Carrie Rickey

According to this courageous, you-are-there documentary, the platoon took enemy fire almost every day, perhaps the longest exposure to combat the U.S. has engaged in since World War II.

A chick movie for guys that zings and pings like a game of supersonic pinball.

Although respectful of its central subject, Comedian is not worshipful. Rather, it is curious about what in Seinfeld's hard-wiring allows him to maintain his equilibrium.

Best of all is the ride through the architect's own domestic space in Santa Monica, dubbed by locals "the house that built Gehry."

Bier primes us for a catfight, but she gives something tastier: a feast of reconciliation and love.

While components of Eastwood's film are excellent, in particular Kelly's quietly tenacious performance and the evocative period details, Changeling is a film of parts, not a unified whole.

A diverting action fantasy that modernizes the stories of demigods and monsters.

So stupid, so stupefying, so stupendously bad.

Raunchily entertaining farce.

Finally, a real movie!

A hare-paced, harebrained and, for the most part, amusing update of "Animal House." [29 Apr 1994, p.03]

The best that can be said about the movie is that it's harmless and mostly charmless. The Clone Wars is to Star Wars what karaoke is to pop music.

A sentimental kidfilm that only a parent could love. [22 Aug 1997, p.04]

What's on screen is a hash, though it may very well be the most comprehensive catalog of male erotic fantasies in one single film.

Essentially, the film functions as a holiday catalog, introducing fans to a new Pokemon whose effigy they can collect in trading cards.

Their chemistry goes like this: He cleans up real nice; she dirties down with gusto.

Though not as lyrical as "The Road," which benefits from both its visual artistry and its humanist perspective, The Book of Eli employs the genre conventions of the western to make mythic its principal character.

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

Spider is a difficult film, but an inspired one, the movie equivalent of eating a meal of artfully prepared eel or sea urchin. It's for those with adventurous tastes and no fear of squishy textures.

He had the fearlessness of a 104-story man and something more than a daredevil's brass.

Too bad the filmmakers didn't trust the material. For Ella doesn't need music and references to other, better, movies to cast its unique spell.

At one point, Dulaine takes the students to his studio and they look up at the mirrored disco ball glittering above the dance floor. "Corny, but cool," says one of the sweathogs. My feelings about the film precisely.

Courageous, shattering and exceptional documentary.

That rare thing, a Hollywood teen flick transfigured into something like pubescent scripture: In the beginning, there was lust; in the end, there is knowledge.

Basically, it's a muddle.

Since the main reason I go to movies is to engage with characters, I prefer "The Pledge," the film opening today by Madonna's first husband, Sean Penn, rather than this stylish fluff by her second spouse.

Director Tim Story's film has two speeds: pedal-to-metal and screeching halt. The former is guaranteed to make the audience carsick, the latter to give it whiplash.

As Greene, Don Cheadle - explosive because you've never before seen this model of actorly restraint - is a one-man fireworks show in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' rollicking, resonant portrait of the real-life ex-con who improbably became a civic icon.

With Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tim Burton gives new meaning to the term "director's cut."

The chief appeal of this affectionate story is its embrace of those who are not thinner, richer and more glamorous than the moviegoers.

A captivating cine-memoir, impressionistic and surrealistic, surveying Varda's formidable career as a still photographer, filmmaker, documentarian, and life force.

Burton gives us SuperDude; Nolan gives us Sir Subdued.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.

Structurally and narratively amputated, Volume 1 retains head and guts but loses its heart and gams to the second installment. Maybe Tarantino figured that Thurman's legs, as long as the Mississippi, were sufficient to carry this half of a movie.

Not only are LaBeouf and Bridges terrific, but Jon Heder is hilarious as surfing fowl Chicken Joe. And Zooey Deschanel is saucy fun as penguin lifeguard Lani.

It isn't a good movie, but it is diverting, a showcase for Anouk Aimee, Greta Scacchi and Ron Silver, and a peephole on behind-the-scenes moves.

Suggests that one way women can fight male violence is by using the weapons of the alpha male: Marking one's territory and firing upon anyone who trespasses.

A disarming, funny and animated Al Gore, once a robot among presidential candidates, proves himself a rock star among environmental activists.

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

Think of the film from director Adam Salky and screenwriter David Brind as "Pretty in Pink" crossed with "Cruel Intentions."

Looking for plausibility in a farce is like looking for a million dollars in a box of breakfast cereal, but elements of real life can make a comedy resonate instead of thud. Little Black Book does the latter.

In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, The Machinist would have felt like a stunt. But Anderson, with a terrific assist from Bale, makes his character's plight achingly physical.

Fortunately, even when star and story are ineffectual, Fears' supporting players are all thrilling, especially Morgan Freeman.

The film's one realistic performance is that of Dakota Fanning as Lucy, whose child's shame, fear and resourcefulness ground the movie in recognizable behavior. She breathes air into this suffocating enterprise.

Some movies skate by fast on slick action. Others snap with crisp dialogue. Nick and Norah springs high on the bounce of its hugely likable leads, Michael Cera and Kat Dennings.

Fry's film has the frantic energy and kaleidoscopic style of Waugh's feverish prose.

Like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," Sarah Marshall has all the ingredients of the Apatow brand. Alas, it's beginning to feel generic.

Bad Company would just be another silly, intermittently funny, buddy comedy (Anthony Hopkins is Rock's training agent) were it not for a plot unlaughably close to current events.

Deadpan, dead-on parody of a schlockmeister at work and play.

While I didn't love it, I enjoyed The Last Stand because it made me imagine the mutant powers I want to develop. I'm thinking along the lines of merging Rogue's suction abilities with Storm's controlled-rain skills.

The unintentional effect of movies like Bless the Child is that they are enough to make agnostics out of true believers.

Despite Angela's skills - and Bullock's charms - director Irwin Winkler's film is so pedestrian that his movie has all the thrills of a school crossing.

Despite the appeal of cobra-eyed Thornton and bunny-nosed Heder, Scoundrels trips early, and often.

I don't think that a woman behind the camera necessarily affects the tenor of what is on screen, but never before have I seen a men-of-war film more notable for its psychology than its spectacle.

Half a century after its release, Godzilla couldn't be more current.

A melodrama painted in the saffron-and-turmeric hues of a Bollywood musical, Broken Embraces is the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," that moody account of obsessional love and double lives.

Cutesy and formulaic and has the approximate depth of a cookie sheet.

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.

Cats is many things: a film diary of an odd-couple relationship, a profile of a forgotten man who slowly reconstructs his past, and the transcendently moving account of a man on the margins who gets reintegrated into society.

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.

The tone of The Soloist is wildly uneven. Though unsparing and unsentimental when framing the principals, Wright is hyperbolic when depicting the agitation of the mentally ill and the soothing rapture of music.

With varying degrees of success, the filmmaker gets each musician to talk about the personal and musical roots that blossomed into his technique.

While the situations don't add up to a satisfying film, the characters are pleasing to watch.

Getting Even With Dad desperately panders to the youth it hopes to attract. [17 Jun 1994, p.03]

This simple story of a Guy and a Girl and their music is very appealing.

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck.

Screenwriters Nicole Eastman and the "Blonde" team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith provide dialogue that has the propriety of the locker room.

As a character assassin, Moore fails, because you can't kill anyone with contempt and sarcasm. And as an independent counsel prosecuting Bush for bamboozling America, Moore likewise misses his mark because many of the exhibits he offers as evidence are emotional rather than factual.

"Shrek" is a scintilla funnier, "Toy Story 2" a hair's breadth more poignant, but "MI" is every bit as imaginative and lovable as these other contemporary animation classics.

If your kids are old enough to safely see the movie by themselves, drop 'em off and pick 'em up after. You don't need to see this one.

Despite excellent elements - great actress, taut plot, slick visuals - Flightplan is like airplane food. No matter how good the ingredients the air chef has to work with, the entree inevitably ends up tasting like a Xerox of a facsimile of a meal.

The biggest surprise of his film is that what begins in sentimental cliche concludes with melancholy insight.

Evolution devolves to the sight of a colossal alien expelling flatus over Arizona. So that's why this movie stinks. Play that flatulent music, white boy.

Stop-Loss carries the emotional force and propulsive drama of the quintessential soldier's story.

In part, the documentary answers the question of why some couples flourish and others flounder.

Rian Johnson's film is a scam wrapped in a sham.

Verdict? Mixed. Loved the slapstick, winced at the toilet humor, and mourned that the female performers were given so little to do. Funeral is funnier the second time around.

A film that leaves cinephiles breathless and the mainstream movie maniacs scratching their heads.

While Flipper doesn't exactly arrive dead in the water, the latest installment in that saga of America's most beloved bottlenose could be dubbed Flopper. [17 May 1996, p.03]

A groaningly awful romantic comedy.

A rollicking, mascara-smearing, intergenerational coed crowd-pleaser. Imagine "Sex and the City" negotiating "Terms of Endearment" with "The Golden Girls."

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

Is there a limit to this incessant princessitude?

Less successful in exploring the long-term effects of mental breakdown than in dispensing short-term comic pick-me-ups, Ya-Ya wrings abundant laughter and tears.

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

Persepolis, the superb film based on Satrapi's graphic memoirs of the same name, is a riveting odyssey in pictures and words. It's unlike any journal you've read or any animated movie you've seen.

The film whipsaws between hyperbolic character study and preachy account of the recent financial meltdown. The two story lines are not well-integrated.

This year's must-see film.

When the tobacco is extinguished what comes between April and Frank Wheeler is bigger, colder and more formidable than the iceberg that sundered Kate and Leo in "Titanic": shattered hope.

An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb.

A triumph for its director and its star.

While all three principals are perfection, the movie belongs to Cage's Charlie, whose sad beagle eyes dance merrily whenever he sees Yvonne. His is a measured, gravity-bound performance, one that anchors many of the helium-light shenanigans surrounding him and adds melancholy shadings to the brightness of the dialogue. [29 July 1994, p.03]

Cinematic dynamite.

Yummy and weightless.

An unlikable and excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.

While the movie is content to be merely atmospheric, the performances convince you that here are two misfits who might be a perfect fit.

It is diverting but insubstantial.

Individually, the actors are endearing. But together in this charmless Gary David Goldberg sitcomedy, inspired by the Claire Cook novel, they are as oddly paired as chalk and cheese.

One possible explanation for My Favorite Martian, a picture so bad it's unwatchable, is that moviemakers are from Mars and moviegoers are from Venus. Not since Howard the Duck has a comedy tried so desperately hard for so pitifully few laughs. [12 Feb 1999, p.17]

One reason to see Rendition is for Naor's stunning performance as the torturer who is the one character aware of the political and moral contradictions of what he's doing. Every time he was on screen, he commanded it.

At its best, it's shaggily enjoyable and enjoyably shaggy. It's like steroids on steroids with Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, disarming arms industrialist, tossing off one-liners like comic grenades.

A witty, winning inversion of the famous Arthur Miller play.

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]

The movie is beautiful but, for one unfamiliar with the source material, confusing. I needed an owl scorecard.

It is almost inevitable that Miyazaki, often compared to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, should have found in Diana Wynne Jones a kindred spirit.

Flavorful and fun. "Muy sabroso y divertido," as Martin might say.

While I liked the film's aesthetics and its futurist imaginings, its most important attraction is how it engages. Some movies massage you; others tickle you. This one jacks you into cyberspace, involving you psychically and physically.

It does commit a cardinal sin of filmmaking. It's boring.

As slapstick, it is painfully slow, so much so that one can see every overstretched rubber band and frayed shoelace keeping the film barely together. [02 Dec 1994, p.03]

The good news is that it sees what a jihad looks like from both sides. The bad news is that it's not a very good movie, with three fine performances and two great sequences.

It's rare that a movie is so graceful and so gross.

Movie and book both are delightful, but very, very different.

A thriller fusing the primal elements of "Bambi" with those of "The Blair Witch Project."

Salvadori's choppy film never establishes a comic rhythm.

Lopez is so remarkably unaffected and guileless that she manages to carry the film through its mood swing, if not successfully to its conclusion.

In its final act, Akeelah is as exciting as any Final Four matchup. What it may lack in cinematic art it compensates for in abecedarian adrenaline guaranteed to pump the pulse and the spirits of viewers from 10 to 90.

Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy but fun, fun, fun.

Diverting, if undistinguished.

Like most great comedies, Hitch confects a sweetly appealing fantasy.

The heroine of this story is the eloquent Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett's mother, who recalls her fight to have an open-casket funeral for her son.

An improbably funny and transcendent account of soccer-mad Tibetan monks in exile at a Bhutan monastery.

Stanford and Neuwirth are performers of such nuance that a mere glimpse of his body language and her bawdy language speak volumes about the difference between love and sex, the ideal and the real.

Love Happens announces itself as a romantic comedy but doesn't speak the language of love. Instead, it trades in the slogans of self-help procedural.

Spiced with melancholy and magic, Micmacs is an imaginative live-action film with the playfulness of an animation like "Ratatouille." Similarly, it is a fable of subterraneans who change how life is lived above ground in a Paris that is both retro and modern.

A cracking police procedural from Belgian director Erik van Looy, has a jaw-dropping premise so smartly executed that if this movie weren't in Flemish I'd swear that Michael Mann had directed it.

Chunhyang is a movie — and a heroine — for all times.

Any resemblance between this film and "Casablanca" is purely deliberate.

A haunting neo-noir about a man told by a palmist that his karma is about to run over his dogma.

Unpretentious fun.

The parade of senators parroting the rationale for invasion - what we now know was misinformation - does not undermine Young's story. Given the private's eloquence, the flashbacks to 2002 are superfluous.

The movie trades in familiar virtual realities. Yet as realized by the gifted director Mamoru Oshii, who imagines cityscapes melting into circuit boards, Ghost in the Shell is where virtual reality meets superrealism. [9 May 1996, p.C4]

Robert Evans has been variously described as the Hugh Hefner of Hollywood, a Tinseltown Gatsby, the Lancelot of the backlot.

It is not a polemic but a plea.

Despite lovely songs from k.d. lang and Bonnie Raitt (written by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken), this range is about as serene as a hen party.

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

The humor here is overcooked to the point of limpness.

That very curious thing, a Shakespearean happy meal.

Cage and Leoni make it offbeat.

A tiny jewel of a film.

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

Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.

Jonathan Demme's superb rule-bending, heartrending and family-mending drama - ends with a wedding, it resists conventions as brazenly as does the bride's sister.

Take the flat tire that was "Madagascar." Retread it with "The Lion King" storyline. Pump it up with air. Now you have Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

Imagine "King Lear" art-directed by Martha Stewart and you have Hanging Up.

As Roscoe's parents, Margaret Avery and James Earl Jones emerge with drawers undropped and dignity intact.

Castellitto directed and stars in this unbearable film, a case study of a surgeon with a raging madonna-whore complex.

A cheesily entertaining effort that recalls the irreverent '50s comedies of Jerry Lewis. [12 Apr 1996, p.03]

Unnerving.

It is the most influential movie you've never seen, deeply affecting many artists and experimental directors who saw it on the museum circuit in 1977 and 1978.

Though it might be Moliere for Dummies, it's infinitely more fun than French director Ariane Mnouchkine's tedious 1978 film portrait, a Moliere for Smarties that ran four hours plus and, like Tirard's movie, explored the comedy of tragedy.

Because Vantage Point is really a concept movie, the actors are not much more than pawns on the chessboard: They move one square at a time.

The rhythms of Whale Rider are hypnotic as the ebb tide, haunting as the song of the humpback sea mammal, bracing as the ocean spray. It's a movie that rewards the patient viewer.

It is a pleasant, undemanding movie that takes place over 18 hours on V-Day and considers Very Attractive People whose romantic destinies converge, diverge, and cloverleaf like the interstates threading through California's Southland.

This is not the plot of your typical Ice Cube movie. It does, however, combine the plots of at least three John Hughes movies.

Although Solondz's view is omniscient, as a filmmaker here he condescends to his characters' innocence, ignorance and bigotry, making him guilty of the same narrative crimes.

It's never entirely clear whether Borchardt is also an object of ridicule for documentarian Chris Smith.

Perry and Campbell are charming despite this straitjacket plot.

Easily the best 1975 B-movie made in 2005, Four Brothers is a raucously entertaining vigilante film.

Setting her (Streep) face into a mask of composure that suggests Darth Vader by way of a Kabuki actor, the most expressive of American actresses shows how power is expressed in the lack of facial and vocal expression.

In physiological shorthand, Mr. Holland's Opus is a very large and very insistent reflex hammer applied to the ducts instead of the knees. [19 Jan 1996, p.03]

Unlike most Sayles movies, the filmmaker no sooner introduces his memorable characters and deeply resonant themes than his From Here to Maternity melodrama abruptly ends.

With this film Daldry, previously the director of "Billy Elliot" and "The Hours," proves himself the screen's reigning master at showing passion thwarted or repressed.

Unsettling, intelligent, and way-out-there.

Touching historical fantasy.

Happily, Perry's strength as a filmmaker is that he genuinely loves his actors, and they love him back. What his movies lack in exposition they make up for in performances.

For its intended audience, Horton's agenda is overt: Listen, be a friend, and most important - have fun!

While even believers can support Maher's skepticism, when he denounces the faithful in sweeping absolutes at film's end, he sounds as absolutely certain as those he has mocked for the previous 100 minutes.

Pazira, whose sapphire eyes blaze through the lattice of her slate-gray burqa, isn't much of an actress, as her singsong narration attests. But when not speaking, she has a commanding presence and is an effective witness to the ravages of war.

While it might not have the laughs-per-minute ratio of the "Naked Gun" movies (but then, what does?), it is a reliable titter generator for boomers and their echo boomlings.

An elaborately presented feast that will taste familiar to the 'tween and teen audience for whom it is served. The four courses are love, war, faith and humor, served in no canonical order, and sometimes, simultaneously.

Like many previous Carrey vehicles, the point of this one directed by Peyton Reed is that one should not live at the extremes, but should achieve a balance between low and high, no and yes.

Filmmaker Roger Michell doesn't so much adapt Ian McEwan's fine novel Enduring Love, a surgically precise anatomy of romance and obsession, as eviscerate it and wave its entrails before the audience.

For its mesmerizing first two-thirds, Van Sant keeps the film tightly focused on his subject, superbly played by Penn and intimately shot, home-movie style, by Harris Savides. But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic.

Summery and scenic, Ruins is this season's "Mamma Mia!," a diversion that dispenses the wisdom: Let go, let live, and let love. Not bad advice, and not a bad movie, exactly.

Brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait.

Where so many Holocaust documentaries remember the past and preach not to repeat it, Shanghai Ghetto remembers the past and teaches the relativity of experience.

Blanchett commands the screen as she commands the royal navy. Her unforced majesty makes a so-so film worth watching.

Laced with magic-realist bittersweetness.

So realistic are Phoebe's quicksilver emotions that at first it doesn't seem Fanning is acting at all. That helps to ground the film, which swings seamlessly from the world of grown-up expectations to that of childhood reverie and rebellion.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

While his movie lacks the psychological resonance of "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Sixth Sense," it easily equals their creep-out quotient.

Side-splitting concert film.

In this episodic film with a soupcon of "Sex and the City" (just as the Merchant Ivory Slaves of New York presaged the HBO hit), cross-cultural misunderstanding, not character, is the point.

Piercingly funny and unexpectedly moving account of that odd couple, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and HRH Elizabeth II (majestic Helen Mirren) and their back-channels affair.

Exhilarating, breathless, must-see chronicle of the skateboarder revolution and evolution.

Isaac's emotional performance as the man who learns to share the woman he loves with the God he worships is profoundly moving and gives the movie its heart.

It's a rare window on an artistic collaboration.

This is a movie that both parodies "The Sopranos" and aspires to its mordant humor. I don't think anyone -- not Tony Soprano, not Paul Vitti -- can have it both ways.

On the whole, the movie is more Cheez Whiz than wizardly.

The film's climax involves a father and son reunion that is tense, tragic and, finally, as transcendent as Mohammad himself.

Lohan is superfluous to the qualities that elevate the film above other Clearasil comedies.

There are three action sequences here so delightful, so hilariously deploying an old tool for a new use, that they prompt smiles long after I saw the film.

One might shudder at the occasional Yakin visual metaphor, as when Fresh and a friend enter their young hound in a dogfight. Yes, it's a dog-eat-dog world. But even more powerfully at work here is that Yakin, aided by the coolly honest performance of young Sean Nelson, makes us see that it's really a king-eats-kingpin world. [31 Aug 1994, p.F02]

It stars the striking Moss, that fierce beauty from "The Matrix," as the sternest, sexiest babe in space since Sigourney Weaver's Lieutenant Ripley.

You haven't heard anything until you've heard "Play That Funky Music" on the accordion.

Tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization.

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

The structure of Lelouch's pedal-to-the-metal story commands attention and suspense. The three principals are enormously engaging, and Gérard de Battista's succulent cinematography creates the sense of actually being there.

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.

It's fair to say that Coach Carter is more an education film than it is a sports movie.

A movie-movie - big, lush and sexy. And formulaic, saddled with more plot than it needs and more "Spy Kids" references than it should have, but still . . .

A keen observational seriocomedy, The Syrian Bride, like "Paradise Now," suggests that all residents of the Middle East, no matter their faith or their nationality, are more alike than not.

I would like to be able to report that Nelson's directorial vision is grim and uncompromising. Grim it most surely is. But his movie about morally compromised figures leaves viewers feeling compromised, unable to find their way out of the fog and the ashes.

Crowe is so good on mood and milieu that when Elton John's bubblegum ballad "Tiny Dancer" swells on the soundtrack, in this context it sounds like a hymn.

Documents the emotional and spiritual journey of three orphans.

If Sweet November were a puppy, it would have rabies.

Spoofing James Bond in the '90s may lack an original comic bite, but making James Bond in the '90s is positively toothless.

A Kid in King Arthur's Court - more precisely A California Mallrat at the Round Table, in which a contemporary Little Leaguer time-travels to the 11th century and teaches Arthur how to chew bubblegum - works too hard for its occasional laugh. [11 Aug 1995, p.05]

Some numbers: Hawn and Sarandon (both 56) are arguably the first women in American popular culture to be pushing 60 and sexy. Hard to believe, but when Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were comparable ages (59 and 54), they were the frightening gargoyles of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Apart from Luna's exquisitely subtle performance, Criminal's strongest suit is the so-artless-it's-artful cinematography by Chris Menges, which gives the impression of being shot by a fly on the wall. Similarly, Alex Wurman's jazz-infused score contributes to the improvisational atmosphere.

In focusing on the courtroom drama that finally culminated in a guilty verdict for murderer Byron De La Beckwith, Reiner and screenwriter Lewis Colick miss the potent human drama. [03 Jan 1997, p.03]

A deceptively simple movie with a deeply felt message.

Even when his technique is amateurish, Jones' belief in the material is refreshing. Pollak's gentle humor is well balanced by the blunt wit of Bonnie Hunt as the O'Malley matriarch.

The first Hollywood feature from Danish filmmaker Jonas Elmer, New in Town is so choppy that it would seem to have been edited with a pickax.

Fortunately, the actors are so likable that these wincingly unfunny moments don't spoil the party.

Apart from Connery, the star of the film is Mamet's deadpan script, which obviously inspired one of the movie's baldest old-movie tributes.

In segments such as the Reagle and Clinton interviews, where character is revealed via puzzle style, Wordplay succeeds. The film is less successful when it travels to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Happily N'Ever After carjacks "Cinderella" and puts her wicked stepmother behind the wheel.

What Zoolander does have, and this was enough for me, is a sublime comic performance by Owen Wilson, as the supermodel Hansel, positively radiant in its dimness.

An uneasy mix of hand-painted characters and digitally rendered photorealistic backgrounds, the film never fully reconciles its two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds.

It pains me to tell you, But really, it's true: The Cat in the Hat Is a piece of dog doo.

Whip It (which takes its name from a play in which skaters hold hands and form a human whip to propel the last skater forward) is heaven on wheels.

Snow Dogs? "Snow Job" is more like it.

A riveting remake of a pretty terrific 1957 western about manhood, fatherhood and honor.

Gluck is not a visual storyteller. He depends entirely on his performers and their snappy dialogue.

While the movie feels shelf-worn, Efron's performance is fresh.

At its best, Queen is campy fun like the Vincent Price horror classics of the '60s. At its worst, it implodes in a series of very bad special effects.

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

Davis does the most thorough job of capturing Basquiat, man, artist, and life force.

Tedious and incoherent thriller.

An exotic and erotic love story about an interracial couple whose cultures have more in common than they ever imagined. [12 Feb 1992, p.D]

It's a minor work in the Yimou canon, but a major visual treat.

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

De Niro's minimalist performance has maximum emotional impact and succeeds in unifying the episodic film.

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

Unfortunately, the plot runs out of dilithium crystals, and drifts to a sluggish and predictable conclusion

Blessed are the Pythons for making holy wit of the Holy Writ.

This soulful tale of a teenage underachiever who exhibits flashes of genius is a surprise on the order of wandering the movie desert and finding the Garden of Eden.

A beguiling and subversively funny entertainment that considers art's worth from many angles, including that of guerrilla painters, gallerists, and seasoned collectors.

If you like movies with plots, skip this review. If you like movies with realistic characters, ditto. But if all you want in a picture is a few smiles and two hours of toe-tapping music, Blues Brothers 2000 is a potlatch of blues, bluegrass, country, gospel and soul, a celebration of the awesome diversity - and uplift - of American music. [06 Feb 1998, p.03]

For the first half-hour I, too, demurred. And then the irresistible force that is Hugh Jackman -- or was it his swoony Leopold? -- swept me off my seat and into the movie.

It's a comedy that knows that no matter one's ethnicity, human foibles, follies and hopes are universal.

For two hours I felt like a kitten chasing an elusive ball of catnip that remained just beyond my paw.

Though it's rife with unexpected scene-stealers, the movie belongs to Lemmon and Matthau, that perfect complement of treacle and acid. [02 July 1997, p.D01]

Nobody's Fool boasts the kind of low-key realism on which Newman made his reputation but that, in these days of high-decibel, high-concept fantasy, has become a lost art. [13 Jan 1995, p.3]

Lush. Debauched. Ravishing. And did I mention sexy?

Hilarious fun.

A mostly charmless affair.

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

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Bar-Lev tells Tillman's story "Rashomon"-style, incorporating multiple perspectives on Tillman's politics (left-liberal), religion (atheist), and personal relations (he married Marie, his first and only girlfriend). Still, it is a documentary with more details of how he died than how he lived.

By no means is this a good movie, but it's warmed by the solar energy of its star, who surely deserves better than this formula empowerment flick.

A spectacle where A-list talent strives mightily to elevate a C-plus effort.

The dialogue is tart, and likewise the bluesy score (a departure for Disney stalwart Alan Menken, working here with City of Angels lyricist David Zippel). And it's these elements that vault Hercules into the realm of hit and myth. [27 June 1997, p.3]

A good-natured comedy of errors from Belgium, should elicit smiles, if not belly laughs.

The movie avoids most of the romantic comedy cliches, and its leads are appealing. That's almost enough for me. But not quite.

Stiles is lovely, forthright and believable, so much so that when the scene shifts back to storybook Denmark (actually shot in Prague), she grounds this fluff in recognizable reality.

A diverting family comedy that at its best aims to be a live-action "Incredibles" and at its middling a live-action episode of "Kim Possible."

I would have told you that its title refers to recreational vehicle. Having seen it, I now know the initials stand for reeking vulgarity.

It's the kind of film -- like Diane Keaton's "Hanging Up" -- that even as it dissolves narratively, still makes you dissolve emotionally.