Although the search for enlightenment may not have much in the way of high-concept appeal, the film should satisfy adventurous moviegoers as well as the large number of adults already intrigued by eastern religions. Children with open minds will also find much pleasure in the characters of the children and the kindly old monk.

Roos' sly, throwaway insights into the ways people deceive and undermine themselves are both ruefully funny and painfully on the mark.

The funniest of all the Cheech and Chong movies, UP IN SMOKE provides a feast of gags for the sympathetically minded.

This beautiful but notoriously disappointing film is one of the most overblown epic Westerns of any decade.

The city looks breathtakingly lovely, the movie's Brazilian characters are charming and filled with joie de vivre, and using excerpts would take care of the fact that the pacing's a bit sluggish for such fluffy material.

Girard and his collaborators are so focused on the stunning tableaux that all other considerations fall by the wayside, leaving their visual achievements -- miraculous on such a small budget -- mired in the elaborate but maladroit storytelling.

Spare, rough around the edges and unsentimentally melancholy.

Director Gary Winick serves up enough giddy fun that it's easy to turn a blind eye to the film's skewed sense of time and minor anachronisms.

The charismatic Mac has stepped into leading man roles with surprising ease, but Bassett -- a fine actress in all respects -- is clearly struggling with the film's broad comedy.

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.

Of course, most of the male-female situations Terry finds herself in are played for laughs, and the film eventually sinks into an all too typical conclusion, but the observations regarding the nature of sexuality are interesting and well handled.

This could have been a wonderful film, but the makers fell in love with the hardware and forgot the humanity. BRAINSTORM is chockablock with special effects that sometimes obstruct rather than enhance the story.

A sharp, superbly acted character-driven comedic drama.

Neil Armfield's film hits hard because it sensitively shows how life on drugs can never be about anything else, and how the real horror of addiction is not what users do to themselves, but what they do to each other out of loneliness and despair.

An effective, tightly constructed thriller that packs an emotional punch in the end, when even its politics are compelling.

Part The Great Escape, part standard sports movie, Huston's Victory limps along until hitting full stride with a brilliantly staged soccer sequence that provides the film's climax.

Inoffensive and designed to cater to some sort of middle-of-the-road constituency (it's not entirely clear who wants period gangster Westerns to be jolly instead of dark), this film is a huge leap forward for director and cowriter Richard Linklater, and he tackles the genre conventions and period set pieces with eminent grace.

A winding story with no real direction.

Delivers plenty of sharply funny moments.

To see the two of them on screen together, even past their primes, is a delight.

That director and co-writer Gurinder Chadha transforms this sitcom material into a lively and charming film about the melting pot at full boil probably owes something to the fact that her own multicultural bona fides are firmly in order.

There's so much less to the film than the novel: Nicholas Meyer's screenplay fails to capture the intricate subtleties of its subject and replaces Roth's moral scope with a moralizing tone.

Rocky III crawls along without dramatic impetus, failing to convey the big emotions and missing the humor of the first two films.

It's a handsome production, and a pleasure to watch. With a shadowy palette and a set design reminiscent of Edward Hopper's nocturnes, a soundtrack hearkening back to the sounds of vintage rock 'n' roll, and a cast of characters straight out of a James M. Cain novel.

Rios is the glue that holds Johannesson's neither-fish-nor-fowl film together.

The final result is a bittersweet product closer to honey than treacle.

Endearing without being especially engaging.

Christine just boils down to another average adaptation of one of the increasingly weak Stephen King novels that hit Hollywood like a bad rash in 1983.