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.