Carrie Rickey

A movie with the sweet soul of "Toy Story" and the boisterous spirit of "Spy Kids."

Despite problems of tone and tempo, Steins is appealingly cast.

Pure, undiluted joy.

At the film's intimate best, it gives a guitar's perspective of the troubadour. He plucks his instrument as he plays our heartstrings. It's movie and music bliss.

McConaughey tucks into the role like a hungry man gobbling a ham sandwich.

The wrestler carries himself with decency and without self-seriousness, the qualities that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. Austin deserves better material than this. So do we.

Striking a balance between Howard's harum-scarum comedies such as Night Shift and Splash and his fuzzy family "dramedies" such as Cocoon and Parenthood, The Paper delivers the goods - and also babies and the news. [25 March 1994, p.03]

So powerful and tender are the scenes between Falk and Dukakis that by movie's end, I was wishing that the film had been more about the marriage of Sam and Muriel and less about the father and son.

Basic Instinct's characters lack psychology and therefore motive. Admittedly they possess pathology, but that's not enough to maintain suspense in a movie with plot holes big enough to drive a tank through.

By turns entertaining and excruciating.

Only in its aggressively imaginative profanity is the film consistent.

Not even Chan's imaginative fight choreography redeems this folly.

A pleasant taste of Roman life.

Few American directors drive this wedge between mind and gut as masterfully as Michael Mann.

A stylish thriller so highly strung it zings, gives us Hopkins, an actor at the top of his game, in material that's only middling.

A gentle fable about how the young boy from Zurich struggles to fit in rather than stand out, Vitus is both a cautionary tale for pushy parents and an endearing, if eccentric, empowerment fantasy for precocious children.

If only I liked The Majestic half as much as I liked Carrey in it.

However insulting the script is to the formidable talents of Clayburgh and Tambor, they turn in Shinola performances.

Franklin has enormous fun using these varied technologies to ramp up the suspense in a movie that is the most purely entertaining thriller since "No Way Out."

A jazzy, immensely absorbing thriller.

An inconsistent and endearing sports inspirational that aims to be "Chariots of Fire" for golf.

Urgent and stunning movie.

My advice: Skip Beyond Borders and write a check to the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders.

The film is an omnibus ride through Brighton Beach, Central Park, the West Village, and Tribeca.

Spectacularly silly and perversely entertaining.

Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society.

Tennant aims for a contemporary version of "The Thin Man," wedding the banter of sparring spouses with sleuth work. To say that he falls short of the mark is understatement.

It would seem that Allen and screenwriters John Quaintance and Jessica Bendinger couldn't decide between making a movie about the summer that 'tweens become teens or "Scenes From a Mal"l for the MTV set.

A far sight nimbler than its plodding predecessor, where the Holy Grail turns out to be a Holy Girl. The sequel is a little like CSI: Vatican City.

Elle Macpherson? Not much of an actress, but nobody who goes to see Sirens is likely to notice her thespian endowments. [3 March 1994, p.05]

Under Michael Apted's direction, Nell is a pleasingly tranquil experience, its epiphanies as understated as Richardson's and Neeson's low-key performances. [25 Dec 1994, p.G01]

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.

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.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

The best that can be said about Collateral Damage is that it offers a fleeting fantasy of American invincibility at a time when we desperately crave the reality. It functions as a movie narcotic.

Washington blows you away. To say he gives the performance of his career is an understatement.

While it lacks the heart and hipness of the similar-themed Pixar odysseys, The Meltdown has the physical humor of slapstick comedy.

Family. Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em. Little Miss Sunshine, a stormy quasi-comedy destined to polarize audiences, is a perfect specimen of this unsentimental attitude.

Best when skewering New Age entrepreneurs for what might be called Compassionate Capitalism. Steve Martin is sublime as Kate's boss, Barry, purveyor of organic food and Zen koans.

It's a pretty nice movie until, like a Ponzi plan, it collapses.

A toothless political satire set in a Maine coastal village. It plays like six subplots in search of a sitcom.

Usually Amy Adams can work all kinds of magic with her wide-eyed gaze and wistful smile. But these attributes aren't assets here, they are distancing devices.

It is also to Khouri's credit that she has written a movie that begins with the men on Mars and women on Venus and ends with their being able to share a planet. [4 Aug 1995, p.03]

Between Owen's quiet intensity and Mirren's showy color, they make a complementary pair for screen or garden.

Warrior has the underwritten, overproduced bluster of "Conan the Barbarian."

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

I'm not sure that the endearing charms of the assorted fogeys and whelps add up to a movie. But I always enjoy how Altman weaves the warp of professional life with the weft of the personal.

If time and space hooked up and got so hammered that they staggered beyond inebriation into delirium, the result would be Hot Tub Time Machine.

Gives audiences something more than just a heart-stopping beauty to contemplate.

Watching the film is like getting hooked by a fearful angler who can't successfully reel you in.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

In this G-rated movie the effects are gee-whiz, with live giraffes amid the stuffed animals and bouncy balls so manic that they could use some Ritalin.

To paraphrase one of the few memorable lines in the movie, "Even stink would say this stinks."

Judah Friedlander and Lindsay Lohan are striking, respectively, as a Lennon paparazzo and a fan creeped out by Chapman.

As for The Happening, his throwback horror flick that plays like "The Birds" meets "The Blob," it's beyond good and evil. It's dumbfounding.

I was shaken, but not stirred, by Babel, a globalist melodrama that careens from Morocco to Mexico like a revved-up "Crash."

In 50 years, film lovers will look back on 9 as the debut feature of an original talent.

Overwritten, over-designed, and too clever by 200 percent, the film does offer the pleasure of actors enjoying themselves.

I wish Eragon's cinematography were crisper, the music less Wagnerian, and the acting more consistent. But this movie isn't for me. It's for my 10-year-old, for whom the subtleties of narrative, photography and acting mean nothing.

Rodanthe is a reliably steamy stormy sultry story.

Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part "The Giving Tree" and both parts marinated in melancholy.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

Three things make the film worthwhile: Shatner's performance; the sequence involving Data getting his "emotion chip" implant; and John Alonzo's crystalline cinematography, which makes Generations the most beautiful Trek ever. [18 Nov. 1994, p.03]

Not a movie, it's a museum catalog of gorgeously rendered portraits and landscapes. What a crashing disappointment.

The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.

An improbably entertaining, if overlong, adventure that brings new meaning to the term "summer camp." Doubloons! Ripped bodices! Unbuckled swash! Rum galore!

As a mainstream Hollywood film about men in skirts, the assumption here is that drag queens Make Accessories, Not Love. Even if you're offended by this, or by the attitude that all of life's problems can be solved by a change in decor or lipstick color, or off-put by the assumption that every town in America between the two coasts is populated by rednecks, there are things to like about Wong Foo. [08 Sep 1995, p.03]

If the only measure of Fur's achievement was in how well it conjures the fairy-tale mood of Arbus' most memorable photos, then it is a modest success. But as a chronicle of the turning point in an artist's creative life, it falls flat on its viewfinder.

Guggenheim doesn't bring much visual style to the game. But he brings heart (and some Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack) to the story of a lost Jersey girl redeemed by sport. Yeah, I cried. And cheered. You will too.

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

Heavyhearted without being heavy-handed, Corbijn's lyrical movie is about a man who has built his own cell and become his own jailer.

The unassuming performances by Krasinski and Rudolph help make this the first Mendes movie that feels lived-in rather than staged.

Harmless, mindless and shameless.

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.

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

The actors, individually fine although they appear to be in different films, tread warily on each other's turf, like Martian and Venusian making adjustments for an alien gravitational field.

In her byplay with Clooney, Roberts only occasionally strikes a spark. Clooney, on the other hand, generates heat.

While Stealing Harvard may be a chucklehead comedy, Lee is oddly touching and funny. Mostly because, unlike Green, he's not aggressively trying to make us laugh.

Searing and hypnotic docudrama.

An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

A feeling man's buddy story that's user-friendly to men and women alike.

Lovely performances from McDormand, Downey and Richard Knox, who looks uncommonly like Little Richard, as a bar owner named Vernon Hardapple.

Hidalgo is the first Middle East western.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

The Big Easy is an extremely enjoyable (and well-lubricated) vehicle for two actors who aren't quite yet stars, but should be.

It's a crudely entertaining argument for redeploying the U.S. military into our schools. [19 Apr 1996, p.05]

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

A slick comedy that's more fun than it has any right to be.

As one unfamiliar with the novel, I found it hard to tease out its meaning from this handsomely mounted, well-acted, aggressively elliptical adaptation.

A case of a yummy yarn spoiled by cheesy visuals.

A clever feature-length cartoon just as entertaining as the hit Nickelodeon series on which it is based.

Mendes nonetheless works this screenplay like a jazz virtuoso plays with a familiar theme such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Though Hilton may be a model, if her work in Hottie is any indication, she is no actress.

I watched this movie thinking that it used the idea of taking a chance on cards as a metaphor for taking a chance on love. I was dead wrong.

Would Backbeat be as compelling a story if it were about, say, Freddie and the Dreamers? Probably not. But despite mostly undistinguished acting and some directorial gracelessness, Backbeat is potent because it tells this emotionally complex and musically exuberant story from every angle conceivable. [22 Apr 1994, p.03]

Though not as great as "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc.," Pixar movies that are the gold standard for family movies, Finding Nemo is visually entrancing.

Despite a terrific performance from Shane West, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crash, Secret is a chronology, not a biopic.

Brosnan, who finds the truth in his character, is quite affecting. And Mulligan, gamely defining a surprisingly undefined young woman, is like a sunbeam piercing the gloom.

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

Except for a handful of scenes, Hancock's film isn't good enough to be memorable. Neither is it bad enough to be entirely forgettable. It's just one of those compromised movies that makes one look forward to the director's cut.

One of the rare rock films that produces the effect of a live concert: After each number, the audience erupts into applause.

Smart, curious and brave.

A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.

Claustrophobic and overwrought, Jailbait is an unpleasant excursion into gay panic mitigated somewhat by performances that are hard to shake.

Happy Accidents is romantic perversity in reverse.

Whenever Andrews - that incarnation of the sensible and the sensitive - glides on screen, PD2 sparkles.

Whatever romantic tension the film has is communicated in the coiled-spring performance by Crowe, one of the most remarkable actors working.

In this it succeeds. Like the Bard said, better witty foolishness than foolish wit.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

An altogether enjoyable ride.

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]

So bad you're nostalgic for "Gigli." So painful you need an epidural. So mindless you'll lose yours wondering, "What were they thinking?"

For Hickenlooper and Mauzner, Sedgwick is more interesting for whom she slept with than who she was. Their movie may indict Warhol for exploiting Sedgwick, but they're just as guilty.

The "Golden Girls" with gats.

There's a word for women like Giselle: Supercalifragilistic. Ditto her film, Enchanted.

When Bullock is on screen, Murder by Numbers is as far away as a sleepwalker's gaze. But when Schroeder focuses on the teenagers, the film is wide awake, eye-to-eye with adolescent angst and anomie.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

Like many graduate students, Love and Other Catastrophes is smart, droll and doesn't always know when to stop talking. [11 Apr 1997, p.03]

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

The $200 million result is an irresistibly entertaining, if grandiose, saga of doomed love and directorial hubris.

This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.

Crudely entertaining comedy.

By turns wry, rueful and explosively funny.

Like moussed hair and inverted-pyramid shoulder pads, this sloppy, sloppy slapstick is an artifact from the 1980s.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.

For those who enjoy the non sequiturs common to Cheech & Chong comedies and Raymond Chandler mysteries, The Big Lebowski is a hoot. For those of a more serious warp, the film is a lexicon of postmodernism, a textbook example of recontextualizing earlier styles, what with its '60s casualties driving '70s cars and enjoying '50s pleasures in the '90s. In other words, this is not a movie for those who demand narrative thrust and coherence, although even they will be startled by the contrast between Bridges' teddy-bear affability and Goodman's corrosive hostility. [6 March 1998, p.04]

Burton's film is an American version of the Odyssey.

Like a piece of music, Godard structures his film in three movements.

A film of haunting eloquence and justifiable fury.

Great message, so-so movie.

While Grant is sublime, the "Godfather" spoof he's in sleeps with the fishes.

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

A girls-just-wanna-have-fun farce.

Don't blame Kline. This most thoughtful of actors is trapped behind the lectern of a film that spouts contradictory lessons it can't reconcile.

At the film's inconclusive conclusion, the filmmakers strand Erica and Sean in the moral twilight.

The three (human) leads are perfection. Bridges' Howard is as breezily garrulous and glad-handing as Cooper's Smith is laconic and withdrawn. Maguire's Pollard has haunted eyes and orangey hair that makes him look like a human jack-o'-lantern, and establishes his own unique rhythm and less-is-more style.

The 3D effects are of a gimmicky 1956 vintage, with hands thrusting from the screen to give the illusion of reaching out and touching the audience.

As doggy movies go, this one gets two paws out of four.

The Omen remake is creepily efficient. Unlike one of the newfangled horrorfests, it doesn't drown you in brackish atmosphere and surround-sound you with techno music.

Surely a life sentence goes by quicker.

Fresh, funny and perceptive.

The delightful G-rated film has a story line simple enough for pre-schoolers to follow and comic sensibility complex enough for adults to savor, with an emphasis on howlingly bad (by which I mean good) puns.

It may be the first meditative action movie.

The fascinating aspect of the rambling and involving film is how Ralph and this no-nonsense dame who married Dad become confederates.

However refreshing it is to see a movie about the secretary rather than the lawyer -- there is a long wait for the light at the end of the Haiku Tunnel.

Much as I gnashed my teeth during 27 Dresses, I genuinely enjoyed the warmth of Heigl's and Marsden's confident ease. While both might be a few minutes past their star-is-born moment, these troupers with more than 30 years of professional work between them have never shone so brightly. It may sound contradictory, but loved them, hated IT.

All in all, this phenomenal film illustrates Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that "The people get the government they deserve." In both meanings of the word, Il Divo is sensational.

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

Ice Cube possesses real screen presence, and it's a shame to see him squander his talents here. He and Epps made me laugh in "Next Friday." They made me squirm here.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.

The film gracefully telescopes a lot of information in its brief running time.

Floats before your eyes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The surprise is that, fitted together, these pieces make a completed picture.

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

Given this swoon-inducer, Summit Entertainment would be well-advised to set up fainting couches in the multiplex lobby and provide smelling salts to those who need them.

With the exception of one sequence, this PG-13 movie is so youth-friendly that I thought I might take my 10-year-old. But that sequence, upsetting for those of any age, makes the movie better suited for mature 12-year-olds and older.

Mostly this elegant little film is a case study in the inconsistency of thoughts and feelings. Here, moralists break commandments, intellectuals act emotionally, and cynics have moments of idealism.

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.

The execution is so dumbed-down, so dumbfounding, that sophisticated moviegoers might confuse it for outtakes from "Spy Kids 2" and "XXX."

Edgeless as a marshmallow and twice as syrupy.

A small, quiet film that walks tall and resonates long after.

At times Let It Rain recalls one of those Katharine Hepburn comedies where the New Woman gets cut down to size so as not to intimidate the Old-School Men. Yet the film so likably deflates the pompous and pumps up the humble that it's hard not to like.

Director Manoel de Oliveira's minimalist, incomparably moving I'm Going Home ranks with John Huston's "The Dead" as one of the great works by a director at his twilight.

Law shines like a sunbeam, warming the film with rakish charm and unexpected emotionalism.

It's a heavy-metal opera with humor.

Sadly too often (and I'm unsure whether this is the result of voices that echo when bounced off stone walls or because the acting is all over the place), the characters create the impression that English is their second language.

If there's going to be a "Rush Hour 3," the filmmakers need more of the Ziyi/Sanchez women warriors to punch up the sagging cross-cultural buddy humor of the Chan-Tucker partnership.

An abhorrent cyberthriller starring a compelling Diane Lane.

The film's recycled nature is most evident in director P.J. Hogan's attempt to marry the farcical hijinks of an "I Love Lucy" episode to an addiction scenario that would not be out of place in "The Lost Weekend."

A casualty of its own clumsy storytelling.

The only likable characters are ebullient Omer (Sam Golzari), a show-tune-loving reluctant Iraqi suicide bomber who comes to the O.C., and earnest William (Chris Klein), an American GI wounded in Iraq, who are mirror images.

An entertaining rethink of the 1951 classic.

The plot is canny, but it would be little more than an ingenious springloaded device were it not for the performances by Howard and Iures.

Maybe Waters set out to prove Karl Marx's observation that all great events happen twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce.

The marvel of Brando's and Leigh's performances is that he is steely solidity and she airy evanescence, something frequently misinterpreted as his modern, realistic acting style and her quaint kind of theatrics. [Director's Cut; 18 March 1994, p.10]

Unfortunately, Turner's performance is as forced as Serial Mom's humor. Both boast false smiles but can't mask the fact that there's something sinister in the suburbs and about this movie. [15 Apr 1994, p.03]

Few movies are as eloquent in their performances and their art direction.

Man, oh, man, much of the dialogue is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that you can see fine actors such as Derek Luke and Michael Ealy buckle under the weight. Clearly, Lee fell in love with McBride's words and couldn't bear to cut them, even when the visuals made those words redundant.

Both the sex and the battle sequences here look like football plays drawn by an NFL coach and shot by the wide receiver's mother. Usually, even when I don't like a Stone film I admire its frenzied energy, but the editing here is as lethargic as the compositions are perfunctory.

Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.

A stunt that fails.

Whatever number it is chronologically on the P&P parade, Wright's film ranks first in verve. Quite simply, it is the essential P&P.

Seething, searing tragedy of unmannerliness.

Moviegoers of a certain age may feel as though they are watching a lost Bertolucci film.

While Imagine That falls short of its feel-good aim, its feel-nice vibe is a good Father's Day diversion for Dads and their spawn.

There are two questions to ask about a film such as Chloe: Is it erotic? Yes. Is it good? Yes, until it devolves into third-act pretentiousness and preposterousness.

The trouble with Nine Months is not that Grant's monologues sound like an apologia to his real-life paramour. The trouble here is that not even a comic actor of Grant's skill can tickle such tired material to life. [12 July 1995, p.E01]

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

Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling "The Da Vinci Code" and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.

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

An unforgettable and profoundly inspiring film. [05 Mar 1999, p.04]

Adoration, Egoyan's most affecting film since "The Sweet Hereafter."

The movie has workmanlike, uninspired direction from Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs), who gets an especially lovely performance from Capron.

Touching and inspiring.

A throwback to the days when gangs met in clubhouses instead of crack houses, raced go-carts instead of stolen cars and brandished slingshots instead of semiautomatics, The Little Rascals is the best 1936 movie made in 1994. [05 Aug 1994, p.03]

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

There are no belly laughs here, only rueful chortles about the confederacy of chuckleheads that calls itself the entertainment industry.

Through Herzog's eyes it is a desolate, strangely beautiful frozen Edenish hell where the planet, having shaken out its pockets, lets the loners, fanatics and cosmologist-crackpots fall to bottom.

Solitary Man is a wafer-thin film with a river-deep, mountain-high performance from Douglas.

A curious screwball "noir," doesn't so much bend established genres as blend them into an unappetizing cocktail, where they curdle before pouring.

What's admirable about Save Me is that it grounds its religious and cultural debate not in vilifying one side but in sympathizing with both.

I enjoyed the spectacle of middle-aged people making spectacles of themselves.

Alas, the conceit of a double-dating Grandson and Gramps does not produce a great many laughs in this cringeworthy film.

More strident than funny, the film illustrates that old French proverb, "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

As irresistible as Chan is irrepressible. In a movie season in which, it seems, all the blockbusters boast wheels, it's a treat to see a movie that has legs.

Heigl, a double-dip of praline with caramel, is so beautiful that initially you don't notice her comic chops.

After Clooney, who gives a sterling performance as a tarnished figure, the standout performance belongs to Wilkinson, a geyser of manic eloquence. Also quite fine are Swinton and Sydney Pollack.

ILYM is the comedy that Rudd lovers have been waiting for since he first charmed us silly in "Clueless." It explores both the dweeby and heartthrobby sides of this guy whose crooked smile fails to mask his social anxiety.

A raunchy spoof of the disaster-movie lampoon Airplane! - does everything to get the laugh. And in the way that a broken watch is right twice a day, a shotgun comedy like this one occasionally hits its target.

Supremacy has thrills, but without Potente's presence, it loses its soul.

Paradise Now plays like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," but with explosives.

Mazel tov, Adam, for having three movies released in five months. You should maybe spend more time on the next one?

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

Its themes and performances didn't stay with me, as did those in "Out of Time." I think this is because, with the exception of Hackman, the actors' performances illuminate strategy rather than character.

Brevity is the soul of wit, lingerie and Ridicule, a keen and silky costume drama set circa 1783 in Versailles. [06 Dec 1996, p.03]

Those who want something more substantial from a movie than a vid-game script with centerfold appeal will not find it in this noisy, bone-crushing survivalist flick inspired by the Game Cube diversion.

It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.

Silly, but irresistible.

The question is not whether Murphy can do anything. He can. The question is why he would want to make a movie as squirmingly unfunny as Norbit.

What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

As artistic achievements go, Mona Lisa Smile is strictly a paint-by-numbers affair. No shading. Little in the way of perspective. To call it one-dimensional would be an act of charity.

Though there are chases galore and stampeding dinos aplenty, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a nicely rendered travelogue without storytelling. There is little to bring an audience along for the ride.

My guess is that the film will appeal equally to broad-minded 10-year-olds and their grandparents.

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

In her clear and compelling film, Sanders lets the innocents do the talking.

I laughed once.

At its best when it employs the conventions of romantic comedies to satirize them through the eyes of an anti-romantic wedding planner.

Because the confrontations between power and powerlessness are so dramatic and because Hirschbiegel's editing is so emphatic, Das Experiment is practically over before you realize that you don't know what its point is, exactly.

Throughout the film its makers pose the question of whether saving a work of art is as important as saving a human life. The question is not answered, and perhaps ultimately unanswerable. Yet Europa movingly shows how for many, art and artifacts are living things.

Ultimately, the values and the CGI are good, but the acting is broad and the chipmunks aren't really differentiated. What happened to Alvin, the rodent counterpart of Dennis the Menace? Was he declawed in the translation to CGI?

It is inspirational in characterizing how people from such diverse cultures share the same human and spiritual needs.

Kudos to Clifton Collins Jr., who appears as a dispenser of cleaning products and common sense.

Dramatically speaking, the movie version of The Notebook has a first act and a last act but lacks a transition. If it were a sandwich, it would be two slices of bread without filling.

A movie as generous, stingy, and biting - and memorable - as its six main characters.

Best of all, though, is Northam, whose sable hair and polished poise put one in mind of the young Cary Grant. In this no-sweat performance, he's an actor who conveys how restorative it is to think.

Evocatively shot by cinematographer Lance Gewer in warm browns and reds that make Tsotsi seem all the more chilling, the film records his gradual metamorphosis from id-driven brute into empathic, if crude, care-giver.

Since the film does not include the testimony of U.S. military or neutral human-rights observers, it gives viewers no way to test the subjects' reliability as narrators.

Peter Glenville's staging of the material is the opposite of cinematic, but the pleasure of these two extravagantly gifted actors at the top of their game - their diction! their conviction! their beauty! - is enormous.

Shrek the Third isn't a movie, it's the extension of a brand.

Not an easy movie to watch.

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."

A third-generation performer, this daughter of actor-director Ron Howard makes a stunning feature debut.

It succeeds as a vivid video album of the metropolis at the millennium, a lilting musical album of the varied carols Americans play and an all-too-rare depiction of what the pursuit of happiness actually looks like.

The film is more than laborious eye-blinking - it's also dazzling visually, its potent imagery conjured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But finally, Diving Bell is about something imperceptible: consciousness.

Intimate as a whisper, immediate as a blush, and universal as first love, the PG-rated film positively palpitates with the sensual and spiritual.

The result is more exciting than the last four ST pictures put together, more fun than a barrel of Tribbles, and the most satisfying action-adventure since last year's "Iron Man."

Like its music, the film's emotions proceed from lament to screaming screed to chorus of hope.

Delpy's manic energy shoots through this meet-the-parents comedy like electroshock, resulting in a movie that is as acutely painful as it is acutely funny.

There are many many fine performers here, including the terrific Patricia Clarkson as the elusive Rachel. But Shutter Island is not so much a character study as it is an atmospheric thriller.

What redeems the film...is that for every nonstop explosion, there's a hilarious burst of Reynolds' nonstop patter.

In refusing to pigeonhole its characters, Nine Lives is less like those L.A. road-rage melodramas "Short Cuts" and "Crash" than those all-of-us-are-interconnected dramas "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."

This eccentric fairy tale with the feel of "Our Town" has a number of remarkable performances.

Unusually gripping.

Unlike most other teen cautionary tales, Thirteen does not accuse merely one villain for the corruption of a minor.

Swank is no mere impersonator. Her Amelia, like Maggie in "Million Dollar Baby," is unwavering in her gaze, ambition, and drive... In Nair's evocatively art-directed (and sensationally costumed) film, Earhart comes alive.

It's a film about dumbing down that has the effect of wising up its audience.

If Batman did nothing else but restore pulp-art shadow to the icon sanitized in his pop-art TV reincarnation, it would be an achievement. Tim Burton's Batman, starring a subdued Michael Keaton as you-know-who and a supercharged Jack Nicholson as the Joker, handily accomplishes that mission.

Suffers from "Bridget Jones" Syndrome but without that movie's charms.

Michael Lembeck directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pounding every joke and cliche until they are flat, flat, flat.

Nothing wrong with the syrupy romance Here on Earth that a megadose of insulin couldn't fix.

Each actor is unusually watchful and wily, and their actorly competition underscores the one-upmanship of their characters.

It lacks momentum, and thus the propulsion required to rocket it into the movie mythosphere.

Mighty Joe Young is a movie only an 8-year-old could love. How cheesy is it? Well, it leaves the ooze of Velveeta in its wake. [25 Dec 1998, p.4]

It's also a case of art imitates life imitates art. If that makes it a tribute to a tribute to a classic, then it is no less enjoyable for that.

The slapstick weeper The Family Stone is a lump of coal brightened by four diamond-sharp performances.

When it works, which is often, Kitano's movie is an anthropology of the distinctions between Japanese yakuza and American gangsters.

Less the blistering satire it imagines itself than a blustering, bloody, blundering melodrama about bottom feeders nibbling each other.

A script with the most underdeveloped characters and spectacularly realized visuals since "Titanic."