Despite its scant 48-minute running time (which many viewers will find frustrating), the film sets up a provocative equation between vampirism and American involvement in Asia.

The filmmakers have allowed themselves an overlong 140 minutes in order to preserve as much of the plot as possible, but they have bypassed many of the novel's key ideas and ironies.

While the film is unabashedly pro-Kerry --Butler and Kerry are longtime friends -- it isn't simple hagiography; it's also a portrait of Vietnam War-era America.

If the ending isn't conventionally happy, it's certainly deeply satisfying.

Powerful, documentary-style drama draws on the real-life experiences of "at risk" teenage girls.

Culkin's Alig has the face of a debauched cherub, but the former child star never quite captures the charisma everyone swears was an essential component in Alig's success. Green's St. James steals the picture out from under him (poetic justice of a sort), and the supporting cast is nothing short of amazing.

Looks very much like a documentary: It's grainy and raw, and Seidl's actors -- a mix of actors and non-professionals -- are often unglamorously posed under what appears to be natural light.

The combat visuals that follow are as powerful as those of any war film.

It's almost inconceivable how Glass could have gotten away with so much, but the movie makes a convincing case for how Glass used office politics, the good faith of his editors and his own personal charisma to get away with the worst offenses a journalist could commit.

The film is beautifully told and superbly acted. More importantly, Paul Laverty's screenplay goes along way toward showing how the traditionalism that can turn a community inward on itself is often a response to racism, and in that sense the film's timing couldn't have been any better.

It's a fascinating story teeming with pride, arrogance, greed and overweening hubris, and Gibney attempts to give it all an added dimension by finding the archetypes of Greek tragedy among the sleazy deals and Ponzi-scheme financing.

The ever-charismatic character actor George Coe stands out as a small-town jeweler grateful for a late-life affair.

Beautifully filmed, but extremely painful examination of the African slave trade takes a difficult position: Rather than focusing on the white European superstructure, Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M'bala focuses on African complicity in the capture and selling of African people.

Shot on location in Manhattan, the film is steeped in understated New York City ambiance and discreetly tinted by Jeffrey M. Taylor's subtle score.

Powerfully acted, intensely carnal drama.

When she's not babbling about the weird symbological system that rules her personal cosmos Imelda is an entertaining storyteller, vividly describing a life that became a national embarrassment and a camp legend.

WHERE THE BOYS ARE is plenty moralistic, yet the film is not without a naive sense of charm.

This film is the product of artists working at the peak of their powers.

An intelligent and very funny satire about the bloody game of American politics.

For what could easily have been a slickly vulgar variation on "American Pie" or "Porky's", this libidinous comedy explores some unusually complicated territory, and benefits greatly from Verdú's unpredictable performance as Luisa.

Fessenden uses an unsettling mix of montage, time-lapse photography and animation to create an atmosphere of great, unknowable menace that closely approximates the haunted spirit of Algeron Blackwood's unforgettable tale "The Wendigo." These hills are indeed alive.

As a visual counterpart to some of the most sublime verse ever written, it's often thrilling.

The result isn't an easy film, but it is rewarding.

Its idiomatic wordplay and social satire is vintage Wilder, and the opening sequence where Dino performs in a nightclub is one of the funniest things that Wilder has ever done.

His epic reworking of their lurid conventions proved so long that it was divided into two parts, and this one ends on a hell of a cliff-hanger.

Highly unlikely plot complications never once threaten to throw this remarkably amusing film off-track, thanks to the narrative intelligence of writer-director David O. Russell, the only member of the filmmaking bratpack who seems to understand how movies work and why they entertain.

Anyone lucky enough to have lived within broadcast range of Rodney Bingenheimer's radio show on L.A.'s KROQ during the late '70s had a privileged upbringing, whether or not they realized it at the time.

The weight of the film rests on the shoulders of Hawke and Delpy, and they're both remarkable.