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

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.

Tremendous fun at times, especially in its vicious power plays and betrayals. But it has no redeeming value beyond entertainment.

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.

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 remarkable film from Romania.

Remarkably entertaining.

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.

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.

It's a film that will stay with you.

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.

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

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

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.

Gibney's documentary strains to make sense of the minutiae without losing the audience's attention over its formidable, two-hour length.

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

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

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

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

Tokyo, if anything, becomes more of a mystery after Tokyo! than it was before. That's the strength and curse of the film. If you can't find real connections between its disparate stories, you can always make them up yourself. But if that kind of film frustrates you, think twice before booking a ticket to Tokyo!

Sad to say, the new Matthew Barney opus, Drawing Restraint 9, made in collaboration with his main squeeze, Bjork, doesn't advance the Barney oeuvre an inch past where he left it with his massive, megalomaniacal opus known as the "Cremaster" series.

What Rulfo needs, unfortunately, is what too many trendy directors forsake: some social context, some succinct voice-overs and some talking heads to put the serious issues (urban poverty, urban stress, environmental degradation, corruption) into perspective.

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

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.

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.

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