Full of heart-rending moments, in which people of good faith search for answers to what, in the end, remain painfully irreconcilable questions.

A documentary that knows to sit back and listen as [Dobson] expounds on a variety of subjects.

By turns fascinating, puzzling and troubling -- a deeply felt account of the varieties of religious experience but also a thoroughly uncritical apologia for fanaticism.

A profoundly disturbing -- and depressing -- look at the New Anti-Semitism of the post-9/11 world. Produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the film is remarkably restrained, given the outrages it documents.

Family Law never really gets to the nitty-gritty of the Perelmans' fraught relationship, instead maintaining a gently ironic distance that, while admirable in its restraint, ultimately lacks emotional fire.

The power of "Grbavica" is not the arc of its story line, but the fullness of the world Zbanic creates.

Clocking in at two hours-plus, Glastonbury at times gives viewers the impression that they're slogging through the three-day plunge into mud, music and madness themselves. But for all the posers with light sticks and piercings, there are moments of Dada-esque beauty, not to mention some great music.

ShowBusiness is not so clever nor so entertaining as the popular musical "A Chorus Line," which plied this territory more than 30 years ago, but it does go deeper into the mechanics of the business.

Trust is always interesting. And always interesting, as someone once said, is always good.

Bill Forsyth's Being Human, an anthology about the hesitant ascent of man, is a whimsically offbeat, stubbornly upbeat tour of man's progress as seen through the eyes of five guys named Hector. [06 May 1994]

Harrowing, controlled and diabolically self-assured, Joshua leaves filmgoers teetering on their own emotional precipice, wondering just where pathos ends and pathology begins.

A star isn't born in El Cantante as much as it's reconfirmed. She's still here, and she's still got it.

What really reaches us is the collective presence of the cast, most of them monks and other acting amateurs. They seem uniformly imbued with inherent grace and effortless spiritual bearing. And their smallest of gestures exude the kind of un-self-conscious gravitas that constitutes all fables.

The Life of Reilly pays fitting homage to a man who deserves to be remembered for much more than just trading double-entendres with Brett Somers on "The Match Game."

It's fast and furious, and it proves that crime doesn't pay, unless you know how to do it right.

Must-see viewing for anyone who thinks of Christmas as just a mall and its night visitors.

Even though it sounds awfully depressing, there's something moving about watching people go at their lives with everything they have -- or don't have.

We may not get to their innermost feelings, which would have taken this documentary to a deeper, maybe darker level, but the movie's purpose is celebratory. As such, it's a satisfying experience.

While the movie's star -- and ruler, and ship's captain, and grand poobah -- is Haneke himself, his actors are sublime.

Yes, it's weird. But it's wild card weird, with that thrill of never knowing what's coming next or when these Parisians are going to get musical on us.

It's not a great movie, but Yu Nan's performance is superb without being showy or melodramatic.

Whether they're navigating a recently flooded Prague or the pristine waters of a Tuscan swimming pool, the fiends and angels who populate Beauty in Trouble are like so many scorpions explaining why they sting the fabled frog trying to help them: "It's my nature."

Argento and Aattou deliver appropriately outsize performances to fit the movie's sense of extravagant escapism, and Claude Sarraute delivers a slyly witty performance as the elderly lady carried away by Ryno's Scheherazade-like tale.

What makes Nanette Burstein's movie so powerful is its uncanny sense of familiarity.

One of the great strengths of CSNY is how skillfully it deflects criticism of "four balding hippie millionaires" taking to the stage to criticize American politics; the film is peppered with excerpts from some of the tour's earliest and nastiest critics.

Despite some scenes that have the feel of an acting or writing workshop, these are believable, complex characters. Their story has a full measure of Judd Apatow raunch, with a dash of "Swingers" emotional sweetness.

For all its charisma, A Girl Cut in Two lacks a certain depth.

Momma's Man takes that germ of an idea and lets it flower, in a way that is both odd and oddly compelling.

The result is a vivid portrait, not just of one unforgettable young man but also of a country in transition.

The film rises above its conventions. Just when it seems to be a fable of sexual initiation, An American Affair pivots away from sex. Just when it seems to be a re-dredging of the Kennedy mystique, it pushes past history. Thoughtfully and imperfectly, it dramatizes the flight from childhood, the surrender to adulthood and the pieces of us that survive.

Directed by first-timer Derick Martini and produced by Martin Scorsese, balances grimness and levity with relative success. It stops short of quirk. It only flirts with "American Beauty"-style hyperbole. It falls somewhere in between, thanks to Martini's steady hand and a bunch of reliable actors working in good form.

Unmistaken Child: adorable, moving, bewildering, sad and, ultimately, peaceful.

But by far the most powerful element is N'Dour's lone voice, a thing of high, pure beauty that feels at once ancient and new. When he sings, an otherwise earnestly conventional film becomes a vehicle of incantatory power.

Under Our Skin has a major ax to grind, but if even half of what it alleges is true, it's more deeply terrifying than any slasher film you'll ever see.

Though it drags on a bit, the film is certainly good-hearted, informative and relevant. We look through the doors of the St. Mel's classrooms and we see the whirrings of a school that can help a smart West Side kid land a spot at MIT. That, at least, is something to celebrate.

Although it frequently misfires and occasionally keeps firing away on empty satiric chambers, Student Bodies is a likably sarcastic and knowing assault on the cliche's of horror movies. [11 Aug 1981, p.C10]

Soderbergh soaks the screen in moody, swimming pool hues to suggest the characters' murky motivations, and uses different textures of film stock to distinguish between the multiple layers of flashback. [28 April 1995, p.N44]

Given the source material, the film is as good as respectful adaptation could make it: a high-class soap opera, compulsively watchable despite a quality of insight eventually exposed as trite and dubious in the extreme. [26 Sep 1980, p.F1]

Darkman, as unnerving as a gargoyle, is a classic nightmare, elegant and sumptuous, everything "Batman" should have been. But we're numbed after a while, as we are by the grotesquerie of the nightly news. Then again, maybe that's Raimi's intention. His work is beautiful in its scary way, and never only skin deep.

The result is a movie that can be wonderfully languid and wonderfully breakneck as well, a formula movie so gleefully bedizened with quirks that it always seems better than it is. [5 Dec. 1984, p.C1]

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn't really a movie, it's a happy reunion. The Enterprise is 18 years older and the crew members look like Gray Panthers in space. It may be old stuff, but it's still the right stuff up there. [8 June 1984, p.23]

This is certainly Chase's most likable vehicle to date, and he endows Mr. Griswold with a sincere sort of goofiness. [29 July 1983, p.D1]

There is nothing that would frighten anyone in this amusing, if pat, little movie. The witty but meandering screenplay shows future promise for first-time writer Eric Luke, a guy who used to work in a sci-fi book store. [12 July 1985, p.27]

Filled as it is with unforced errors, A League of Their Own isn't a perfect picture, but it is irresistibly ebullient with not one, but nine Babes on base.

Jackie Gleason and Tom Hanks team entertainingly in Nothing in Common, a sugar-coated variation on "Death of a Salesman." It proves an uncommonly funny drama, its painful truths brightened by Hanks' clowning glory and Gleason's glowering deadpan. [1 Aug 1986, p.25]

Attention all units: Slapstick in progress in the vicinity of Police Academy. Suspects wanted for mugging the camera and possession of night shtiks with intent to incite a laugh riot. Please respond to this blues burlesque, a uniformly funny hit sure to have a long run. Its target audience -- those who can take their T&A with a grain of assault. Its plot -- a combo of "Animal House" and "An Officer and a Gentleman." Its stars -- a rainbow coalition of hot newcomers and dependable, unexpendable pros. [23 Mar 1984, p.23]

An inspired comedy title, Stir Crazy blends several inventive, high-spirited performing talents into a tangy, cheerful entertainment. [12 Dec 1980, p.E1]

The Road Warrior is ferocious and unpredictable. It's energetic. It's peculiar. It's big and it's dirty. But mostly it's cosmically irrelevant. Hey, but, one thing's for sure, we are driven.

All canapes and haute bourgeoisie, it is a smart comedy of conversation, like "My Dinner With Andre" but with eight place settings.

This is hardly your same old trough of slop. Babe nonetheless prevails, demonstrating once again "how a kind and steady heart can heal a sorry world."

The Irish independent feature I Went Down is an elusive leprechaun of a film that doggedly resists being pigeonholed. Once caught, however, it yields a small pot of gold in its droll performances and deadpan wit. [3 July 1998, p.N46]

This is a very sweet movie to watch, the pleasant cinematic equivalent of light summer reading.

You judge a movie by its own standards, right? Bulletproof, starring Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, is rambunctious, crude, ridiculous, violent and -- incidentally -- very funny.

Moonraker, the newest James Bond spectacle, is a cheerful, splashy entertainment. The curators of the Bond museum do not surpass themselves with this exhibition, the 11th in the series, but they haven't fallen down on the job either. Moonraker is a satisfying blend of familiar ingredients, from the highly polished to the barely adequate. [29 June 1979, p.C1]

Director Ron Underwood of the big-worm thriller "Tremors" effectively contrasts the bland life of the big city with the rough-hewn joys of the Big Country. And the three leads -- neurotic, brash and bonding like flies to No Pest strips -- give energetic if obvious performances. The whole dang thing is rather too blatant, but if you take your comedy with a little branch water, you'll want a shot of this 'un.

Christine does indeed suffer from the preposterous, low-octane nature of the devil-car pretext. But this satanic nonsense is saved from strictly facetious appeal by a few sensational pictorial effects, notably the sights of Christine speeding after a victim while engulfed in flames or miraculously repairing her own battered body, and by the no-nonsense performances of an excellent cast, especially Keith Gordon as the obsessed and transformed Arnie Cunningham.

Most of the time Creepshow works.

This jokey horror movie, adapted in part from King's short stories, is composed of three brief tales, the perfect form for him. Instead of having to create characters and a story, King simply has to come up with a gimmick and a punch line -- and on to the next.

Compared to Escape From New York, the weapons are bigger and the violence is more extensive, although it’s toned down by today’s excessive standards. There are also greater special effects this time, involving holograms and nuclear-powered submarines. But Escape From L.A. is more enjoyable in a playful way.

Though it's not a great film, it is an entertaining and, at times, emotionally rich one.

The film is never inspired; it's not imaginative enough to be any more than an entertainingly good time. But it's an enormously unassuming, likable comedy, and surprisingly uninsistent for a big summer entertainment.

The movie, however, is Pesci's. In that courtroom, he gets on a roll and stays rolling until the end. There's no one better with that New York-New Jersey corridor accent.

Producer-director Garry Marshall, who made a pretty penny off Pretty Woman, brings the same fizzy, dizzy feel to Frankie & Johnny. He seduces us with stars in our eyes and blinds us for 90 minutes or more to his ploys, some of them as cheap as dime-store perfume. Still, we're happy to sit back and swoon. [11 Oct 1991, p.D7]

Coleman and Thomas are unusually sympathetic embodiments of a father and son, and they have some moments that are legitimately stirring. Cloak & Dagger is never as adept or perceptive as you'd like it to be, but it's got what members of the critical fraternity traditionally characterize as a little something.

Given the creative recession in the movies, you could do worse than sit through Patriot Games. If this would-be blockbuster slavishly follows summer movie guidelines, it does so well -- or adequately. Neither poisonous nor great, it never loses sight of its mall-movie mandate, to defend American hearth and home against invincible boy-toy bogymen.

An entertaining, light-hearted cops and robots action adventure decked out in high-tech finery. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]

Short Circuit fizzles a little at the end when the script becomes even more predictable and mawkish. But Badham's technological know-how can't be denied, and the pleasures of Number Five are considerable. [09 May 1986, p.27]

The nice thing about Nice Dreams is that, if you can live with a little raunchiness, it's fun, and it's funnier than C&C's "Next Movie," their second movie after "Up in Smoke": the humor doesn't rely so completely on old jokes about the drug culture. Cheech and Chong are bawdy, they're unself-consciously irreverent, and if any idiocy can happen, it will happen to them. So naturally people enjoy watching them. [5 June 1981, p.17]

A generous entertainment of its kind, Any Which Way mixes plentiful portions of gauche, robust action and comedy with frequent musical interludes. [17 Dec 1980, p.E1]

A smooth and agreeable entertainment, Hero is easy to enjoy while you're watching it. But ultimately it adds up to far less than you hope for at the outset. [3 Apr 1982, p.C1]

A bit of advice: Get to "The Naked Gun 2½" on time and plan to stay till they turn the lights back on. The opening and closing credits alone are almost worth the price of admission.

David Zucker and Segal seem to thrive on the formulaic tomfoolery that propels these rapid-fire spoofs. Naked Gun 33 1/3, as pointlessly plotted as ever, manages to be not only still funny but energetically slapped together and occasionally inventive.

Whether the lines are funny, tasteless or not-so-funny, Chase keeps popping 'em; whether the scenes are from "48 HRS." or "Beverly Hills Cop," screenwriter Leon Capetanos keeps photocopying them; and director Michael Ritchie (who also directed "Fletch") makes everything move along to a frenetic zydeco soundtrack. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself laughing at something. Unless you're dead, too.

The Natural is a likable baseball saga, a big, old messy metaphor that says: You may be middle-aged, America, but you can still hit one out of the park. [11 May 1984, p.25]

Expertly acted, Chariots is an undeniable rouser. However, there's also something a trifle much about its very wholesomeness and likability.

A scruffy but appealing light entertainment, the movie owes its unexpected charm to the fact that comedian and dog seem to complement and humanize each other. [09 Sep 1980, p.C3]

Price and director Harold Becker build in enough jumps and scares and good red herrings to be satisfying -- there are a few especially heart pounding moments in which Keller's sense of helplessness in his own bedroom is palpable -- but a few logical holes may appear when you talk about it afterwards. Still, Sea of Love is leagues deeper than the average buddy movie.

As with any band movie, this is a moral, rise-and-fall tale. Rock must learn he's a regular guy, not a nasty poseur. Like Spinal Tap, the movie basically peters out, tying up its narrative loose ends. But for the laughs you get, it's a small price to pay.

Thanks largely to the dexterity of director John Badham and the irresistibly fresh attractiveness of the young leads, Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, WarGames contains enough entertaining suspense and more than enough personality appeal to finesse many of its implausible plot twists. [3 June 1983, p.B1]

The music is electric on Beat Street, a good-natured, emotional movie, where morals are as sound as they were in the mom's-in-the-kitchen, dad's-in-insurance sitcoms of the '50s and '60s.

Directing his own starring vehicle, that sly boots Burt Reynolds gives the audience a shamelessly lurid but stylish going-over, while putting a clever new wrinkle or two on his own status.

Smokey and the Bandit is an unexpected good time, a playful, wisecracking and curiously revealing example of All-American escapist entertainment. [29 July 1977, p.B1]

Blue Thunder hovers just this side of trash and the other side of credibility, but it propels a willing audience into adrenaline heaven.

It would be cornier if it weren't so well acted by Nunn, Bening and 12-year-old Allen.

Frantic is vintage Polanski, with its relentless paranoia, irony, diffident strangers and nutty cameos. And Polanski forgoes the mood-marshalling Hitchcock cellos for his own brand of good old quiet tension -- here made eerier by Witold Sobocinski's high and low camera angles.

A thoroughly credible hybrid of the prison film and the supernatural, it has plenty of shocks, of course, but also an actual story. What makes it work here is the skill and energy of a young director, Renny Harlin, and a surprisingly decent ensemble.

Blaze turns out to be quite an amusing floor show, the kind of silly, factually irresponsible burlesque that makes you laugh in spite of yourself.

Merrill's story, synthesizing the painful paths of dozens of blacklisted men and women, is told with admirable simplicity and lack of sensationalism. De Niro projects a warmly masculine presence, struggling to maintain dignity while wrestling within with the Faustian bargain.

Ultimately, Davies' choices have a powerful cumulative effect. In the latter section, he achieves a transporting poignancy of feeling. What he manages to convey are the debilitating contradictions that exist, side by side, within every family; the ways in which families nurture as they destroy, and love and despair act as equal partners.

A wildly profane stew of twists and surprises. And for the most part, the ways in which the various elements combine are enormously diverting. It's a clever, intelligent piece of work with an impulse to surprise and entertain. It's also a crock.

Lorenzo's Oil, which stars Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte as the Odone parents, is not superbly made. But it's adequate enough to convey the story. No filmmaker (in this case, director George Miller) could stand in the way of this drama, though certainly others could have made it better.

DiCaprio is daring and unguarded in his performance as Rimbaud, and Thewlis does an astounding job of showing the despair of an artist whose time has passed.

Missing lacks the streamlined tension of the dynamically paced, left-wing political thrillers -- Z, The Confession and State of Siege -- that made Costa-Gavras' reputation a few years back. Nevertheless, it's an expertly acted and suggestive impression of battered American innocence and good will in the explosive, political environment of a South American country (obviously Chile, 1973) during a military coup. [12 Feb 1982, p.C1]

Within the stylistic limits and shortened time span the filmmakers have decided to use, All the President's Men is an exceptionally well-made film. It's simply impossible to suppress the feeling that a more involving and satisfying movie would have emerged from a less restrictive framework.

There's enjoyable chemistry between the two, but not the sort that sequels are made on. Aykroyd's straight man gets most of the laughs with his hilarious variation on the late Jack Webb's hard-bitten dialogue, with Hanks playing less often off the priggish, ever-positive Friday.

Artistically self-indulgent, if beautifully acted, Light Sleeper isn't aimed at audiences with a hunger for conventional entertainment and upbeat endings -- for Schrader this is an improvement.

A respectably stirring film about the rupturing birth of civil rights in the South. Although most of Walk Home heads down this ready-for-prime-time moral path, director Richard Pearce and screenwriter John Cork uncover some interesting dramatic grays along the way. 

Alice, which seems like child's play after last year's sober Crimes and Misdemeanors, finds Allen at his most optimistic and sentimental since Radio Days. His pen is not as sharp nor his wit as keen as it has been, but he has become accessible to a broader audience in this whimsical entertainment.