A virtuoso experiment in animation that combines traditional anime aesthetics style with a variety of Western animation styles.

Carpenter's first directorial effort, an intermittently hilarious satire on 2001--A SPACE ODYSSEY. Carpenter's spaceship is piloted by four goofy astronauts who live like slobs and are bored out of their skulls by their long, uneventful mission.

Seven segments make up this melange--some of them work; some of them are dreadful. It was Allen's sixth screenplay, his third directorial assignment, and one of his weakest efforts.

Woo's career, LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY gives fans of Woo's later work (A BETTER TOMORROW, THE KILLER, BROKEN ARROW, FACE/OFF) the chance to see him develop his expertise at staging action and telling stories of friendship, loyalty, and betrayal among a close-knit group of men.

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?

White Hunter is an ambitious and intriguing project that never amounts to anything more than the sum of its parts--a trait shared by many of Eastwood's other major project as an independent filmmaker, Bird.

Location shooting gives this intermittently powerful film a semidocumentary feel.

It takes place in an artificial world constructed largely from the mythology of other movies, and, though it's both seamless and stylish, some find it a little too self-conscious for its own good.

Like the hardscrabble lives of this isolated wasteland, it's equal parts unforgiving white-heat aridity and golden late-afternoon glow.

A sad blot on an impressive career.

Stuart and Margolo are genuine marvels of computer generated special effects, each feather, whisker and strand of fur beautifully rendered. But they're bland and rather boring characters, dumbed down for kids.

While not particularly dramatically compelling, the film is carefully constructed and exposes both the economic and sexual exploitation of illegal workers.

This ultra-stylish film is far more interested in exploring its own central image -- the camera -- than the forensic minutia of the mystery.

Filmed with great visual style, the film looks terrific but makes almost no sense save for its "insider" references to such films noir as Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville and Fritz Lang's M.

However unlikely the twists and turns in this mystery, Dead Again moves briskly forward, never weighed down by any sense of seriousness.

This is the rare Holocaust documentary that ends on an optimistic note, and Comforty's film might even help reinforce one's faith in humankind.

Zanuck and Dexter employ an elliptical narrative style, stringing together vaguely connected scenes that nervously cut away before their full, depressing implications can sink in. The result is a lack of any meaningful character development or narrative drive.

Unlike Woody Allen's New York City, which becomes a staging area for character angst and transformation, Martin's L.A. stifles the characters.

Once upon a time there was a feisty young woman who didn't sit around twiddling her pretty thumbs and singing "Someday My Prince Will Come." That's the revisionist spin on Cinderella, and it twirls very nicely.

A very expensive caper picture that drowns in its own artiness, using multi-images, cinematic tricks, and other pretentious film gimmicks--all of which detract from the story.

The village is filled with nay-sayers and depressing townsfolk, but Pollyanna soon changes matters by always managing to find something good in every situation, seeing the bright side of even the blackest occurrences.

The gadgets are up to the usual Bond standards, but fancy effects do not a movie make, and 007 is less satisfying floating around in space than when his feet are more or less firmly planted on the ground.

The movie races all over the place in a hurry to illuminate the "little people" who live in quiet desperation. It's a bit too noisy for that, and yet there is enough about it to warrant attention.

All the right intentions but never overcomes the essential problem of showing what's going on inside people's heads.

An enjoyable mix of fine animation, catchy songs, and outstanding voice characterizations.

Director Polanski, a master of movie atmospherics (e.g., Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby), here creates a hauntingly foreign, forbiddingly stylish Paris that seems to move to the oneiric disco stylings of Grace Jones. Harrison Ford, outstanding as an American innocent abroad, moves persuasively from complacency to confusion, rage, and paranoid desperation in a performance comparable to James Stewart's best work for Hitchcock.

Astaire and Rogers persistently upstage the romantic leads, Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott, and they simply fly, largely unburdened by the plot.

Unlike so many other recent youth-oriented independent efforts, it takes on difficult, even impossible, issues with genuinely astonishing results.

Looks very much like a documentary: It's grainy and raw, and Seidl's actors -- a mix of actors and non-professionals -- are often unglamorously posed under what appears to be natural light.

Occasionally marred by purple narration; it's also a mite sloppy in terms of time-passage and geography. Yet its mythic characters feel like genuine, hurting human beings.

The sci-fi wonders, including an army of shuddering robo-soldiers and one-man, steam-powered bombers with delicate wood-and-linen wings, are truly marvelous and go a long way toward making up for the film's erratic pacing.

An ambitious drama about gang warfare and the culture of violence, American Me is nothing if not earnest. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean it's a particularly successful film; for every bluntly powerful moment, there's another that's crude and obvious, sometimes excruciatingly so.

Expertly executed action flick that starts out fast and winds up faster. We've seen it all before, but the execution here supersedes the concept.

While there's not much baseball played here, this is an amiable film, marked by the enjoyable cast and some lively, if not memorable, music.

Eastwood is perfection as the New Jersey shoe clerk who, like Miniver Cheevey, dreamed a nostalgic dream and took action to realize it. The actor-director could have gone over the top by satirizing the very character he played so well in spaghetti westerns; instead he gives a sincere, realistic performance that silenced detractors who thought he could only play violent loners.

The cast is charming, the sets intentionally stagy, and the musical performances fine.

Q&A is a pungent, graphic drama sabotaged by a stupid romantic sub-plot, misjudged casting and a truly abysmal soundtrack.

A tightly scripted cautionary tale about what happens when the lights go down in Southern California, hiding behind a generic action-thriller title.

A hard-hitting action thriller.

Likably low-key, character-driven dramatic comedy.

Ken Russell applies his rococo outpourings to Pete Townshend's rock opera and botches not only the visuals but the fine score.

Colors has a tentative, ambivalent feel to it--as if Hopper merely considered himself a hired gun who should avoid imposing too personal a vision on the material.

Spooky and character-driven, this stylish ghost story owes a great deal to contemporary Japanese ghost movies in general and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" (1999) in particular but weaves a creepy spell all its own.

Lightweight, thoroughly charming fluff.

Sleek, stylish and crammed with girl-power action.

Trapero again proves himself a master of mood, evoking the gritty, workaday world of contemporary Argentina that helped establish him as one of the most important young directors of the new Argentine cinema.

The film's prestige is a doozy, both dazzling and preposterous, but if you're watching closely -- as Cutter advises in the film's first few minutes -- it's flawlessly set up.

A bleak, often repugnant rumination on the harsh realities of urban life, Driller Killer will offend tender sensibilities. But Ferrara is already a distinctive and conscientious talent behind the camera, unmistakably concerned with more than gore-filled exploitation.

Writer-director Daniel Burman's dryly humorous, poker-faced comedic style is once again in full play in this funny and touching film about a young Argentine man and his aging father, both of whom happen to be lawyers.

PARENTS concentrates heavily on Michael's Freudian pathology; however, in its emphasis on psychological themes, the film loses sight of its story and becomes a confused collection of isolated vignettes. In adopting the boy's single-minded perspective, it prevents its characters from developing, so that Quaid hovers and glowers, Hurt giggles and flirts, and Madorsky lurks in dark recesses without variation from beginning to end.

This melancholy mediation on aging and desire hangs on an exquisite performance from Penelope Cruz.

The story is compelling enough that even glib phrases like "healing through hip-hop" can't drag it down.

Maggie Gyllenhaal cements her reputation as a gifted, if somewhat aloof, actress in Laurie Collyer's sad character piece.

It's all about the amazing look, cobbled together from an astonishingly evocative range of sources: "Nosferatu" and "Mad Love," "Brazil" and "Metropolis," a haunted mosaic of bits and pieces of movie memories.

Thank goodness for Pfeiffer's Lamia, a harridan who's lived long enough to get the face she deserves and will do anything to hide it. She's a wicked delight.

This sleek and cleverly assembled film is a brutally honest portrait of an obsessive personality, a woman whose mania for control over her weight and the world around her fed her demons and fueled her art.

Shot in grainy black and white, the film features tons of entertaining footage of the band in the studio as well as an enlightening commentary from music critics Greg Kot and David Frick.

Overall this is an assured piece of genre filmmaking that delivers the goods so stylishly it hardly matters that they aren't fresh.

This is a brave, groundbreaking film.

The film's ensemble portrait of women caught between nostalgia for the tough and free-spirited babes they were (however much that freedom may have been illusory) and uncertainty about what their futures hold is almost painfully on target.

Those who appreciate Ferrell's sense of humor will be utterly entertained by his efforts to kick it into high gear.

Solomonoff cuts back and forth between 1984 and 1976, gradually revealing the truth of what happened, but the mystery is less important than the complex relationship between Natalia and Elena, which was sorely tested by events beyond their control.

Against all odds, you'll leave this remarkable film caring quite a bit for the old coot -- surely a sign of a very good documentary.

The humor here is forced, incoherent, and sophomoric, made worse by Thomas Chong's amateurish direction.

This simplified Romeo and Juliet tale was written and performed with such heart and care that it is impossible to dislike. The cast is wonderful, headed by the engaging couple of Cage and Foreman and wittily directed by Coolidge.

Beautifully shot and subtly rendered, but too slowly told for its ambiguities to really be effective.

While Rolling Thunder suffers from Schrader's predictable obsessions with masculine ritual and gunplay, Devane and Jones enhance the material with their nuanced, sensitive portrayals of men who have lost their souls in another land.

Davis has a chance to let it all hang out in the two roles and she does.

The film is pleasantly humorous, though the jokes are aimed at those interested in history.

Played for comedy, the film never quite works, and Curtis can't quite handle his role.

Fun at times, but somewhat long.

The second pairing of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow is a steamy drama of infidelity, set against an exotic background and peppered with dialog and situations that pushed the boundaries of Hollywood self-censorship as far as they would go.

Where this film towers above the first one is in the music, written by Disney stalwarts Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman.

Makoto's misadventures are specifically geared to the concerns and perspectives of teenagers, while avoiding the luridness of similarly themed films like THE BUTTERLFY EFFECT, and the resolution refreshingly bittersweet.

Though the violence in this film never becomes physical, the psychic wounds these people inflict on one another cut so deeply you wish it would. It's a grueling experience.

It hurts to see this story reach for a tidy ending... STRANGE DAYS hurtles down the track for two hours, frantically trying to warn us en route to the Big Switchback, only to pull up in a hiss of smoke and hot air.

The kids are real and their stories enthralling: When it comes to drama, there's nothing quite like high school.

Al Pacino gives an urgent, bravura performance as the title character.

A taut, literate tale of civilized men pitted against implacable nature, encumbered by a meaningless and not especially enticing title.

Once again employing his famous muppets, Jim Henson creates a brilliantly detailed universe with this intriguing fairy-tale adventure.

Ask yourself this: Did the title make you laugh? If so, you're probably the target audience.

Fueled by a brilliant performance from Bogosian, TALK RADIO is an intense experience that will leave most audiences feeling drained.

Directed by Hollywood's slickest hack, Tony Scott ("Top Gun"), with a script doctored by Quentin Tarantino--you won't need sonar to spot his contributions.

It's a shame to see such dedicated performers flay their psyches in the service of such fundamentally shallow material.

It addresses issues of stultifying routine and the small crises of middle-aged life, and deserves credit for not obscuring the simple story with a flurry of smoke and mirrors.

Compared with most of what passes for scary movies these days, this is golden: It's not stupid, it's not wussy and it pulls off a couple of pretty nasty jolts.

Visually striking and viscerally repellent, director Denis Villeneuve's Quebecois oddity offers a nightmarish vision of one woman's unraveling, the likes of which haven't been seen since Roman Polanski pushed Catherine Deneuve off the deep end in "Repulsion" (1965).

Like his intrepid hero, theater-turned-film director Ekachai Uekrongtham never misses an opportunity to brighten an otherwise ordinary palette with just a bit more color.

By today's standards, THE JAZZ SINGER is mawkish, crudely filmed, and full of schmaltz. Yet it remains fascinating in its historical value, not only for its technical innovation, but because director Alan Crosland took his cameras on location into New York's Jewish ghetto around Hester and Orchard streets and then along the Great White Way of Broadway, showing the colorful, divergent, and now vanished ways of immigrant and show business life.

Outrageous fun, this film is New Wave chic, satire, self-parody, science fiction, and certainly one of the more accessible independent features ever made.

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

Strikes a carefully calibrated balance between the film's darkly malicious sense of humor and its pastel sets and costumes.

A flawed but nevertheless endearing father-son road trip with a distinctive twist.

By the end, it should be perfectly clear just why Cho is so loved by so many different types of people. Raunchy though her material is, it embraces all comers, regardless of gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity. And it's never been sharper — or funnier — than it is here.

A cut above the preposterous action spectacles that now pass for espionage films.

Never boring, often excruciating and occasionally transcendent.

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.

SIDEWALK STORIES has more heart than art, but its heart is large, and Lane proves himself an ambitious, impassioned filmmaker.