Bill Gallo

This badly muddled adaptation of a complex novel chases after Guterson's many skeins and themes with no unifying principle in mind.

You'd better be in the mood for a blitz of bumper-sticker philosophy, a major machismo transfusion and 94 minutes' worth of mind-numbing repetition, complete with a musical score seemingly lifted from reality TV.

There is more anxiety than loving humor in the proceedings, and a noticeable lack of charm.

An occasionally amusing but wrongheaded remake that arrives more than four decades after the original blazed across the screen.

For Caan's shtick alone, The Yards is worthwhile, but we may also be witnessing the emergence, in Gray, of a young filmmaker who's just starting to find the range.

Picture the dopes from "Dumb and Dumber" getting mixed up in organized crime -- but without benefit of Jim Carrey's rubberized pratfalls or his go-to-hell anarchism.

If, having seen "Jackass" half a dozen times, you now yearn to watch a pair of identical twins from Texas Tech cavort in the wet T-shirt contest or hear mobs of drunken undergraduates screaming for more margaritas, here's your flick.

The cast has plenty of room to emote, but their task feels a bit empty and thankless. For the most part, they're carrying the director's water.

The flashy sensationalism of The Sixth Sense -- maybe the best thing about it -- is at war with its desire for contemplation.

A thoroughly unremarkable police action movie starring the magnetic Samuel L. Jackson.

Atkins has trouble keeping the tension high and the jokes rolling. Halfway through he begins tripping over the noir genre's dark rules, and in the end he veers off into a haze of romantic redemption that Billy Wilder and Nicholas Ray would have scoffed at.

The whole thing has a dour resolve that undermines its attempts at humor.

There's so much EFFORT here to convince us of the switcheroo (already one of Hollywood's oldest ploys) that we soon weary of it.

The World's Fastest Indian is not likely to be regarded as some kind of masterpiece--far from it--but Hopkins once more keeps our ears open and our eyes fixed on the screen.

Parents wishing to protect their beloved daughters from cliché overload might do well to withhold the old allowance money for a couple of weeks -- until the inevitable bout of Mandymoviemania subsides.

More well-meant than well-made, the movie is ethnically accurate (sometimes, you smother in the marinara), but its forced sensitivity can get abrasive, and the drama is full of false notes.

Happily, the director and writer Andrea Gibb treat little Frankie with as much dramatic respect as the grown-up characters, and he saves the movie from killing sweetness.

Homer would be hard-pressed to find any remaining shred of "The Iliad" in this over-the-top entertainment. It has a lot of loud passion but not much poetry, and that's appropriate for a movie that could well be subtitled My Big Fat Greek Bloodletting.

Little Ralph comes off like "Billy Elliot" on steroids. Still, this an energetic movie that can be truly hilarious in spots, and it captures perfectly the oppressive atmosphere of a Catholic boys' school in the ’50s.

In this beautifully devious, exceptionally well-made entertainment, Mr. John Frankenheimer does it all, and more, with the assurance of an old master.

In the end, the filmmakers strike a bad bargain between action and myth: In their obvious attempt to shoo everyone into the tent--romantic and roughneck alike--they don't serve either end of the spectrum very well.

Villain? Great. Verdict? Average.

A reasonably entertaining -- and occasionally very moving -- picture.

Whatever else is weak or indulgent in this fledgling effort -- self-consciousness and a certain grim solemnity come to mind -- it has the jolt of truth about it, like a lot of thinly veiled fiction.

The film is amateurish in places, but fascinating: Bring your eager hypothalamus and your tuned-up frontal lobes with you. They'll get a workout.

Alternately fascinating and distracting.

Unfortunately, Bullock and Affleck don't strike many sparks or produce many yuks…they're not exactly built for comedy.

Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that's so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road to becoming art that it slips off into the ditch.

Despite his natty wardrobe and calculated sangfroid, Penn doesn't summon up quite the right image.

There are many winning moments here, but director Nigel Cole (Saving Grace) sometimes imparts to the thing a terrible case of the cutes and an overeagerness to please.

Like hundreds of doomed movie protagonists before him, the hero of Life as a House doesn't have long to live. By the second reel, you may find yourself wishing his time on the planet was even shorter.

Yet another version of the conscience-stricken white soldier Kevin Costner played in "Dances With Wolves" and the Indian killer-turned-noble warrior Tom Cruise gave us in "The Last Samurai."

Cox, bespectacled and deglamorized here, shows some acting ability, but by the time you get through this 78-minute bag of tricks, you could be suffering from a case of perceptual overload.

The cumulative effect of the movie's many Kodak moments and stretches of greeting-card sentiment is that they kill us with kindness.

Vertical Limit represents another kind of propaganda--namely the current Hollywood notion that the bigger and louder and longer a movie is, the more people will want to see it, even if that means getting numbed before your popcorn's cold.

The low-wattage thrills, lukewarm jokes and unconvincing caricatures we encounter in The Big Bounce simply don't generate that kind of excitement.

Damon looks like a kid lost in the wrong neighborhood, and his acting manners underscore that impression--everything is a bit too fine, too neat...An intermittently interesting, intermittently foolish film.

Suffice it to say that Cruise never seems right in this part--never as treacherous as he should be, nor as mysteriously tortured. Foxx has his moments, but there's no room for his trademark humor, and we can never quite get our minds around the idea that the hit man has beguiled the cabbie.

Muhammad Ali's spirit, his life force, is not quite present here, despite Smith's astonishing mimicry and Mann's considerable perspiration.

Carrey's brand of exhausting physical comedy is a far cry from Segal's useful bewilderment, so this ride is both rougher and loonier.

As usual, Hollywood hitmeister Bay is more interested in blowing stuff up than in addressing deep questions like the morality of science and the false myths of civilization, and these explosions go on for over two hours.

The result is a kind of quirky, high-toned soap opera.

Emperor gives off a distinctly musty odor -- not least because Kline's character.

What a shame to squander the dramatic riches of Jones's life on third-rate caricature and paint-by-numbers storytelling.

Shades of "House of Sand and Fog," without the compelling drama.

This sweet-tempered retelling of "Romeo and Juliet," which substitutes uplift for tragedy, gives off enough energy and light that the audience wants to believe in it even if society's impacted prejudices continue to say otherwise.

As another exposé of stubbornness, petty opportunism, and greed, there's some residual value in the story of two unappealing characters.

The problem here lies not in the abundance of blood--we've seen that before--but in the film's pounding insistence, which prevails for all two hours and 40 minutes, that we also absorb a rather thin and unreliable history lesson.

Comes straight out of the Forrest Gump School of Interpersonal Magic, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

Here's a fervent, G-rated version of contemporary life in which the divine overcomes the earthly and miracles are commonplace. It's aimed squarely at the emerging Christian market.

A teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on "family values" and moral absolutes: It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits army are unlikely to buy many tickets, but those who do will probably see the thing as sanctimonious pabulum -- even for its target audience of adolescents.

The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes' best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood's irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take.

By all accounts, Marsh has absorbed classic crazy-killer thrillers like "Psycho," "The Night of the Hunter" and "Badlands," but The King isn't likely to join such esteemed company.

The movie's not great, but Mom might like it.

In the end, it demonstrates all over again the virtual impossibility of doing Nabokov justice on film, because his work is so resolutely and brilliantly made of words.

This plodding mediocrity displays none of the flair or the compelling trickery that enlivened its 2002 prototype.

This romantic tragedy has the measured gentility of the M.I. classics, but its sheen of crass melodrama is startling, and its many metaphors run amok in a tangle.

Director Thomas Carter (no relation to Ken) relies on processed emotion and stock characters, and not even the inevitable Big Game excites us very much.

It's a workmanlike adventure yarn, intermittently reverent to the canon but not very inspired, and it must be said that Banderas is starting to show signs of wear.

Mangold gets stuck in the gooey sweet spots of his tale a little more often than he breaks loose with a bracing jolt of perversity.

In the end, Stevie is a relentlessly messy, sometimes trying picture of family dysfunction, official neglect and personal tragedy, a disturbing redneck soap opera about real people and real consequences in which the protagonist--like the filmmaker--often proves to be as unlikable as he is sympathetic.

Along with his tedious array of tricks and twists, Parkhill stuffs the film with enough dizzying flashbacks, camera jitters and rock-and-roll editing techniques to drive a 14-year-old MTV addict nuts.

This unstinting look at growing up in the 1990s never pulls its punches. Bridging the angst of Generation X and the uncertainties of Generation Y, Chick reveals the romantic traumas, career screwups and self-absorbed fantasies of a group of eastern college grads.

This is a deeply disturbing (if not very satisfying) view of what happened at Columbine and in other school shootings.

For now, it might be best to acknowledge this as an impressive debut and wait for the grown-up stuff to come.

Instead of slick heroism, the saving grace of The Matador (which was obviously made on something less than a blockbuster budget) lies in the comic interplay between Brosnan's ignoble Mr. Noble and the hapless square he picks to serve his purposes.

Carrey and the Farrellys are equal-opportunity offenders.

This resolutely old-fashioned movie is less a drama of the streets than a kind of recruiting film.

If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do.

Surprisingly tender and resolutely unpostmodern.

Hamburg's smartypants banter is a bit spotty, but the bathroom humor, of all things, hits the mark, and Stiller's trademark wide-eyed bafflement wins the day again.

Competently if unremarkably directed by Englishwoman Clare Kilner, should prove compelling enough to Moore's huge legion of fans.

Some Marvel fans and die-hard devotees of Lou Ferrigno, the bodybuilder who played The Hulk on television (and who does a brief walk-on here), may find Ang Lee's whole enterprise grandiose and, given its not-always-successful attempt to fuse brains and brawn, a little bit silly.

This is a Tom Cruise vehicle, pure and simple, and that means it's destined to be the biggest chunk of guilty white-boy wish fulfillment since Kevin Costner got down with the Sioux in "Dances With Wolves." In fact, the parallels are all but plagiaristic.

Not a film for everyone, but if you're in the mood for a little sensory overload, some spirited intellectual gymnastics and an introduction to the most intriguing new actress Europe has produced in years, get in line with the rest of the thrill-seekers.