Amy Taubin

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.