Amy Taubin

Eads's wit, generosity, insight, and courage are irresistible.

Despite its incoherence and inaudible dialogue, this slice-of-life film manages to be simultaneously thuggish and platitudinous.

A very beautiful film, but its bleached desert colors and flatter perspectives are less inviting, and the back-and-forth between present and past can occasionally be confusing.

Primary story line is clumsy and badly acted. But he (Lee) reminds you that movies have power, that they matter, and for a few brilliant moments, Bamboozled matters more than any other American movie this year.

Not nearly the mindfuck it wants to be.

That Simon Birch is not as maudlin as it might have been is largely due to the intensely thoughtful, prickly performance of 11-year-old Ian Michael Smith, who plays Simon.

That in such a miserable film I could still care whether his character lived or died is, perhaps, the greatest proof that Chow Yun Fat's a movie star.

More mushy than mystical.

Director Eric Bross has a smooth nonstyle that serves him well until the screenplay turns melodramatic at the end.

This is the Julia Roberts performance her fans have been waiting for.

Clichéd and condescending.

East/West fusion aside, The Musketeer is a stale Euro-pudding.

So formulaic and predictable that you're bored even when you're scared.

Garvy has worked hard to weave the interviews into an exciting narrative, but the focus is perhaps too narrow for the film to be as politically effective as it could have been.

A smart, sweet, and altogether smashing evocation of teenage girlhood.

The many eight-to-11-year-olds in the audience seemed completely enthralled.

An understated gem.

Although I don't begrudge Borchardt his year of fame, what he doesn't seem to understand about his exploitation creeps me out.

Singer achieves remarkable intimacy with his subjects.

Despite Sunshine's historical scope and multiplicity of characters, it doesn't shed half as much light on its subject -- identity and anti-Semitism -- as does, for example, Agnieszka Holland's claustrophobic chamber piece "Angry Harvest."

While the acting ensemble is crucial, it's not the only asset here.

So hackneyed and so condescending to its potential audience (adult women) that even Lifetime might hesitate before running it.

Tender, poignant, and homoerotically charged, this complicated father-son relationship is brought to life by two brilliant actors and a director who's canny enough to give them all the room they need.

Except for Polley and Rea, the performances are heavy-handed.

Barely a movie.

A pop culture document for a mass audience.

It's a sign of how watered-down the movie is that only the supporting actors have any bite.

Valentine isn't exploitative or trendy in the manner of so many indie films. Rather, it seems like the kind of art film that might have been dreamed up by a feverish high schooler.

Filled with vivid and likable characters, The Opportunists could be the basis for a TV series as captivating as "The Sopranos."

What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.

The film is too eager to please and falls short of the novel's tragic dimension.

Series 7 could have turned out as ugly as the second season of "Survivor," were it not for the pleasure Minahan takes in melodrama.

(You) might be charmed by the film's blend of kineticism, car-culture rituals, and hilariously flat-footed dialogue.

A caper film hardly worthy of his (Newman's) presence.

I suspect that Time Code was a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.

Mindless, shoddy (lurching zooms, no color correction, an entire reel out of sync) depiction of some very big guys who work as bouncers.

Gibson has never lacked chemistry with his leading ladies, from Sigourney Weaver in "The Year of Living Dangerously" to Julia Roberts in "Conspiracy Theory," but faced with the awkward Hunt -- Hollywood's bland antidote to the Lolita syndrome -- he doesn't even try.

Pretty much a mess, but it also has a couple of long stretches that are extremely daring in that they reveal black family dynamics we've never seen on screen before.

A sympathetic but conventional disease-of-the-week movie.

A progressive but not very funny comedy of manners.

The show that Horrocks puts on when she finally takes to the stage is more than worth the wait.

It's entertainment that never lets us off the hook.

Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first.

Has all the hallmarks of a Pennebaker production. The editing is seamless, the drama builds throughout, and the arc of the central character is as shapely as in a Hollywood fiction.

Cross "Rushmore" with "Cheech and Chong" and you might get Outside Providence.

We may not want another film about incest, but there's a necessity about this one that won't be denied.

Time has tamed some of the terror and eroticism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but it’s still a haunting thriller about guilt and the supernatural. What’s notable (more notable even than the much celebrated bedroom scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in which sex is displaced into memory even as it’s taking place) is that Roeg’s use of the death of a child as the focus of a horror film never feels exploitative.

Overproduced as a Super Bowl soft-drink commercial, so much so that even its potentially insightful moments seem like movie fakery.

It may seem perverse to fault a movie for being too accurate, but when surface accuracy is coupled with tunnel vision about self and society the result is a wee bit irritating.

An Indiewood spoof that's more winning than anyone who wasn't a close friend of the director could possibly expect, R2PC satirizes not only wannabe auteurs but also that overworked genre, the faux documentary, while functioning as a credible study guide for Filmmaking 101.

Antoine Fuqua's propulsive, elegantly written police thriller, offers the unsettling spectacle of Denzel Washington.

It's this strategy (however unconscious), and not simply a lack of directing talent, that makes Hedwig so relentlessly assaultive, heavy-handed, and emotionally monochromatic.

Little more than a cartoon, and not a funny one at that.

Inept as a thriller, Place Vendôme nevertheless intrigues.

Made with intelligence and formal sophistication.

The most progressive, good-hearted studio film of the summer.

A sub-sitcom stretched to an interminable 85 minutes.

His film is hardly memorable, but it's amusing enough for two hours, and it never panders or cloys.

Figgis's frenetic and grossly self-aggrandizing adaption of Strindberg's worse-for-wear two-hander about the battle between the sexes and the classes.

A film of rare tenderness and mystery.

So low-key it could be mistaken for a throwaway. But Meadows's understanding of childhood fears and fantasies and the yearning, heartfelt performances he draws from his two young actors should not be underestimated.

A witty, trenchant script, lots of complicated characters, and a few actors who turn human frailty into something nearly sublime.

Largely a showcase for Puri, and he rises to the occasion with a performance that bursts from the screen and tears into your heart.

Egoyan, whose sophisticated eye is connected to a brain that seems, for the moment, to have gone dead.