It’s difficult to watch but beguilingly genuine in its exploration of the tortured dynamics of three adult siblings whose mother died five years earlier and who haven’t been together in three years.

This French-language horror film is shockingly well made for a debut feature: Julia Ducournau, who wrote and directed it, really knows her stuff and is clearly bound for mainstream success, if that’s where her appetites take her.

The Witness is remarkable for its emotional impact, and its clarity. The picture that emerges isn’t perfectly clear; the whole truth will never be known, Bill Genovese says. What he has made known, though, is valuable.

Richly detailed -- and improbably entertaining.

Rough around the edges, it's humor decidedly sophomoric in parts. But that's part of its charm. [19 Jan 1995, p.A16(E)]

What God’s Time affords us, as few Hollywood movies do anymore, are performances that rely on sustained craft and emotion, an ability to mesmerize the camera and justify why it isn’t cutting away.

Strays is wildly inappropriate. It’s also wildly funny.

Looks like Weimar decadence and feels like down-home friendship.

One of the many stylistic distinctions of this outwardly modest production is the complex voice that the filmmaker has found for his young hero.

Martius comes to a bad end, while Mr. Fiennes achieves a great beginning. As a director, his grasp exceeds his daring reach, and his performance stands as a chilling exemplar of psychomartial ferocity.

The source of all this information was a real-life KGB agent, Vladimir Vetrov, code named Farewell, and with the usual adjustments for drama his story gets a respectable retelling in this nervy French production.

The material is often intimate, often heartbreaking.

Conventional it is not. Engrossing it is.

Value has been added as well -- the most thrilling car chase ever committed to film, a sequence that also shows, by cutting to the psychosexual chase, why fans embraced the tawdry genre in the first place.

If you lop off the closing credits of Fred Cavayé's preposterously exciting - and pleasingly preposterous - French-language thriller, the running time is a mere 80 minutes. Not since "Run Lola Run" has the term been used more aptly.

Ms. Stone is entrancing, whether Sophie is in or out of her trance state, and so is the movie as a whole.

In the ultimate test, Kirby submits this very documentary to the tender mercies of the MPAA. It gets slapped with an NC-17 for graphic content. He appeals. He loses -- ten votes to zip.

No beauty contest has ever been more bizarre than the one in Gerardo Naranjo's shockingly powerful thriller.

Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor.

Though the oddness of the situation yields the same kinds of lightly funny observational moments that gave Lost in Translation some of its charm, Rental Family is, like Sofia Coppola’s movie, above all else a sweet drama about the difficulty of connections. Which makes it an unusually mature and considered experience at the movies.

Seldom has a film explored such exotica as Valentino's world -- the gowns, the galas, the villas, the private jets -- with such a sense of momentous drama behind the glitz.

The movie also fights for what it wants - to touch us in the course of entertaining us - and it succeeds, with its zinger-studded script that transcends clumsy mechanics and a spirited cast that includes Marisa Tomei as a nymphomaniacal middle-school teacher, and Jonah Bobo as a lovesick eighth-grader.

It’s a story that doesn’t quite follow the money. The money is a maguffin, as per Hitchcock.

As in the previous films, the pilgrims stay in the most picturesque places, and are served the most sumptuous meals, the preparation of which Mr. Winterbottom uses as a visual digestif when his two stars begin to cloy. Most often, though, they are supremely urbane and consistently hilarious.

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

The latest in a series of stiletto-sharp social comedies by the French filmmakers Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui.

This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue.

The situation is fascinating, and given an illuminating investigation here.