Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

Friendship matters to those of us who still claim membership in the human race, and Goldbacher's merciless autopsy on it is both illuminating and dispiriting.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.

An exuberance, a celebration, a hoot, a kick and a half.

Huge, sprawling, and utterly absorbing.

Mamet loves two things: scams and dialogue. This movie is rich with both.

Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.

The movie is -- how can I say this? -- funny as hell. It's like an old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like to See" put together by someone on crystal meth, with a vicious streak, an existentialist streak and no mercy anywhere in his soul and only the tiniest flinch at the end, which is probably, sigh, the best way to end.

Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy.

About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.

The summer's most rousing action picture.

Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.

The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it.