Elvis Mitchell

It's true that a smile can take years off a person - not that such a thing matters in Yoko Ono's case.

It's so funny: whenever there's a new technology introduced, there's always this fear it's going to end entertainment as we know it. When records came around, they were going to be the end of live music. Nobody would ever want to go see live music again.

Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.

The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'

No actor has made a career of exerting determination to the extent that Matt Damon has. In the 'Bourne' movies, he burned himself down to a central nervous system - his focus fried away unnecessary calories.

The pleasantly crude 'Hall Pass' reminds us of what's been missing from movies: Those squirm-inducing moments in comedy that produce enough discomfort that, at points, what we're watching is half a heartbeat away from a horror film.

'The Third Man,' directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever made.

The mission of '8 Mile' is essentially to garner sympathy for a white rapper involved in an old-school shootout - a rap contest. This may be the final frontier for pop, more unbelievable than the prospect of launching a member of 'N Sync into orbit.

In his very first film, Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu makes the kind of journey some directors don't - or can't - travel in an entire career.

I dress well. I travel; I seem to be relatively glamorous for a film guy - which, to me, is like being the fastest midget in the circus.

Just the idea of seeing a type of narrative we've not seen before is a chance to be surprised.

A lot of the time, you see all this ambition from these black actors, and it's just pouring off the screen. Because they don't often get a chance to work, and when they do, they don't usually get a chance to work with other black people.

We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture - by art, if we're lucky. And it's amazing how often people have lost sight of this.

Though narrative cohesion isn't the strength of 'Mean Girls,' which works better from scene to scene than as a whole, the intelligence shines in its understanding of contradictions, keeping a comic distance from the emotional investment of teenagers that defined 'Ridgemont High' and later the adolescent angst movies of John Hughes.

'Ali' offers stunning re-creations of bouts Ali fought. In the second Liston fight, the auditorium is underlighted and clouded with fetid cigar smoke, which was why the famous picture of a snarling Ali standing over Liston was so dramatic; indoor arenas are now bright enough to be spotted from Alpha Centauri.

Miramax seems to be showing the same faith in Roberto Benigni's 'Pinocchio' that the Republican Party showed in Trent Lott the live-action version of Carlo Collodi's fairy tale about the wooden puppet whose only ambition was to be a real live boy was sneaked into theaters Christmas Day.

Mr. Miyazaki's specialty is taking a primal wish of kids, transporting them to a fantasyland, and then marooning them there. No one else conjures the phantasmagoric and shifting morality of dreams - that fascinating and frightening aspect of having something that seems to represent good become evil - in the way this master Japanese animator does.