Carrie Rickey

The trippy creation of onetime marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob is a cockeyed optimist toiling at the bottom of the fast-food chain.

Alas, this joyless affair doesn't have a clou.

Elaborately establishes a mood but fails to deliver a dramatic payoff.

Unlike most films about teenagers, the performances are happy-sad-realistic. Lerman, who plays the least expressive of the three principals, does a fine job at suggesting the active inner life of an externally inexpressive youth.

The best performances are those of Portman and the resourceful Peter Sarsgaard (Shattered Glass) as Mark.

Shulman photographed buildings as if they were movie stars: He found their best angles and immortalized them.

Unnerving.

Sneakily funny and hopelessly romantic, Reality Bites speaks with the distinctive, ironic voice that marks it as The Graduate of Generation X. [18 Feb 1994, p.03]

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

Taylor-Wood stresses the universals rather than the specifics of John's youth. So don't go expecting a Fab Four origin story. The word Beatles is never uttered. But do go.

Though one wishes Graff's eye were as developed as his keen ear, he elicits rafter-raising musical performances from Latifah, Palmer, and Jordan that are irresistible fun.

Jon Favreau, the actor-director who made the delightful family film "Elf," has a firm grip and a light touch with this material about bickering brothers who find a board game that zaps the family home into hyperspace.

A movie about people who literally carry a lot of emotional baggage, metaphorically unpack it, and spiritually lighten their loads. By the end, I felt lighter. Which is closer to enlightenment than most movies get.

That rumpled grumpus Paul Giamatti seizes the title role in Barney's Version, summoning irresistibility and irritability to create a character as endearing as he is galling.

For those who have seen Tarkovsky's moody original, let me say that Soderbergh skims the fat from the 1972 film. What's left is a rich stew of longing.

A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.

Michael Jackson's This Is It looks beyond the reconstructed face and spindly body of the late King of Pop and basks in his meteoric light.

This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

The story is as basic as a peasant meal - and just as hearty.

As is the case with many English comedies, some of the film's slang is hard to understand. But Jennings' sprightly films proves that although England and America are countries divided by the same language, they are united by slapstick comedy.

While Weitz's story is diverting, the performances cut deeper than the film.

It's a rare window on an artistic collaboration.

Even if you don't give a shiitake mushroom about food, there's much to savor in this lively comedy with dramatic aftertastes.

From its antagonists to its art direction, everything about Johnston's movie has a been-there, seen-that familiarity. Yet Evans' clean-cut idealism and objectives make old-fashioned patriotism look fresh.

The moral of this softhearted tale is that family values can rehabilitate and tenderize even the toughest of birds. But you'll forgive me if I liked it less when Stuart smoothed Margalo's feathers than when Snowbell's fundamental cattiness made the fur fly.

While most of the talking heads, including the funny and articulate Barbara Ehrenreich (herself a breast cancer survivor), are not likely to join runs and walks for the cure, Pool shows how such events create community and sisterhood.

A light-as-powder family comedy.

Smart, curious and brave.

Frisky, raunchy and frequently riotous.

Bakula is the ideal surrogate for a perplexed audience. Similarly, Whitacre's exasperated wife, played by Melanie Lynskey, is drily funny.

This seriously funny group portrait of third-generation clam diggers (and their wives and sisters) is fresh as today's catch and about as tasty. Its '70s soundtrack positively swaggers.

Pure, undiluted joy.

Restoration moves from farce to spiritual parable to melodrama with such inconsistency that it could be a case study in 17th-century multiple personality disorder. [02 Feb 1996, p.05]

If Coixet's film is substantially more restrained than its explicit source material (Nicholas Meyer, himself a fine novelist and director of the second and best Star Trek film, adapted), it is no less provocative as a poetic meditation on love, sex and death.

Stunning, beautifully observed character study.

An unexpectedly moving family portrait of cousins we didn't know we had.

An appealing, low-budget musical.

Funny things, images. While to depict something visually is not necessarily to endorse it, when Bigelow shows rape as she does in Strange Days, she does so from the rapist's point of view. It's kind of like making a movie about the dangers of the atom bomb that glamorizes the aesthetic beauty of the mushroom cloud. [13 Oct 1995, p.05]

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.

Some call Margot a comedy. For me, it is a tragedy impaled by comic moments.

Basic as a home movie -- and twice as touching -- Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories is a black-and-white silent comedy that pays tribute both to Charles Chaplin's The Kid (1921) and to the urban homeless. [06 Apr 1990, p.4]

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

Unsettling, intelligent, and way-out-there.

To the delight of gadgetheads and the dismay of the rest of us, Spy Kids' paraphernalia is better developed and considerably more fun than its story.

As adorable and predictable a film as the Helen Fielding best-seller that inspired it.

Whether it is truth, fiction or, most likely, a little of each, the story Weir tells is a powerful parable of man's charge for freedom and his humbling by nature.

The late John Hughes would have liked Bandslam, an upbeat high school musical that plays like a garage-band cover of "The Breakfast Club."

Unlike the previous two films in this series, Abrams is more concerned with his hero's heart than with his hardware. The result is a pulse-racing thriller that restores the human factor to the franchise, and to its producer-star.

I smiled for the first half of the movie and started laughing hysterically when a supporting character hijacked it from its stars.

The overall tone of the film is sunny, with Ramona and Beezus resiliently turning life's lemons into lemonade.

Rather than plunge into the murky marital waters of ambivalence and power struggle, the film bobs on the surface. No one would ever mistake David Frankel's dramedy of sexual healing for Ingmar Bergman's psychologically astute "Scenes From a Marriage."

A coming-of-age film that has the jaunty mood and egg-cream flavor of a Philip Roth memoir.

At its best, the film's visual dazzle equals the tasty wordplay of the novel. But it is overlong, overscored, and curiously misshapen.

Haggis' earnest and eloquent film about the impact of the war in Iraq on U.S. soldiers, and by extension, their nation, is human-scaled. And as deep and harrowed as Jones' crevassed face.

A triumph. Unapologetically old-school, in both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, Debaters overlays the story of social underdogs onto the familiar template of the stand-and-deliver saga, the staple of sports inspirationals like "Rocky," "Invincible" and "The Karate Kid."

Rather prosy until its final third. Then it grabs you with unexpected force.

A challenging film populated with characters who are depressed, on antidepressants, or strung out on mood-altering drugs, The Dead Girl is a downer with resonance.

Witcher makes a remarkably confident filmmaking debut, eliciting excellent performances from his leads and underscoring their romance with a sound track that flavors, rather than overwhelms, the story. [14 Mar 1997, p.03]

Vintage Terry Gilliam, a pour not to all tastes but one certain to please lovers of "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

Despite Sigismondi's fresh eye, feminist perspective, and rapport with actors, The Runaways feels like a long-form music video, recycling every trope from the doomed-rocker handbook.

Williams never defaults to mimicry. Her Monroe doesn't have the breathless whisper and quivering lips/quivering hips quality of the Marilyn impersonators. Her Monroe is a lightbulb on a dimmer, suddenly bright, and just as suddenly, indistinct.

To the extent that this mostly sunny excursion succeeds, it's due to the irrepressible Hawkins.

Brazenly enjoyable, The Matador is a picaresque cocktail with a Tarantino twist. It is The Odd Couple with a buzz on.

Thornton swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.

Almost reflexively, the filmmakers skirt Dan's messier conflicts. But it is the moments when they don't dance around the awkward issue of a brother falling for his brother's girl that Dan is the most poignant.

Great? No. Great fun? Oh, yes. Like Sergio and Aldous, this movie messes with your mind, then tickles it.

Half enjoyable goof, half an uncomfortable panorama of urban terrorism that just doesn't sit well after Sept. 11.

Brody plays Chess as a slightly crooked but well-meaning musical cheerleader without fully emerging as a character.

While Smith gets into Ali's head and under his skin, the movie around him has more footwork than punch.

However great Murphy is in this film, even greater is Liam Neeson as Father Bernard.

An unnerving and astonishing thriller.

While these individually diverting factors add up to a good time, they don't add up to a good movie.

The result is visually inventive, narratively edgy, and unlike anything else.

Maybe it's just the subtitles, but it would seem that Fontaine has a keener eye for the elements that made Chanel's style than she has an ear for dialogue. But she gets a splendid performance from Tautou.

Whatever you say about Sex and Lucía, you have to admit that it takes place at a hormonal high tide that never ebbs.

The movie about literature's luckiest orphan may teem with children, but it is not for them.

Making a remarkable feature debut, Hamilton distinguishes herself more as a filmmaker than as a screenwriter. While she elicits smoldering performances from Mackie and Washington, the movie around them is rather diffuse.

Silly, but irresistible.

One admires Wallace's intentions while despairing at his execution. Yet as clumsily directed as his film is, it inspires compassion for Moore, his men and their foes. And in that, there is merit.

Among the leads, Radcliffe alternates between playing the wet blanket and the dry wit, and Grint strikes a few sparks as his ambivalent protector. It is Watson who catches fire as the strategist and soldier of this penultimate Potter quest. Watson's so good that one wishes Rowling had built her septology around Hermione Potter.

As it progresses, the film takes us to another borderland, that between reality and delusion. This is where Harlan's mind freely gallops.

The film's focus on the contest between the two agents does throw the film off-balance.

Despite its title, Outrage is calm, riveting, and provocative.

The movie that pretends to celebrate women devolves into the complaint of a wronged man.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

Don Cheadle, wiry and wired, delivers an electrifying performance in Traitor.

The film is enjoyable as a performance piece, an eminently watchable contest between two actors at the top of their games.

While on its face, Mother and Child is about the impact of adoption, in its heart Garcia's movie reckons how consequential motherhood is in the calculus of womanhood. The fine actors show how we bond to those not related to us by blood - and also how we love. Bring Kleenex.

The scenery is majestic, the goats adorable, the characters alternately gruff and tender. Like the best storytellers, Carion delays vital information about his characters that makes their dynamic increasingly interesting.