question: Though the characters are difficult to watch at times, Aberdeen burns with ferocious honesty and strong performances.

numbered reviews: 1. Intelligent, moving and often beautifully photographed.
2. A ferociously observant study of two characters.
3. A raw, haunting experience.
4. Difficult to watch, but it's also impossible to take your eyes off the screen.
5. Moland has again directed Skarsgard into a new frontier of dramatic acting, and what is probably the most nakedly convincing performance of his career.
6. A sentimental and painfully mundane European drama.
7. A little European indie pic that digs down to the roots of its characters, describing people's lives and relationships in ways that resonate with clarity and heart.
8. Clean and transparent, with no movie director tricks.
9. I cannot think of another film that treats so heatedly the range of emotional possibilities between a young woman and her father.
10. [Headey's] performance not only gives definition and emotional force to a shapeless movie, but it's the kind of star turn that will have Hollywood producers and agents engaged in kickboxing death matches to ink her.


question: Preachy and repetitive in parts, Baby Boy still manages to exude authenticity, thanks to its competent cast.

numbered reviews: 1. Singleton just may be challenging us to laugh at the film or with it and then feel extremely uneasy for doing so. If so, that's admirable; if not, he's made a very strange soap opera.
2. A meandering, flawed, but electrifying film.
3. The subject is certainly worthy, but Singleton's script is too repetitive, pedantic, and protracted to do it justice.
4. Baby Boy earns credibility for its insights by moving beyond image and rhetoric and quickly establishing Jody, his friends, lovers and family members as complex, striving, fallible human beings.
5. Singleton hammers home his thesis ... with a monotonous single-mindedness that dulls the usual acuity of his perceptions.
6. A bold criticism of young black men who carelessly father babies, live off their mothers and don't even think of looking for work.
7. Baby Boy is more insistent in its didacticism than Boyz N the Hood, the passion and conviction are no less heartfelt.
8. 'Baby Mama Drama' in da Hood.
9. Tells it like it is with just a glimmer of how it ought to be.
10. What holds the movie together ... is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.


question: Val Kilmer delivers a powerhouse performance as one of rock's most incendiary figures, but unfortunately, Oliver Stone is unable to shed much light on the circus surrounding the star.

numbered reviews: 1. Kilmer is convincing in the lead role, although he never allows the viewer to share any emotions.
2. Not exactly Stone's finest hour, but a worthwhile portrait of 1960s (counter) culture and the self-destruction of an icon.
3. The attempts to plumb Morrison's sensitive side, his (pretentious) philosophical bent and his struggle to channel his considerable talents positively are something of a blur in the trippy kaleidoscope.
4. Whatever reservations one may have about this exhausting, dark-side-of-the-'60s epic, there can be little doubt that Stone has captured a particular, bombs-away brand of rock & roll excess with definitive candor.
5. The film really proves only that Jim was a bad drunk and a worse friend, and that in no way was his life exemplary.
6. Intense biopic full of drugs, sex and rock'n'roll.
7. Val Kilmer gives the performance of his career as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's biopic, so it's a shame the surrounding film lets him down.
8. Val Kilmer does, however, pull off a remarkable impression of the troubled vocalist, although he's more convincing on stage than he is in his drunken, drug-fuelled reveries.
9. Stone is not the most subtle of directors, but he has the ability to translate his passion for subject matter (he's an unabashed admirer of Morrison) to the screen with a strong visual flair. That talent in evidence here.
10. After the first hour or so of The Doors, the only door I wanted to see was the one marked ''EXIT.''


question: With exotic locales, impressive special effects, and a worthy central villain, You Only Live Twice overcomes a messy and implausible story to deliver another memorable early Bond flick.

numbered reviews:
1. Sean Connery may have been eying retirement, but he and Bond were by now moulded together, his sleek machismo indelibly imprinted on 007 forever.
2. It isn't "Thunderball" and it sure isn't "Goldfinger," but it IS old-school Connery Bond, so obviously it's a darn good time.
3. This noisy and wildly violent picture... is evidently pegged to the notion that nothing succeeds like excess. And because it is shamelessly excessive, it is about a half-hour too long.
4. Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent.
5. A well-crafted installment in the Bond series.
6. Sean Connery's disenchantment with his starring role is unmistakable in this, the fifth Bond spectacular.
7. Sean Connery plays 007 with his usual finesse.
8. A primetime Bond adventure plus the best Bond movie theme of all time.
9. Roald Dahl's implausible script is padded out with the usual exotic locations, stunts, and trickery.
10. Tons of fun, really, and Donald Pleasence as Blofeld is inimitable.