Garofalo and Thurman breathe some eccentric life into the cliches, and charming Chaplin is a walking warning to Hugh Grant, almost adorable enough to warrant all the trouble.

Straight Time is a powerful film that shows a criminal as he is. The film has no tired explanations for Hoffman's behavior, no fingers are pointed, no apologies or excuses are offered.

It's especially nice that all the songs on the soundtrack are heard in their entirety, even if the accompanying video footage is sometimes drawn from performances of different vintage.

Gripping adventure tale.

Far from proving the reality of the Horatio Alger myth it peddles, Chris Gardner's story is worth celebrating precisely because he managed to beat the odds stacked so high against him. Steve Conrad's screenplay is also curiously but insistently silent on the subject of race.

Brimming with ideas, aphorisms, diatribes, film clips and even bits of a story, the film's a gorgeous muddle that somehow manages to leave one both baffled and deeply satisfied.

Eight magnificent sled dogs must fend for themselves amid Antarctica's frozen wastes in this top-notch survival adventure that will reduce the coldest heart to a puddle of warm slush.

Thompson's stories are familiar, but she weaves them together with such assurance and good humor that they're equally soothing and thoroughly enjoyable.

It's an overblown campfire tale that doesn't know when to stop.

Given his way with witty banter, Stoppard's obvious, even leaden, dialogue is especially disappointing; director Michael Apted's handling of the story's frequent flashbacks is equally infelicitous.

With its artfully artless hand-held cinematography, haphazard focus, non-diegetic dialogue and what sounds like a largely improvised script, Thraves's film is all about style, but contains a surprising amount of substance.

A fascinating allegory of life in Iranian Kurdistan, a remote borderland still deeply scarred by years of war with Iraq.

Imagine "The Full Monty" without any of the feel-good uplift, and you'd be pretty close to capturing what this bitter -- and often bitterly funny -- film from Spain is all about.

Buried deep inside this ponderous, repetitive psychological thriller is a fantastic half-hour "Twilight Zone" episode.

Despite Schnack's half-hearted attempt to divide the film into chapters, his film is too unstructured to hold the interest of non-fans who might have appreciated a somewhat less hagiographic approach.

The outlandish premise and greasy title may be a little hard to swallow, but Danny Leiner's proudly moronic film embraces its boneheadedness so cheerfully that its lowbrow charms are nearly irresistible.

The melancholy joke - if you can call it that - is that the pall of global mediocrity has erased national differences and turned women like Tamiko and Amanda into ghosts drifting through their own lives.

The morbid theme notwithstanding, this is by no means a downbeat film, and it ends with the rather hopeful thought that for every disaster there's also a chance for survival.

Though not particularly bloody, The Hills Have Eyes is an extremely intense and disturbing film. As is the case with Sam Peckinpah's classic, Straw Dogs, it becomes oddly and distressingly exhilarating to watch the nice family become increasingly savage in their efforts to survive.

This film, Hitchcock's first contribution to wartime American propaganda, is as polished and suspenseful as any the great director would make.

This unlikely love story never really pays off, largely due to Lawrence Kasdan's contrived script. To their credit, a very subdued Belushi and an appealing Brown do their best to add a patina of light charm to this minor effort, and largely they succeed.

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

Nothing much happens on the surface, but worlds of hope, hurt and determination lie right behind the characters' eyes, waiting to be discovered.

This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel features plenty of not-too-menacing pirates, and exactly the sort of schtick one expects from the Muppets. It will provide an entertaining diversion for children and adults.

The film bogs down, however, because of De Palma's penchant for technically slick but overblown action scenes that call attention to themselves as virtuoso set pieces instead of advancing the narrative.

All in all a fascinating film with an outstanding musical score consisting of jukebox hits from the period.

The third teaming of Redford and Fonda (after "The Chase" and "Barefoot in the Park"), HORSEMAN falls far short of what it might have been, starting out smart but getting sloppier and more sentimental as it goes along.

French director Helene Angel's dark but deftly handled fable about familial violence has a terrifying, fairy-tale atmosphere that's in perfect keeping with its unique point of view.