At times funny, but mostly tragic, Scurlock's film is important viewing for any who owns a credit card without realizing that it's a wallet time bomb.

Curl your cynical lip if you want, but there's a place for heartwarming, life-affirming, even weepy dramas, and Robert Redford brings the best-selling novel about a traumatized teen and her wounded horse to the screen with dignity and restraint.

Clad in dull khakis and a polo shirt, the always reliable Kinnear is his (Brosnon's) perfect foil, while Davis' neat turn as a suburban wife with a penchant for guns and the men who use them turns what might have been a cliched supporting role into something worth watching.

Through Carax's eyes, even squalor looks fabulous.

Multi-character drama that reveals a vivid cross-section of the city's inhabitants but fails to live up to the director's high ambitions.

A topical comedy that's about 25 years too late.

A well-crafted exercise in urban paranoia that's so controlled it never achieves the reckless, visceral immediacy its subject matter demands.

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.

Meyrou follows the family through the three day trial, the verdict and its aftermath, but the perpetrators remain a mystery.

Adapted from the play by Noel Coward, this dissection of the prejudices of English country artistocrats shows Alfred Hitchcock in fine early form.

For all the updated riffs and personal noodling, it's best when it doesn't stray too far from the original material.

Whereas the first half of the movie concentrates nicely on the developing friendship between the young Holmes and Watson, the storm of roller-coaster thrills and Industrial Light and Magic special effects soon takes over, blowing the nicely drawn characters away.

Bottoms is a Minnesota-bred law student who comes to Harvard and the lecture hall of Houseman, an instructor who seemingly takes great pleasure in puncturing his students' egos. Bottoms falls in love with Wagner. Essentially, this is a military school plot with a change of venue.

More admirable as a sheer technical feat of filmmaking than as a sustained dramatic narrative. It still makes worthwhile viewing.

Figgis's bold narrative strategy turns what could have been a standard-issue chronicle of shallow Hollywood lives into a fluid and enthralling experience.

The issue is dealt with in a sensitive manner, but a much less "meaningful" approach would have made the characters much more accessible. The direction by Friedkin is not cinematic at all, looking simply like a rendering of the stage play on celluloid.

Pryor's direction is better than the script, and singers Eckstine and McRae make nice dramatic debuts under his firm hand.

It's a pleasure to see the articulate, disciplined Telfair succeed where so many other young men have failed, but ultimately his path to success is so smoothly upbeat that there isn't much urgency to it.

While not entirely successful, Mortal Thoughts is surprisingly compelling. Headly and Moore go all-out with their working-girl mannerisms, but their friendship rings true and their ill-considered decisions are made strangely believable by their desperation.

Watching Binoche dithering about an American comedy takes some getting used to, but she's a believable soul mate for the hangdog Carell. The rest of the family, however, has got to go.

The action sequences are so franticly dizzying that they make "Run Lola Run" look as though it unfolds in slow motion.

The film is simultaneously sweet natured and sharply observed, and if love eventually conquers all, it takes its own sweet time doing it.

We never get a real sense of what made these recordings so different or revolutionary. Part of the problem is that re-recorded versions of songs by the actors were used in the film, with vastly mixed results that never match the ferocity and excitement of the original tracks.

It's a brilliant impersonation; Smith gets Ali's speech patterns and Louisville accent exactly right, and astonishingly convincing facial prosthetics complete the transformation. But he never quite finds the man under the enormous image; those quintessential Mann moments, during which Ali is left alone to brood, feel surprisingly blank.

Aside from its frank consideration of preteen sexuality, the most daring thing about Cuesta's extraordinary film is its willingness to put honest, intelligent dialogue in the mouths of kids.

While Lee fails to impose sufficient structure on his material, expertly drawn performances help vividly to evoke the family and street life of an era untroubled by crack or drive-by shootings.

The film moves well and never loses its gripping tension, but the lighthearted tone of the beginning takes a dive into an abyss that shocks many viewers.

The plot is simple and the Italian performances verge on the operatic, but Leone revitalizes the Western through a unique and complex visual style. The film is full of brilliant spatial relationships (extreme close-ups in the foreground, with detailed compositions visible in the background) combined with Ennio Morricone's vastly creative musical score full of grunts, wails, groans, and bizarre-sounding instruments. Aural and visual elements together give a wholly original perspective on the West and its myths.