James Ivory's direction is meandering in the best sense: Rarely obvious or predictable, he quietly builds a complex portrait of a intimate family.

Strikes a carefully calibrated balance between the film's darkly malicious sense of humor and its pastel sets and costumes.

A flawed but nevertheless endearing father-son road trip with a distinctive twist.

By the end, it should be perfectly clear just why Cho is so loved by so many different types of people. Raunchy though her material is, it embraces all comers, regardless of gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity. And it's never been sharper — or funnier — than it is here.

A cut above the preposterous action spectacles that now pass for espionage films.

Never boring, often excruciating and occasionally transcendent.

Philadelphia fails to create complex characters or finely nuanced drama, but it succeeds in its real goal; the education of an audience whose thinking about AIDS and gay life has been shaped by notions of perversion and divine retribution.

SIDEWALK STORIES has more heart than art, but its heart is large, and Lane proves himself an ambitious, impassioned filmmaker.

Despite fine performances from its lead actors, The Border fails to involve the viewer at more than a perfunctory level.

Fuller has taken a basic Agatha Christie-type plot and bathed it in social issues; A Soldier's Story is an insightful period drama as well as a totally engaging character study. The picture does become a trifle talky at times, thus betraying its stage origin, but Fuller's words are almost always interesting and powerful and make worthwhile listening.

A combination of muddy sound mix and players with heavy accents (particularly Chinese superstar Gong, who seems to have learned her lines phonetically) renders large swaths of dialogue incomprehensible, but the details of what's being said and done don't really matter.

A relatively minor work in the Disney oeuvre, but it's still quite entertaining, and it also marks the last time that Walt Disney himself would provide the voice of Mickey Mouse.

As is always the case with compilation films, some segments are far better than others. But they're all so brief that the least of them passes quickly and the best are small miracles of economical storytelling.

It's sometimes wrenching to watch, but it's too gripping to turn away from.

Lots of laughs.

Told mostly through haunting, often chilling visual fragments, this handsomely mounted and unusually gripping account amounts to an important exercise in biography: It faithfully restores Spielrein to her rightful place as a crucial contributor to the fields of child psychology and psychoanalysis.

For everyone who's just dying to know (and can't guess) what it's like to work for Joel Silver, Hollywood mega-producer and notorious egomaniac, Silver's former assistant George Huang has fashioned this mean-spirited revenge comedy. Kevin Spacey is awe-inspiring as the Silver-esque Buddy Ackerman; Frank Whaley is his wimpy whipping boy.

A lurching, addlebrained biopic that lacks even the crackpot energy of JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon struggles to invest its nakedly venal subject with tragic dignity.

Though the story is a hackneyed one--the rise of an itinerant to a position of power--Cagney is so dynamic that he rivets the viewer's attention.

Mediocre documentary squanders a terrific subject.

Butch Cassidy's winking awareness of its own cinematic nature (from the opening "silent movie" train robbery to the famous closing freeze frame) and witty banter give the story a degree of charm and exuberance.

The plot soon dwindles down to little more than a flimsy, Austen-esque comedy of circumstance.

Inlike many directors with music video backgrounds, Tim Story keeps the flashy cutting to a minimum and lets the story unfold at its own unhurried pace.

There's way too much CGI gadgetry, some inventive, much simply flashy in the worst kind of video-game way. The kids are nearly lost in the glitz.

Solidly entertaining and surprisingly free of the Mamet-isms that can suck the life right out of the most tightly crafted story.

The scenes from Epidemic have the high-contrast look of a 1920s horror film, are in English (much of it badly dubbed) and feature images that are handsome and preposterous in equal parts -- they're amusing, and too stylized to be disturbing.

The fourth of nine Dracula films by Hammer, with the violence and eroticism more up front this time around.

Director Jon Favreau keeps the guy-in-an-elf-suit act from degenerating into a too-long sketch, focusing on Buddy's naïve optimism, even in the face of harsh reality.