relentlessly entertaining as it is silly--so shamelessly over the top that you watch in a mixture of horror and delight as the drama unfolds toward a climax that is truly mind-boggling.

The humor is spotty but when it works, it is hysterical. Raves go to Terry-Thomas for producing some riotous comic moments.

A feel-good movie for anyone who's ever wanted to see yuppies burned, blown up, or dropped from the sky.

Canet and Lefevre pruned subplots and fixed the novel's ending -- it's now merely preposterous rather than patently absurd – but it's the cast that makes the genre clichés feel vivid and even fresh.

This sequel to the terrific The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, is great fun--with a minimum of plot and a maximum of wonderful Ray Harryhausen special effects.

A loving, dramatic comedy that resembles early Frank Capra in its patriotism and sentiment, this movie just misses on several levels but has enough humor to make you smile and enough corn to warm anyone's heart.

Colorful Cajun noir, spicy, romantic, efficient.

Ejiofor's polished, energetic performance -- including several song-and-dance numbers -- enlivens what's basically comfort food in movie form, but sometimes comfort food is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Given the controversy, which strongly suggested that the filmmakers had it in for President Bush, the film's biggest shocker may be how kind Range and coscreenwriter Simon Finch are to him.

It may not be by-the-book history -- a relative term in any event, when discussing the ancients whose worldview embraced men, gods and monsters -- but what a spectacle!

Lafosse's razor sharp dissection of relationships strained to the breaking point is hypnotic in a road-accident kind of way.

The movie's refusal to treat young girls like silly tramps-in-training is almost radical: It's just good, clean fun and actually offers children of a certain age a role model even adults can feel good about.

This hard-hitting crime film, based upon the notorious career of one-time New York City vice lord Charles "Lucky" Luciano, was a tour de force for Davis who had just battled Warner Bros. to a standstill in a contract dispute.

A sprawling, messy, frustrating and impassioned examination of the psychological fallout from America's obsession with a highly artificial and all-but unattainable standard of beauty.

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is an outrageously entertaining cult classic, and probably one of the most bizarre movies ever produced by a major Hollywood studio.

Imbued with great atmosphere by director Jack Arnold, the film is genuinely frightening, but also elicits a certain amount of pathos for the creature, reminiscent of that that goes out to the unfortunate King Kong.

Featuring some strong performances from a cast that includes Dabney Coleman and Ally Sheedy, convincing re-creations of defense technology, and nicely modulated tension, WARGAMES is a generally effective message film.

A down–under fable with a sweet country-music twang.

The supporting cast is excellent, especially Scott Wilson as an astronaut who flipped out on the launching pad and aborted his mission. Offbeat, visionary, and challenging.

Mitevska telescopes centuries of conflict between nations into an intimate story of siblings whose hopes for the future are being slowly poisoned by the sins of the past.

A touch labored but lovable.

THE IDOLMAKER takes itself too seriously, but is nonetheless one of the best and most energetic film treatments of the early days of rock 'n' roll and a fine depiction of how performers are groomed for stardom (far superior to THE ROSE).

A lot fresher and bit more sophisticated than the ordinary run of maudlin chick flicks and crude gross-out sex farces that now pass for romantic comedies.

Donen's direction here is a trifle trendy and frantic, with sometimes jarring results.

An imaginatively constructed soap-opera with a high-powered cast.

Dramatically simple but emotionally complex.

By the film's downbeat climax, Cerda's dread of death and uncertainty about digging too deeply into what's better left buried have become palpable, and The Abandoned lingers beneath the skin as any decent horror movie should.

While Lee fails to impose sufficient structure on his material, expertly drawn performances help vividly to evoke the family and street life of an era untroubled by crack or drive-by shootings.

"Masala" refers to a mix of varied spices, and one of the strengths of MISSISSIPPI MASALA is its own collection of colorful characters.

Ambitious, deeply flawed and studded with sequences that achieve pure, majestic greatness.

Efron's remarkable performance as a wild child who seems to truly exist somewhere betwixt and between is riveting.

Screenwriter Richard Matheson did a fine job of adapting Poe's rather limited (for films) short story by saving the dungeon sequences for the climax and then creating a rather interesting plot line to lead up to it. One of Corman's and AIP's best.

It's easy to envision the big-budget remake, but hard to imagine a mainstream American production capturing the original's sour, sweaty immediacy.

A finely crafted and beautifully acted adaptation of John Le Carre's glasnost-era spy thriller that never quite gets as gripping as it should.

Bad Boys is disturbing, sometimes annoying, often painful, and never boring. Writer Richard Dilello and director Richard Rosenthal have taken a difficult subject and infused it with interesting people, some wit, and a lot of careful thought.

Singaporean writer-director Eric Khoo's third feature is a beautiful, contemplative study of love -- unrequited, unfulfilled and reborn.

Philadelphia fails to create complex characters or finely nuanced drama, but it succeeds in its real goal; the education of an audience whose thinking about AIDS and gay life has been shaped by notions of perversion and divine retribution.

Although the story makes for a movie that is often slow going, it is also a beautiful and evocative film fueled by an excellent performance from Davis and Peggy Ashcroft.

One of the best baseball movies ever.

Equal parts "Oliver Twist" and "Pinocchio," Russian director Andrei Kravchuk's fictional hearttugger exposes a troubling real-life practice in contemporary Russia: the buying and selling of abandoned children to rich foreign couples.

One of the more successful attempts to bring Hemingway material to the screen, this story of a writer who has lost his intellectual and emotional bearings after enjoying early commercial success works splendidly under King's sure directorial hand, and is enacted with power and conviction by Peck.

Reichardt is such a canny filmmaker that one could almost believe that she intentionally leaves Wendy underwritten and a bit of a cipher, because Wendy is far more effective as a bold-faced symbol of the downtrodden than as a fully realized human character.

Gary Cooper enacts the title role with quiet magnificence in this superb adventure tale loaded with drama, action, and mystery.

The mystery is marvelous.

A wonderfully funny and creative film with a cornucopia of comical characters in absurd situations. These loony elements combine to offer some perceptive observations about human joy, fear, and passion for food.

Aside from some unnecessarily crude stereotypes, Eddie Murphy's least-painful comedy in years has a certain peculiar charm.

Although occasionally preachy, it is a fascinating horror tale that is as engrossing as it is horrifying.

For a movie rooted in reality, Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo's taut psychological drama is in desperate danger of drowning in metaphor.

Raised in Mumbai, classically trained actor-turned-writer-director Khanna addresses the volatile issue of women's rights within Islamic households, and if his sensationalistic debut feature makes its point with a heavy hand, it's also starkly effective.

Razvi, once a pushcart vendor himself, is particularly good; he brings a visceral poignancy to a character who comes to represent every desperate soul who ever tried to make it in the land of plenty.

Raimi and company deftly balance spectacle and character-based drama, occasionally tweaking the comic-book mythology but always respecting creator Stan Lee's idea that costumed crime-fighter Peter Parker's life as Spider-Man isn't all derring-do and public accolades.

A surprisingly tight, clever, twisty heist tale.

The result is a rich and touching exploration of the vagaries of fortune, literary reputation and, above all, friendship that works on several levels at once. The soundtrack includes songs by Joy Division, New Order and Le Tigre.

Claustrophobic, jittery at times, and electric in pace, Quarantine is a stripped-down bloody thrill ride that -- while certainly not catering to everyone's tastes -- should satisfy gore-hounds looking to step up their theatrical horror cuisine beyond the usual creepy little kid rehashes.

Tony Gilroy deserves the lion's share of credit for making such a delightful movie. His writing and direction find the perfect balance of comedy, sexiness, and tension.

The writers get the mix just about right, and first-time Bond director Martin Campbell moves things along fairly briskly.

A very frightening adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about a small English village that becomes the victim of unfriendly aliens.

The performances range from adequate (Balkin's) to exquisite (MacLaine's), and the movie broke new ground for 1961. These days the story wouldn't be all that controversial, but in 1934, when the play was first presented, it dealt with a different set of mores.

A treat for Cronenberg fans, though this could hardly be called a gripping, or emotionally involving, story; you're more likely to need a can of bug spray than a hanky.

The filmmaking is a bit crude at times but it packs an emotional wallop.

What divides opinion is the film's tone: Are those naive, portentous pronouncements about media, voyeurism and the numbing, pornographic allure of atrocity footage a sly reflection of the YouTube generation's boundary-free narcissism and callow youth, or evidence that Romero – never one to underplay a metaphor – has become a hectoring, tin-eared fogey?

Clad in dull khakis and a polo shirt, the always reliable Kinnear is his (Brosnon's) perfect foil, while Davis' neat turn as a suburban wife with a penchant for guns and the men who use them turns what might have been a cliched supporting role into something worth watching.

This film begins at mach one and gets somewhere near the speed of light by the time it finishes.

Expertly directed by veteran British helmsman Young, Wait Until Dark is an exciting, original chiller.

Markowitz 's low key coming of age/coming out story isn't particularly original, but features subtle performances and a vivid sense of place.

Hypnotic, culturally pertinent drama.

In the end, GERONIMO is a welcome contribution to a revitalized genre, filled with interesting representations of both the Apache and the pursuing army.

Actors Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss provide the frenzied fun that highlights What About Bob? a wacky slapstick comedy.

This has become a minor cult classic and is one of Mitchum's more interesting (and bizzare) efforts.

While it's not a top-drawer romantic comedy, this is certainly a worthy sequel to Three Men and a Baby.

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 only silent film to win an Oscar for Best Picture of the year, WINGS was a spectacular tribute to WWI combat pilots.

An unnerving film that chips away at the sensibilities, effectively shot in a semidocumentary style, but a movie that refuses to pander to the perverse.

Exchanging Buddhist mantras like diet tips, they thoughtlessly destroy themselves after destroying each other.

A quietly harrowing chronicle of addiction and fragile recovery anchored by Vera Farmiga's intense performance.

Though writer-director Peter Duncan can hardly help but touch on volatile political issues, he seems oddly without a political point of view.

Cloak benefits from tight direction and the good humor of the Holland script. The addition of the dual role for Coleman (who's excellent in both) serves to highlight the relationship between father and son, adding another dimension to the yarn and almost relegating the spy plot from the core element of the story to mere diversion.

Although the film could have been preachy, Ritchie handles the story and theme with deftness.

Alternately grim, playful, and gripping, PACIFIC HEIGHTS breathes new life into what was becoming a moribund genre.

As with Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, Jarmusch focuses his offbeat sensibility on urban iconoclasts, small-town oddballs, and bewildered strangers. Not surprisingly, Mystery Train will work best for those who share Jarmusch's fondness for America's pop culture junkyard; he's a true original, but Jarmusch's originality lies in a quirky viewpoint that may leave some audience members cold.

The story isn't particularly believable, the revelations not fresh or profound, but the film succeeds anyway because of its strong lead performances. A true family picture in the most entertaining sense, VICE VERSA provides laughs for both kids and adults.

This enchanting adventure story about a pair of poor Irish lads and their possibly magical horse is a vivid reminder that there is more to kid film culture than animated toys, chop-socky amphibians, and Macauley Culkin vehicles.

Banned for many years in director/cowriter Alfonso Cuaron's native Mexico, his debut feature is a bawdy comedy that pivots on the comeuppance of a serial philanderer.