The lush, emotional scenes are enhanced by the sound track.

Drew Barrymore's virtuoso performance smooths over the plot holes.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

A wizard at manipulating time, Kitano introduces staccato elements that interrupt the meditative pace even as they help set it.

Entrancingly lurid live-action fantasy.

Scenes that should have been uproarious are weaker than many of the movie's smaller moments.

This bleak vision directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") is pointless with good reason.

A hallucination sequence and a scene set in a Vegas nightclub are so engrossing you forget they're animated; even the showiest techniques don't detract from the story.

But Peter Hyams, who's both director and director of photography, forces us to constantly strain to see what isn't there, until ultimately the screen explodes in welcome light, a cathartic finale in broad visceral terms even if the drama hasn't inspired much emotion.

Even the melodramatic score can't ruin the essentially serious tenor of this old-style non-self-referential horror story, whose characterizations are unassailable--stereotypical shtick you buy because the performers are working so hard and their faces are so skillfully lit.

The music's great, but frequent tight shots of actors ostensibly blowing their horns look phony enough to be distracting.

Subplots are woven stealthily into the story, taking the pressure off the central drama, allowing it to be affecting rather than melodramatic, and heightening the atmosphere of the lush Louisiana setting.

Their blossoming love is thwarted at every opportunity by wicked stepmother Anjelica Huston, whose practical motive -- she wants her own daughter to become queen -- is part of an unusually nuanced characterization.

Set in an expressively underlit environment, this rivetingly moody drama is enhanced by the restrained use of incidental music.

It's all very clever but not really provocative - though a layer of political subtext may make the scenario seem funnier and more meaningful.

A sparing use of exterior shots during the mesmerizing buildup to the match heightens their impact, while invasively tight close-ups put the actors to the test.

The wavering style and tone fragment the movie, undermining both characters' development, though each retains her power as a symbol.

This buddy movie grows on you.

Many of the gags rely on the incongruity of Grant's nervous, cultured character posing as an Italian-American stereotype, but they're subverted by his earnest relationship with his fiancee, whose affection hardly seems worth the trouble.

A realist mode that strains credibility; it's tenuous and inflexible -- and easily ruptured by the contrived irony in Jimmy McGovern's screenplay.

The material is powerful--one boxer has been accused of a crime and the trial conflicts with a crucial competition--but much of it feels predigested, the themes inadvertently one-dimensional.

Lots of men cry lots of tears in this supremely self-indulgent, supremely moving documentary about making a documentary.

Writer-director Mark Brown ruptures and restores the realism in this romantic comedy with ease, dispensing earnest wisdom with a little tongue in cheek instead of undermining it with a lot of irony.

A standard mix of performances, interviews, and gimmickry -- the image and sound sometimes loop or jump in a tiresomely literal attempt to translate the techniques of scratching and "beat juggling" into cinema.

Instructive comedy, which is marvelously neutral toward a type of sexual and domestic relationship that's often exploited or overblown.

There are enough plot points to fill an entire soap-opera season, but writer-director Chi Muoi Lo, who also plays the son, somehow manages to juggle them all, turning seemingly superfluous elements into workable drama and metaphor.

Images about imagery can be diverting, even insightful, but this painterly 1999 feature piles up studies in elaborately choreographed motion that are their own reason for being.

There's little rapport between Duchovny and Driver after their initial meeting. More exciting and suspenseful is the relationship between Driver's confidant (Hunt) and her husband (James Belushi), who can't seem to get all their kids to go to sleep at the same time.