This kind of gloomy razzle-dazzle isn't everyone's cup of mind-altering tea, but strong performances make it worth the effort to keep the time-tripping shenanigans straight until the surprisingly satisfying payoff.

A good premise spins out of control in the hectic final hour.

While the story is thin, Clouzot uses his immense skills to raise the picture above the standard for the genre.

Steel Magnolias is an old-fashioned "klatsch" film, a prefeminist relic in which a group of women eschew the public world of men in favor of the community of the coffee table. Their world is shown as inferior to men's in terms of power but superior to it in emotion and insight into the things that "really matter."

Beneath the heavy accents, wild gesticulating, slaps to the head and garish flocked wallpaper, there's an awful lot of heart.

The scene transitions are sometimes jarring, but the story unfolds like a particularly juicy bit of small-town gossip, one that's told by a particularly vivid storyteller.

The Thunderdome sequence is an amazing display of imagination and technical skill, but the film falls apart with the climactic chase scene.

It's informative as far as it goes, but the film's raison d'etre is the simple sight of large wildlife up close and personal, and it's mesmerizing.

The story of the business is historically interesting, but the story of a friendship tested to the breaking point is timeless.

A wonderful premise that delivers solid laughs and has a heart as big as the state in which this farce unfolds.

It's good fun, and the whole debate raises some interesting questions about larger questions of authorship and whether or not it ultimately matters who "Shakespeare" actually was.

THE STAR would have been a much better film if all its loose ends had been gathered. As it is, the ending is too curt and too convenient to bring the tale to a close with a ring of truth.

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.

A big sweet hit, tingly and glycerined in a phony way, but diverting.

Grim tale of good and evil.

Despite a few dull spots and a certain amount of predictability, The Gods Must Be Crazy II delivers enough laughs and does it with enough charm to be worthwhile viewing, especially for fans of the first film.

A spectacular natural disaster spiraling out of control, a crime gone wrong and a poor jerk caught in the middle: Yes, it's a standard action-picture recipe. But what a difference a cast makes.

Rises above its low-budget limitations by pandering to the most outrageously paranoid fantasies of unhappy office drones.

In the Kill the Bitch tradition of FATAL ATTRACTION, this adaptation of Stephen King's misogynist fable about a serious (male) author trapped by his own frivolous (female) commercial creation isn't quite satisfying either as a flat-out horror screamer or a psychological thriller.

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

A lovely homage to a charismatic star.

It's funny stuff, though most of the pimps seem like such buffoons it's hard to imagine how they actually make a living.

Beautifully animated epic is never dull.

Unpretentious social satire that manages to poke a few deserved jabs at modern man's ego. The laughs are a bit sparse, but the witty cast helps carry it along.

Surprisingly, it's not bad on the whole (in an Afterschool Special kind of way), and the young stars are uniformly appealing, especially Schuyler Fisk (Sissy Spacek's daughter) and CROOKLYN's Zelda Harris.

It's overtly about provocation, set in a tony Danish suburb where a group of men and women living commune-style in an empty house are discovering their "inner idiots" by pretending to be developmentally challenged.

If this new film seems less prescient than its predecessor, it's only because reality is rapidly catching up with Cronenberg's warped imagination.

It's funny when it shouldn't be, sentimental to a fault and has one of the goriest scenes ever shot.