question: Bolstered by Nolte's strong performance, The Good Thief brims with seductive style.

numbered reviews: 1. It's a sticky-suave erotic portrait of a man swaggering his way to the bottom of the proverbial barrel.
2. There's a sad, compulsive, edge-of-the-abyss desperation to Nick Nolte's intuitive and informed performance...
3. This is a movie for which you want to give an award to the casting director, Susie Figgis.
4. We came, we saw, we forgot. Plenty of smoke but no fire in 'The Good Thief'
5. With his haggard good looks and bearish presence, Nolte is the main event in this colorful three-ring circus of a heist picture.
6. [Nolte] could not be cast more perfectly.
7. A stunning intro for a Georgian (Russia) beauty whose tantalizing assuredness is a major contribution to the movie. Men will swoon (and write rhapsodically) for this engaging seductress...
8. The South of France has rarely looked so grim and inviting as it does in Neil Jordan's new film, The Good Thief.
9. If director Neil Jordan was going for criminal cool, he hit the jackpot with The Good Thief.
10. Jordan has made a film that is both traditional enough to hold those moviegoers who don't catch its kickiness, and cinematic enough to hook those in thrall of 'camera art.'


question: Though Blade II offers more of what worked in the original, its plot and character development appear to have been left on the cutting room floor.

numbered reviews: 1. Why spend $9 on the same stuff you can get for a buck or so in that greasy little vidgame pit in the theater lobby?
2. The vampire thriller Blade II starts off as a wild hoot and then sucks the blood out of its fun - toward the end, you can feel your veins cringing from the workout.
3. Blade II is the rare sequel that improves upon its original.
4. One of those rare sequels that's actually better than the original.
5. There's no seduction here, no build. You might leave feeling strangely sucked dry.
6. The plot is riddled with improbabilities and abandons its own internal logic, but the supporting cast plays their characters as if they really believed the nonsensical mumbo-jumbo the script asks them to spout.
7. It's a bad action movie because there's no rooting interest and the spectacle is grotesque and boring.
8. While the filmmakers obviously know their fan base/target audience and deliver the goods to them in spades, there's little here to recommend.
9. While the new film is much more eye-catching than its blood-drenched Stephen Norrington-directed predecessor, the new script by the returning David S. Goyer is much sillier.
10. This movie's greatest strengths and weaknesses are in its action scenes.


question: Kazakh sheep herders get their cinematic due in this lovely, unsentimental debut from director Sergei Dvortsevoy.

numbered reviews: 1. A folk tale disguised as a documentary, Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan appears something like actual reality, half-planned and half-found.
2. A visually stunning coming-of-age drama set in the vast barrenness of southern Kazakhstan's Hunger Steppe.
3. Despite its rich, picturesque scenery and a few briefly amusing and tender moments, Tulpan feels uneven, meandering, unimaginative and somewhat bland both as a drama and as a comedy.
4. The details of the exotic trappings on display may be relatively new but the rites-of-passage story is as old as civilisation itself in Tulpan, a timeless and endearing coming-of-age tale for the Story of the Weeping Camel crowd.
5. It dares to be sentimental. Underneath the fly-swatted surface is a gentle coming-of-age.
6. Skip the latest Hollywood trifle and see this instead.
7. Story of a young man's efforts to reconcile his imagined paradise with the harsh landscape he hopes will sustain him offers a romantic vision of nomad life on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
8. Poignantly captures a society at the hinge of change, where the beauty of the rugged environment and the pride of fulfilling traditions compete with the pull of the city.
9. It captures the life-and-death demands of a seemingly alien landscape within the context of a generational paradigm shift in Central Asia.
10. Perceptive and humorous, this gentle drama is uplifting and resonant.


question: Director Richard Attenborough is typically sympathetic and sure-handed, but it's Ben Kingsley's magnetic performance that acts as the linchpin for this sprawling, lengthy biopic.

numbered reviews:
1. Worthy, handsomely mounted, but highly conventional and ultimately dull.
2. The film opens with an acknowledgment that it can't do justice to an entire life but that it will content itself with capturing the spirit of the man.
3. [The world] really needs this film.
4. An epic biopic, over three hours in length, Gandhi captures the spirit of the man and his struggles.
5. Ben Kingsley is nothing short of mesmerizing in the title role.
6. Both script and camera serve only as a canvas upon which the masterful Ben Kingsley paints a touchingly lifelike picture of one of the greatest men in history.
7. An informative and enjoyable movie.
8. In playing Gandhi, an actor must be less concerned with physical verisimilitude than with spiritual presence, and here Kingsley is nothing short of astonishing.
9. Attenborough's crowning achievement as a director.
10. Richard Attenborough's Gandhi is every bit as sumptuous as everyone had expected.