It's a film that will stay with you.

Documentary makers struggle for this effect -- a feeling for the land that is both grand and unsentimental. The makers of Duma, a fable fit for children, have found it.

It's long, but it's also very real and worth every minute.

Remarkably entertaining.

A remarkable film from Romania.

Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia," and it's an apt label for an entirely idiosyncratic mix of local myth and history, dubious science, salacious gossip, personal rumination and endless camp humor.

At its best, Tokyo Sonata is a deft interweaving of seemingly dissonant ideas -- war and music, family and politics, authority and freedom.

Neither the title nor the subject matter prepares you for the pure fun of Frost/Nixon.

A light but enjoyable souffle of erotic vignettes.

The slaughter is part of a traditional fishing culture, according to the Japanese. But if you succumb to the emotional appeal of this documentary, it emerges not just as a bloody and brutal business but almost as bad as genocide.

It is as polished as it is heavy-handed, and it leaves one under a spell.

Just when Sydney Pollack's new film about super-architect Frank Gehry, Sketches of Frank Gehry, threatens to get really interesting, Pollack, perhaps unconsciously channeling about 100 years' worth of bad movies about great artists, reverts to fall-back mode.

The splendid, painterly melodramas of Douglas Sirk lurk behind every shot, but the tone is essentially pre-Raphaelite, sexy and cold.

It is a film rich in detail, the kind that simply never emerges in the nightly news accounts of the war.

Cotillard leaves you loving her Piaf, wishing you could reach through the screen and steer her life a bit differently.

The subject is huge and worthy, and the film makes a noble effort to embrace some of its complexity.

A brutally efficient bit of storytelling, and it makes no unforced errors. It is admirably free of any Spielbergian effort to squeeze sentimentality or inspirational lessons out of what is a complicated and morally complex story.

Riklis has made a powerful film, but can a powerful film change anything about the fatalistic culture of powerlessness that is felt throughout Palestine and Israel? The irony of Lemon Tree is that what it achieves adds, in the end, to the sense that nothing can unravel this mess.

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

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.

Both slapstick and social drama, and it is certainly the most confident mix of the two that Perry has managed to achieve with this particular part of his vast media franchise.

Caine is magnificent, and the film is worth a look for his contribution alone. But Milner is a promising actor, too, and the pairing of young and old is believable and occasionally very moving.

Is it a great movie? John Malkovich's portrayal of an aging and sexually aggressive professor of poetry is enough to make the film worth anyone's while.

Watchmen is a bore. Sad to say, after a wait of more than two decades, the much-anticipated adaptation of the world's most celebrated graphic novel is long, dull and subject to what might be called the "Lord of the Rings" problem: It sinks under the weight of its reverence for the original.

The director raises the question that haunts the whole film: Who should feel shame: gay Muslims or the Muslims who oppress them?

There is a difference between the importance of a film's subject and the quality of a film's execution. And the execution is lacking. The film just isn't, well, very interesting.

Traitor traffics in the cliches of the terrorist chase film -- including the usual stereotypes of Muslims -- while trying not to succumb to outright bigotry.

There are three fine performances lost in this otherwise middling film. Alan Arkin makes a wonderfully gruff newspaper editor who does just about as much barking as Marley. Jennifer Aniston makes the most of the rather slender figure of Jennifer Grogan, creating a believably human picture of a career woman who gives it up for the kids. And then there's the dog that plays Marley.