This being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces.

The next time you hear a director complain about the studio or his stars or the weather or whatever, think of what Jorgen Leth achieved with Lars von Trier as his boss -- when five obstructions became five splendid opportunities.

The performances are daring and assured, especially Lansbury's holy terror of Momism and Harvey's snide, pathetic pawn, brainwashed by both KGB AND CIA. [21 March 1988, p.84]

Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness. [22 July 1996, p.95]

A formally elegant, subtly savage and powerfully affecting film.

What we come to care most about in writer-director Joshua Marston's film is how his heroine achieves the state promised by his title, Maria Full of Grace. Our emotional investment in her derives primarily from the astonishing performance of Moreno, 23.

As bustling and impassioned as the best Sturges and Capra movies, this one captures both the purposeful edginess of Administration Pooh-Bahs (Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, David Paymer and Samantha Mathis--nice jobs, all) and the isolation of the President. [20 Nov 1995, p.117]

It proposes that you can make an extraordinarily satisfying comedy without writing a joke. Subtly played and elegantly directed, this is an Adults Only movie in the best sense of the term.

If there were an Oscar for ensemble acting, Ray would win in a stroll.

Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.

Funny, hurtful, splendidly acted.

The Incredibles has those characters, that heart.

This is rapture in pictures. [22 December 1997, p. 81]

It is a powerful portrait of a slightly befuddled man who, when inhuman demands were placed on him, found within himself an unexpected response.

The actor (Puri) and the film make something fine, winning and memorable.

Wry, richly layered, wonderfully observed Argentine film.

One thinks of the great opening line of that great novel The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Like many such tales, this one is worth taking to your aching heart.

What makes this movie work is the kind of cool that made Get Shorty go so nicely: an understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and situations as if they were the most natural things in the world.

Beautiful Girls is always in touch with reality but never drowned in it. [19 February 1996, p.64]

The perfect e-ticket for a flight of fancy into a world far more gorgeous than our own. The film doesn't halve itself to appeal to two generations. At its best, it turns all moviegoers into innocent kids, slack-jawed with wonder.

Wings of Desire works hard to be both an essay and a love story, a mural and an intimate portrait. To savor this film, the viewer must work hard too. But when the artists behind the screen and the angels in the audience meet, it's like a smoke and coffee: fantastic! (1998 May 9, p. 79)

More important, we should take into account the fact that this is really quite a good movie--a character-driven (as opposed to whammy-driven) suspense drama--dark, fatalistic and, within its melodramatically stretched terms, emotionally plausible.

The poise and passion in Eve's Bayou leave one grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.

Proof is on the side of the lost, blessed souls. Paltrow, as alluring and reassuring as ever, emphasizes the blessedness in the isolation of genius, giving a new dimension to a complex role. New, true and thrilling--she is the Catherine that Proof was waiting for.

Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.

Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.

The Squid and the Whale is domestic tragedy recollected as comedy: a film whose catalog of deceits and embarrassments, and of love pratfalling over itself, makes it as (excruciatingly) painful as it is (exhilaratingly) funny.

Director Joel Schumacher's breathlessly paced and incident-crammed movie will induce a certain sense of deja vu among veteran viewers.

The whole rollicking adventure zips along a mile a minute.

Because she also has a classical heroine's sense of quest, the picture's Pocahontas rises above stodgy old legend into the sky of myth... That's apt for a role model for any child, red or white. And it's perfect for a film romance that earns a place of honor among Disney's latter-day animated film stunners.

But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions.

What is startling is how well While You Were Sleeping recaptures the true spirit of the best kind of modern fairy tale -- classic romantic comedy.

But the writer-director is canny enough to salt the stew with poignance, so that by the end these attitude machines have become human beings -- more than the sum of their chiseled jokes.

The movie hits every emotional button with a firm fist. It makes the phrase feel-good sound like a command from the industry's P.C. Patrol.

The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere. Second, it is executed with panache and utter conviction.

Their sweet, determined, gently understated struggle for fulfillment in a superstitiously conservative society makes this densely, deftly packed movie a quiet joy to behold.

It's a terrific movie. I love the look and the verve of the thing, the confidence of its epic design, its smart use of half a dozen noted British thesps, lending weight and wit to the supporting roles.

Makes everything Hollywood has lately done in the action genre look clumsy, dull and stale. It is a short, nonstop stuntfest that, by going back to basics and placing them on the screen with simple, breathless stylishness, turns what is essentially a lowlife movie form into something one is not embarrassed to call "pure" cinema--all energy, movement and high kinetic wit.

Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.

Both horrifying and hopeful.

The film is more than a murder mystery and more than a study in character conflict. At its best, it is an intense and complex portrait of an urban landscape on which the movies' gaze has not often fallen.

Terse is the word for Eastwood's directorial style. It rarely editorializes; it doesn't emote or orate. It just tells the damn story of a soldier's honor, which means doing the job no matter the odds--indeed, no matter the mission.

Fincher, whose work on "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing.

If this madly entertaining movie has a fault, it's that it's too ingenious for the genre it ostensibly inhabits.

Very simply, Bertolucci has found an elegance of design and execution that few of his contemporaries could even dream of. [23 Nov 1987]

A careful, finally powerful film.

It could as well be called Best Thing of Undetermined Species.

What happens is not the substance of Manhattan as much as how it happens. The movie is full of moments that are uproariously funny and others that are sometimes shattering for the degree in which they evoke civilized desolation.

A gross-your-eyes-out horror movie that is also the year's most poignant romance.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a rare movie that finds its tone, its focus and its poetry in its very first image.

The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me."

This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations.

In an age of post-Christian facetiousness, Martin Scorsese's work daringly attempts to restore passion and melodrama to the Gospel story. Protests notwithstanding, the film is an affirmation of faith in the power of both the Gospel and the movies.

Director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio are great guys to waste time with. The latter has a real flair for writing strong, confrontational scenes -- brisk, needling, well shaped -- and the former stages them with coolly concentrated intensity. And the cast is terrific. [19 Dec 1994, p.75]

Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d'etat into fodder for renewed debate.

The movie, which drops the postcards but keeps the edge, is a show-biz mother-daughter film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. [17 Sept 1990, p.70]

It's hard enough to find comedies like this at any time, so it's a small and welcome miracle to come upon one in the midst of a typical movie summer.

The film has refurbished the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer.

It also accomplishes that rarest achievement, the breathing of life into an ossified art form. The '70s has its first great epic.

Big and pretty, vigorous, thoughtful, this Hamlet expands the story with helpful flashbacks.

Director Gillian Armstrong and writer Robin Swicord have fashioned an entrancing film from this distinctly unfashionable classic.

In this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy, all the performers are tops. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors.

Not just a ripping yarn but a powerful, poignant coming-of-age story.

So, for those of you who were wondering if a great TV show could top itself at feature-film length, the good news is that The Simpsons did it! But "South Park" did it first.

Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.

Sexy, funny, sad and defiantly romantic, Feast of Love is the rare movie to cuddle up to.

It is, like quite a few Lumet pictures, rather small in scale, easy to overlook. But I think it is time to gather around a director who has embraced his octogenarian bleakness and sing his praises. Ultimately, I think you'll laugh a lot at what he has wrought here -- but only well after the movie is over and the full scale of its perversity settles into your bones.

I wouldn't call the film inspirational -- it is too well observed to succumb to easy sentiment -- but its realism is patiently engaging and subtly insinuating. And Linney and Hoffman are extraordinary.

I have rarely, if ever, seen a documentary reconstruction of a historical event that is so rich in firsthand (and well-preserved) photographic material.

A picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year's funniest smart movie.

Not since "This is Spinal Tap" have I had such a good time watching amiable idiocy stumble on toward uncertain glory.

Some of us knows that there's an American style -- best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic -- that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing.

The new picture provides a master coursed in cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment.

If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.

Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality).

No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating, a vital affirmation of the creative process.

Embrace the movie -- surely the most vivid and persuasive creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures -- as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience.

The movie is ridiculously over the top, inelegant and so defiantly ?crazy?that it works, reminding you how fun gore and creatures that go bump ?(and? grind) in the night can be. It's a sci-fi horror film, but no actual ?comedy?has made me laugh as much this year as Splice.?

Tom Ford -- the Texas-born fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci -- financed this first feature himself. The producer couldn't have hired a smarter director.

Kick-Ass moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is. But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly.

A contemplative crime drama with a high startlement quotient.

This is a survival manual turned into an existential prison-break movie; it cuts deep and, at its ecstatic climax, soars high.

It's a deceptively small piece of onscreen art that resonates afterward with such insistence that I felt positively nagged by it.

It's a cagey delight, and an imposing feature directorial debut for one of Britain's TV stalwarts.

The Trip may have familiar elements - it's pretty much "My Dinner With Andre" pinned to the plot of Alexander Payne's "Sideways" - but the badinage provides an immediate and lasting kick, as well as the spectacle of two champion combatants at the top of their game.

It is indeed impressive; and we mean not just this solid, satisfying final film - in which the Potter saga reaches its climax, if not quite its emotional apex - but the entirety of producer David Heyman's blockbuster franchise.

The looming presence of that planet and its possibilities turns Another Earth into a metaphysical treat, with influences that range from Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique and Blue" to Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris." It's the most soulful art movie of the summer.

Matthews brings to The Interrupters what every terrific documentary needs: an out-of-nowhere personality with the same magnetic watchability as any Hollywood star.

His performance is a canny portrait of leadership - part genius, part crazy guts, part dumb luck - and worthy of moving Pitt up to the playoff round of Oscar finalists for Best Actor. We'd put money on it.

Beyond its craftiness and impeccable craft, the film sparks a warm connection with the viewer. Like a smiling cavalier swinging into view to rescue an imperiled maiden, The Artist brings salvation to melancholy movie lovers. For here is that rare film indeed that offers pleasure beyond words.

Ramsey's film has its own strengths. We Need To Talk About Kevin doesn't just bring you to the outskirts of a parent's worst nightmare; this fever dream of guilt and loss takes you straight inside.

Miss Bala is a tragedy rendered with the savviest, moviewise virtuosity. A young woman's despair, and a nation's, was never so damned entertaining.

Arrietty brings the same magic to the mundane, elevating the ordinary confines of everyday life into sumptuous surprises. And while Arrietty lacks the sweep of "Spirited Away," "Princess Mononoke," or "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind," it preserves all the trademark sensitivity to the emotional turmoil of adolescence.

A documentary as vivid as any horror film, as heartbreaking as any Oscar-worthy drama.

Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.

Repressing its rage to tell an important story, The Invisible War identifies soldiers who are true heroes because they dared to fight for justice.

Frankenweenie has that youthful verve and the ghoulishness of strange kids who will some day be eccentric creators. This movie is an attic experiment for its makers to be proud of and for audiences to cherish.

Director Ursula Meier's Sister is a penetrating study of familial bonds, quietly devastating in parts, beautiful on whole and destined to make you fall in love with a practiced and entirely amoral preteen thief.

A canny director and a top star decided to dig deep to find the core of a compromised hero. And when they reach that center of gravity, Flight soars.

The Impossible is technologically a marvel - the tsunami experience is harrowingly believable - but also emotionally rich. I hesitate to use this term, since it is so often equated with hokey, but The Impossible is life-affirming.

It twists it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.

Side Effects virtually demands a three-word review: Just see it.

This is a test, requiring rapt concentration and acute attention, and repaying a hundredfold. For spectators dulled by the midget movies of an arrtstically timid era, the film may be a chore. For those on Malick’s rarified wavelength, it’s a wonder.

A devious mind game, Trance is also the most entertaining smart movie so far this year.

Glorious vision of youth and truth, love and loss, your name is Mud.

The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups. [24 Sept 1990, p.83]

Enigma is not for everyone, but the thoughtful (and the historically minded) will find it an absorbing and extremely well-textured experience.

The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.

Gives its fine actors room to breathe and behave--and in Michelle Rodriguez's case, glow.

A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that's what Ali is, and you can't help being drawn sympathetically into its hero's struggle for mastery of himself and his era.

Cecil B. proves how a dose of smart bad taste can be jolly good fun.

It stands, soars on its own. It moves to a seductive rhythm and vision.

Given that this holiday film season has come up more than a little short on love and laughter, one can easily forgive Kate & Leopold the slightly excessive lengths and complications to which it goes in search of those rare commodities.

A tortured testament from a true believer.

Well acted, and it achieves a strong, smart, engaging life of its own.

In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning.

We have this movie--full of acceptant, sidelong glances at human quirkiness--to delight us.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

A small epic with subtle strengths.

Handsome, well-acted, richly textured adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's novel.

It's best to see this as a drug buffet. Graze through the vignettes... and you'll find three or four tasty bits to snack on.

A smart, tough, yet curiously moving film.

This criminal comedy remains deliciously deadpan about the wages of psychopathy.

The purity of Dequenne's performance inspires awe.

This gripping documentary doesn't exactly say what went wrong, but the pain and puzzlement of its principals as things inexorably fall apart is palpable and saddening.

This wee, discreet little movie has a certain rueful intelligence about the ways we rather carelessly talk ourselves into love--and out of it as well.

Works as a sweetly loony ensemble piece, a sort of cracked romance that's typical of director Barry Levinson at his shrewd but unpretentious best.

A movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock.

This moving tribute to a handful of candles flickering in the darkness has the power to summon us--one prays--to our better selves.

From its first shot, of a mangled car high up in the branches of a tree, this cool, handsome thriller proceeds with an elliptical elegance.

The fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.

The result is a lovely movie, one that allows its characters unexpected spurts of growth and regression, darkness and grace.

Nichols and his once and current partner, screenwriter Elaine May, can make a funny, knowing, ultimately judicious film from the deliciously satyric satire.

This darkly sumptuous, hypnotically complex movie ought to have many constituencies.

A savory cocktail with a bitter twist.

Like its title -- blunt, thruthful, uncompromising. It is hard on an audience, even harrowing. But that's exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on earth to do.

The real fun is in seeing Hong Kong pop cinema at its innocent, crowd-pleasing best. And for Jackie, that goes double.

Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!

Toss in enough gorgeous bluegrass music to make the movie's CD a must-have, and you have prime, picaresque entertainment.

Here is a picture that has wit, a hairpin-turn narrative, high pizazz and ensemble star quality. Ready, set, Go.

To make an unembarrassing movie about embarrassment is definitely an eye-opening achievement.

Wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film.

Despite some rough edges and language, this is at heart a beguiling fantasy of comradeship.

So long as Casino stays focused on the excesses -- of language, of violence, of ambition -- in the life-styles of the rich and infamous, it remains a smart, knowing, if often repetitive, spectacle.

In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience.

Niftily quirky.

A perfectly coherent, handsomely rendered couple of hours, animated in particular by Damon's good performance -- shrewd, innocent, angry, wistful and, above all, likable.

A movie that is both as real as food on the table and as hauntingly evanescent as its taste on one's tongue.

These people are fools for heedless love and, perhaps, needless complication, and you can't help responding to the heat of their passion.

Sex, drugs and rack 'n' ruin; pretty people doing nasty things to one another...honestly, what more could you want in a movie?

Just gives us Andy, the pop postmodernist, and permits us to make what we will of him, which is a fascinating activity.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]

Fast, witty, glamorous, with thrill piling on giggle atop gasp. [11 June 1990, p.85]

This movie is more emotionally remote than Salles' fine "Central Station." But it is starkly beautiful and says something potent to a world in which nations, like these families, engage in mindless blood feuds.

"Shrek," this film's prime competition for the first Animated Feature Oscar, is a synoptic parody of fairy tales. In Monsters, Inc. the gags aren't as spot-on but the technique is miles ahead. The vision is grander and warmer.

For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too.

Has so much razzle-dazzle that viewers may end up both raised and dazed. It's remorselessly inventive, trying anything fast and sassy to keep you watching. In other words, it's the most honest display of showpeople's need to be noticed this side of a Madonna concert.

It's a real and rare pleasure to see Costner and Duvall together -- these masters of intense passivity, who know how to be watched when they're listening.

It will fascinate and possibly even delight cinephiles. Who does not enjoy gawking at accidents, particularly those in which there are no fatalities and the sad story unfolds in almost slow-motion clarity?

Binoche is especially subtle and radiant in another splendid drama from Leconte.

Take a while to get their vehicle to sail and soar. But when it does, this Planet is a treasure.

Occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder.

A raw, unblinking film. It teaches that in dire circumstances our only obligation is to our own survival; all else -- culture, ideology, even love -- is a dispensable luxury.

McTiernan does not fall too much in love with any scene, character or gadget. He has judged his material (and our attention spans) very well. His alternation of menace and human interest, technological wizardry and action sequences is subtly calibrated, ultimately hypnotic in its effect. [5 Mar 1990, p.70]

Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat.

This documentary, a gallivanting time trip through a bolder film era, is Herzog's final collaboration with Kinski: an act of love and exorcism.

A smart live-and-let-live parable.

It's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote.

So here's a tip for those attending this handsomely acted, epic-length little film. Ease into the sleaze, stare at the party animals, look but don't touch, and, oh, boogie all night. [October 6, 1997]

As long as Training Day stays tightly focused on the struggle between the two cops, the movie is first rate.

At times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. [26 Sept 1988]

Alvin's tragic memories give perspective to the triumph of his trek, even as Farnsworth's weathered brilliance makes this movie a G as in gem.

If this sounds like an old-fashioned sex comedy, it is -- sexy, for sure, and funny, in wild spurts.

Cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny.

An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.

An excellent film. [16 Jan 1989, p.64]

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention is a cure for nagging ethnic generalities. This Palestinian sort-of-comedy has a sly wit that amuses and disturbs in equal, salubrious measure.

Seduction is more important than deduction in this chic display of star quality to the eighth power.

Nettelbeck is a sharp observer of life's surprises, and Gedeck has an appraising, intelligent beauty. Her Martha is like the film: tart on the outside, sweet on the inside, with a delectable aftertaste.

A lot of very good actors...do honest, probing work in a context where, typically, less will do.

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.

Quite a good movie--a big, fat, rousing, intelligent, daring, retro, many-adjective-requiring entertainment.

The result is an escapist fantasy that is -- Damon's and Potente's persuasive performances aside -- as weightless and inconsequential as a musical. And at the moment every bit as welcome.

The comedic first part of Jacques Audiard's film doesn't achieve a seamless connection with its melodramatic second half, but you can't deny the originality of his conceit or the tart cynicism of its development.

Colombani has created uncommonly arresting entertainment.

Isn't an audience that was nurtured on the doomsday screeds of art-house cinema entitled to vacation in the warmth of a superior film about a boy with almost too many people to love?

Simone is a funny, smart, improbably successful satire on contemporary celebrity obsessions, the waning summer's most delirious comedy.

Everyone in the cast has his or her solo, and all rise brilliantly to their occasions, notably Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Beals, Mina Badie and a divinely neurotic Jane Adams.

An often deft, frequently droll little movie.

Kevin Spacey (gives) a truly great performance.

Here's another warning: you may laugh yourself sick--as sick as this ruthlessly funny movie is.

The film dances; the heart sings.

There is something arresting about it too. The damned thing keeps gnawing at your mind -- if only for its almost perfect lack of conventional sentiment. Or movieness.

Boyle's ingenuity with the camera gives this fraught journey plenty of menace and pizazz.

The movie ends in a burst of violence that we are unprepared for and don't believe. Maybe it's the film's final joke. It's a miscalculation -- though a calculated one -- but it does not erase one's fond memories of all the odd, deeply humorous behavior that preceded it.

It's a bright, engaging bauble with half a dozen Elvis Presley songs for Mom and Dad, and just enough sass -- Stitch sticks his tongue into his nose and eats his snot -- to keep the tweeners giggling.

After “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Hulk,” there's something refreshing about this movie's complete lack of intellectual pretense.

We're talking fables, not reality, here, and this is a fine and merry one--"Ms. Woods Goes to Washington"--played to airy perfection by Reese Witherspoon and a light-on-its-feet cast.

Writer-director Ramsay neither sentimentalizes nor garishes up the lost children in this observant and poetic drama.

It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop-social memory.

Ross is a filmmaker with a taste for inherently sentimental tales…but the discipline not to play mawkishly to our sentiments. You will be moved by Seabiscuit--but not to tears.

It's an exercise in style by Robert Rodriguez and not to be taken any more (or less) seriously than his giddy "Spy Kids" movies.

Even when the movie sags and strains a bit in Act III, Clooney keeps it flying with old-fashioned movie-star allure. He's got it all: Cary Grant's looks and, inside, Bob Hope's snake-oil-salesman soul.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s -- people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore -- stupid us --but we ought to be glad someone does.

As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss or feathers.