This minimalist meditation on loneliness and loss is so spare and drained of color that it seems always on the verge of fading into invisibility.

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.

A superb sci-fi flick, FORBIDDEN PLANET offers an unusually intelligent script, exciting direction by Wilcox and generally good acting from a decent if rather dull 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.

One of the best examples of Depression-era musicals.

Filled with moments of real poignancy and gentle epiphanies, the film is also marked by strong Christian undercurrents, but, like everything else in Salles's film, they're handled with extraordinary delicacy and never feel exclusionary.

Beauchamp reconstructs the actual crime with disturbing immediacy, and his treatment of how Till's death galvanized a country makes this short film a good way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a crime that still has the power to outrage.

Household Saints succeeds in raising issues and religious ideas like few films before it, making it a movie that's more compelling to discuss and mull over afterward than to sit through.

Though Bittner's slacker charm may not be to all tastes, the parrots are natural-born scene-stealers with more than enough charm to seduce the most dubious viewer.

The surprisingly tragic climax may make it rough going for kids too young to grasp the film's comforting message.

With British-American culture clash as its dominant theme, A Fish Called Wanda bristles with wit, enlivened by delightfully over-the-top ensemble acting.

Bielinsky's feature debut is a smart, enormously entertaining thriller whose preposterous conclusion in no way diminishes the fun of getting there.

As M, Dench knows she has a tiger by the tail and isn't fazed in the slightest. Reservations aside, the film marks the beginning of a new phase in James Bond's history, and it promises to be a gripping one.

Branagh's use of trendy extended tracking and steadicam shots is sometimes distracting, but overall this is a jouyous romp whose forced jollity is only occasionally wearing.

The script is shapeless and it all goes on far too long.

This is a landmark western, redefining what the genre was capable of doing, and is one of Daves's best works.

They don't make movies like they used to, and this Oscar-winning Italian-French co-production spends the better part of three hours proving it.

A rare, unexpected treat.

Rozsa's pounding score and a savage climax make Brute Force first rate all the way.

Darkly lyrical and imbued with a genuine sense of magic, ROAN INISH has the haunted quality of Irish folk music. It's family entertainment in the best sense of the term.

This is a film worth seeing, and LaBute is a filmmaker well worth watching.

Comprehensive and reverential.

Beautifully acted and emotionally devastating.

Provides an exquisite representation of the emotion and pride in this microcosm mining community. (Review of Original Release)

A Bronx Tale tries to cover too much ground; racial conflict, family drama, first love, the lure of the gangster life, and the joys and tribulation of coming of age in a kinder, gentler New York are all crammed into the slight story. It all feels too familiar to sustain the viewer's interest, but Palminteri's and De Niro's equally compelling performances help give it life.

Bugsy is an elegant, knowing, but ultimately heartless homage to the bygone glamour of Hollywood and Vegas.

Chilling Fosse vision of Weimar Berlin, stylishly directed and choreographed, featuring a show-stopping musical performance by Minnelli, Grey's unforgettable emcee and thoughtful acting from Michael York.

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.

It's an extremely violent and brutal film, featuring a fine performance by Newman. He's a blunt, practical man who favors action over words. Cilento is appealing as the worldly landlady, and Boone is chilling as the sadistic bad man who is ready to murder anyone standing in his way.

It's as chilling as Algernon Blackwood's elegantly unnerving "The Willows," played absolutely, unsettlingly straight.

Blood sprays, limbs fall, bodies are chopped in half--business as usual in this moderately diverting feudal Japanese revenge story, enlivened by peculiar plot twists and offbeat cinematic flourishes that greatly influenced Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

No film in recent memory has tapped into primal, visceral fear as HENRY does, with its vision of a depraved world that seems at once too horrible to exist and too realistic to be denied.

Perfect introduction to a remarkable career, and a moving memorial to a remarkable filmmaker.

An enthralling, suspenseful documentary about spelling bees.

Thrilling, heart-wrenching tale of the real-life incredible journey.

Although slow-moving and uneven, Freaks is one of Browning's more consistently fine films, a landmark still worth seeing.

Fascinating and brutally realistic, THE PUBLIC ENEMY, along with LITTLE CAESAR, BAD COMPANY, and SCARFACE, set the pattern for the gangster films of the 1930s.

what makes Caro's film a future classic is What so many movies geared toward younger audiences lack: a cool and very courageous 'tween heroine whom boys and girls of all ages can admire

Aside from the women themselves, the most remarkable thing about Gabbert's unexpectedly entertaining film is how effortlessly it dispels misconceptions about the elderly.

The film proceeds from an utterly fascinating notion. As with A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's admirable intent is to create a prescient, serious science-fiction movie.

Best of all, though the Simpson clan is 18 years older, they're not one bit wiser.

Spare and quietly heartbreaking, this French-Canadian feature uses a fine brush to depict a teenage girl in the midst of a quiet crisis.

The film is informative, often grisly and undeniably riveting.

Peralta includes amazing archival footage to demonstrate just how far surfing in general permeated American popular culture, but also narrows his focus to follow the evolution of the surfboard itself.

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia does have some sloppy photography, a few unintentionally humorous scenes, and an excess of Peckinpah's signature slow-motion violence, but it stands as one of Peckinpah's more daring films.

Wragby is a stately manor straight out of English House & Garden, rather than a sprawling, suffocating warren teetering on the edge of a coal pit, and sex is portrayed as a means of personal deliverance rather than a universal salvation, leaving Lawrence's admirers still waiting for the film that will finally do the novel justice.

Cheung, slinking around the corridors of her hotel in her sheath of shiny black latex to the dissonant chords of Sonic Youth, is an instant icon of everything.

A remote, Israeli desert town is the setting for this droll, endearing comedy about an accidental cultural exchange that very quietly says some very important things about contemporary Arab-Israeli relations.

Sarandon is terrific and Penn is in top form, but the film is an achingly earnest message movie with a curiously muddled message.

Despite this flaw, several dramatic lulls, and an aggressive determination to "sparkle," the film often makes for crackling good drama with plenty of leavening humor and magnificent performances by Hurt and newcomer Matlin.

Informative documentary.

Pro football fans may be disillusioned by this excellent, honest, and often brutal expose of the play-for-pay game.

An unusual piece of work that combines almost thriller-style suspense with an intelligent, neo-documentary approach to its harrowing subject.

Rather than adapt the novel per se, Winterbottom has adapted Sterne's hilarious attempts to make the mess of life fit the neat contours of the novel by making a movie about an attempt to make Sterne's chaotic and confusing novel fit the contours of a film.

That the film should have the look and feel of a classic teleplay by, say, Rod Serling, is probably no accident -- the style is one more reminder of just how regrettably short of Murrow's vision we've fallen.

What could easily have been a dry, didactic film is granted unusual power by Cantet's cast, all of whom seem to innately understand the personal nature of Cantet's subject.

The real emotional impact of the film lies in the candid interviews with Crowhurst's wife, Clare, and his son, Simon, both of whom are clearly still haunted by Crowhurst and his fateful voyage.

Fox is superb as the coldly impassionate killer, and Lonsdale is properly plodding yet magnificently analytical as the detective tracking him down. A taut, suspenseful, and fascinating political thriller.

Morose, shockingly violent yet strangely beautiful, Deliverance is a tale of what happens to civilized values when put to the test in a hostile wilderness environment.

Thankfully, Coraline is appropriately dark, and like its inspiration, is only a children's movie by the thinnest of margins.

Angelopoulos' leisurely pace and trademark long takes add up to a film guaranteed to please filmmakers nostalgic for the bygone glory days of European cinema.

What makes husband-and-wife directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' hilarious debut such a great family film isn't that it's suitable for the whole family (it's not), but that it speaks a simple truth about what it means to be part of one.

The result is a confused mess of mixed signals that substitutes a brutal climax for any kind of satisfactory resolution. Parents should be warned about the frequent gunfire and a grisly death by hanging.

DeVito films this tale with a fiendish gusto, yet with psychological realism and meticulous attention to an inexorable logic in the plotting, even as the Roses' war moves from the outlandish to the surreal.

Fails to capture the essence of Hesse's book, try though it may. It is more a series of filmed events than an interpretation of the story.

Sweet, melancholy comedy; it's ineffable charm lies entirely in the delivery.

The craftsmanship, acting, and history lesson all make it among the most satisfying films of Ron Howard's career.

Clever camera setups, Altman's patented overlapping dialogue, wonderful sight gags and situations, and universally fine ensemble performances combine to make this one the most enjoyable war-themed films ever.

This wonderful tale is told with a brisk, imaginative pace and the special effects--whereby Darby interacts with the tiny leprechauns--are marvelously executed, and sometimes frightening.

Grim, violent, and stylishly directed, Get Carter is an interesting film that brings some freshness to British crime cinema.

A remarkably assured comedy-drama of domestic life in Taiwan, Ang Lee's EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN explores how families use meals and other rituals to appease their hunger for love in stressful times.

This is a psychological study that rejects psychology, an erotic drama of surpassing coldness, and a story of amour fou in which the madness is calculated and the love frozen.

The funny lines fall flat and the relationships and conversations among adult characters are straight out of 1950s sitcoms. Now that's scary.

This wild and sometimes woolly fantasy is delivered in the customary chaotic Python style, resulting in an onslaught of witticisms and slapstick.

Flynn gives one of his most convincing and powerful performances, and Raoul Walsh's direction is nothing less than excellent, with the great action director maintaining a harrowing pace, providing a wealth of interesting military detail, and delivering one thrilling scene after another.

The penguins' matter-of-fact victory over some of the Earth's most punishing conditions is astonishing enough without the epic airs.

Nelson's film eschews sensationalism, and knowing how the story ends in no way diminishes its visceral impact.

Bighearted and wistful, but with no fresh spin or anything new to say.

Tom Gilroy's debut feature is a little obvious, but it's an excellent showcase for the criminally underused Ned Beatty.

The combination of Lee's discomforting subject matter and distancing style -- calculating artlessness punctuated by occasional flights of lyrical fantasy -- makes this slow-moving drama a challenge that doesn't seem entirely worth the effort.

Despite the Lear-like trappings and the talented young cast, which does its work with considerable grace, it has little momentum or punch.

Set in the New York milieus Mazursky knows so well, AN UNMARRIED WOMAN has some great insights and is superbly acted by all involved. The director populates the film with his usual, very real and attractive modern characters, but you may think it cops out in the end.

A tightly woven tapestry of extraordinary breadth, and director Fernando Meirelles's control over the material is extraordinary.

Red Rock West is the tale of a hapless drifter caught in a web of corruption in a remote western town. It offers suspense, wit, genuine surprises, and a trio of top-notch performances.

A fascinating if problematic early film from Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the most obsessive of the great auteurs of the 1960s, made just on the cusp of a run of cinematic masterpieces.

Although the film's small budget and tight shooting schedule (lensed in 15 days on Super 16mm) is betrayed by sloppy editing, unpolished sound and an occasional flat performance, particularly Johns in the lead role, She's Gotta Have It still bursts with the energy and technical command that have quickly established Lee as a major force in American cinema.

It's a great part for a great actor and Cheadle does a magnificent job turning this living legend back into flawed, flesh-and-blood reality.

It's never dull -- beautifully acted and handsomely shot in sepia-toned Cinemascope.

Eleventh-century Spain has been lavishly recreated by Mann and producer Samuel Bronston. The photography by Robert Krasker is spectacular, as are the battle scenes, filmed with the help of veteran stuntman Yakima Canutt as second-unit director.

PLANET OF THE APES is a success on many levels, with a witty, intelligent script by Rod Serling and a suitably hot-tempered, athletic performance from Charlton Heston. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter are highly effective as a sympathetic ape scientist and doctor, respectively, with John Chambers's superb latex makeup allowing them a full range of expressive facial gestures.

A virtuoso update. Gerard Depardieu's Cyrano is nothing short of magnificent.

From the ravishing landscape photography to the exquisite costume design, the entire film is a stunning visual experience; rarely since Hollywood's golden age has the genre been so well served.

Each frame is exquisitely framed, the acting is superb -- Abedini deserves to be a star -- and the impermanence of the lives of displaced Afghans is hauntingly expressed.

One of the sharpest and emotionally resonant romantic comedies in what seems like years.

Lopsided comedy turned tearjerker, saved by excellent performances.

The original script, written by TV veteran Belson, supplies plenty of laughs, but the picture has so many characters we never get to truly know any of them, and the result, while often hilarious, is ultimately skin-deep, just as the beauty contestants are.

GRAND HOTEL remains a classic of its kind.

The film is partly inspired by SHANE, accentuating the close relationship of hero-worshiping youngster to virtuous gunfighter, and its exterior shooting has the look of a John Ford work, but HONDO stands tall on its own.