Charles Taylor

Lean, fast and undeniably entertaining.

None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."

The Time Machine is, for the most part, a handsome, pleasant entertainment.

A large part of the movie's problem is that both the characters and the actors who portray them serve as vehicles for Ramsay's stylistic flourishes.

Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.

This hot-button picture isn't especially well thought-out, but it might be crafty and manipulative enough to rile up audiences.

Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.

Shelton has directed Dark Blue in a jacked-up urban thriller style that simply does not play to his gifts. He's a sidewinder, the sort of writer-director who tells his stories through loopy character details and anecdotes.

How's the movie? Big, loud, brutal and stupid, that's how it is. But then, you don't need a critic to tell you that -- anyone with a grade-school education who's seen the previews can figure that out.

It's melodrama that rises to the complexity of art. The Human Stain takes a complex work of literary art and reduces it to tasteful melodrama. Its smallness is simply crushing.

Fincher is still working on the assumption that he has better things to do than entertain an audience. Which would be fine if he weren't drawn to such schlocky material.

Isn't a good movie. It's drab, visually ugly and a little pokey...but the two heroines are so recognizable as real girls, and the young actresses who play them are so appealing, that you keep rooting for these kids.

The movie seems to proceed from somebody's notion that it would be hilarious to see a black guy and a Chinese guy working together.

A singularly unpleasant movie.

A consistently engrossing piece of work.

Well-enough made and highly watchable, but it lacks the one thing that would put some swing in its step and some swagger in its attitude: a sense of jazz.

Follows a consistently predictable arc. In some sequences, you can tell not just what's going to happen next, but what shot is coming next. And the movie's weird mixture of moralism and affectlessness cancel each other out.

When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.

Live Flesh isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable.

At its best, State and Main is fast and sharp, but when a movie like this goes off the rails, it's more disappointing than when a bad movie does.

Millions of people read Harr's gripping bestseller, but Steven Zaillian may be the only one who didn't understand it.

Director Michael Apted does a smooth, competent job, but like almost all his work, Enigma lacks excitement and a vivid personality.

Whatever the reason, Bean saddles Atkinson with a story that hangs on him like a dead weight and a filmmaking style that surrounds him like dead air.

What's the point of setting up a historical fantasia around an invented character if you're only going to make her part of the scenery?

It's nearly impossible to tell whether Williams thought he was making a family tragedy or a sex farce.

A slack, tepid picture stuck in a no man's land between satire and drama.

So often loose and funny that you'd have to be pretty stingy not to get some pleasure from it.

It could be funnier, sharper, more probing, but at its best it is sexy, and that's always something to celebrate.

It's a noble undertaking. But why isn't it a better movie? Told in scattered fashion, the movie only intermittently lives up to the stories and faces and music of the men who are its subject. Part of the problem is the narration.

If The Siege frustrates anyone, it should be the moviegoers who turn up expecting the kind of clean resolution that action movies thrive on.

Calle 54 doesn't have that coherence or vision of the "Buena Vista Social Club."

Warchus seems as at ease with the complexity of the style as he is with directing actors.

Obviously influenced by the style of Robert Altman's multi-character extravaganzas, Robbins has seized on this incident as the centerpiece in a carnival about the conflicts among art, politics and commerce.

Stettner must be one of the luckiest and unluckiest debut directors in years, blessed with actors who both take the focus away from his limitations and wind up shining a spotlight on them.

To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.

Legally Blonde was content to tickle you. The new one is something akin to a band that has a surprisingly successful debut deciding to rerecord all their originals and release a "Greatest Hits" collection for their second CD. It's both familiar and off.

The movie feels choppy and rhythmless. And he's (Chelsom) rather hopeless at dance sequences.

A truly vulgar movie.

If a couple who belonged to the Christian Coalition, or your maiden aunt, or George and Laura Bush were looking for a reassuring night out, Raising Helen would fit the bill nicely.

If Jackie Brown lost 45 minutes, it might have been a snazzy entertainment. As it is, it wears out its welcome well before the end.

This In-Laws isn't a disaster, it's just not very good.

There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying.

Nothing but plot and production values, and there's barely a laugh in it that isn't quashed.

I don't know when a bad movie has made me laugh as much as this one. Most of the gags are vintage silliness: foreign double talk, characters donning funny costumes, well-timed profanities.

Sructured like a Mad magazine parody where there's a promised joke in each frame. It doesn't add up to a movie.

The real surprise of Private Parts is that it isn't very funny. It's a flat piece of work with long, slack stretches.

Winds up a lot closer to the movies it's taking off from than it cares to admit: cheap, unimaginative and predictable. It's the horror movie equivalent of one of those "Saturday Night Live" sketches that drags on interminably, though nobody in it seems to have any idea of just what the joke is.

The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.

The plot construction here is especially lazy. The whole movie is built toward the dance competition.

It's a movie almost doomed to be called "refreshing," in the way that the word is used to excuse the game but amateurish presentation of a quirky premise.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

A little more flair and polish could have made Girlfight a terrific movie instead of just the decent one it is.

Certainly pleasant enough, and if you can put the preachiness out of mind it's entertaining, in its square, conventional way.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.

By the end of Love Object a dorky loner who wants a rubber sex doll at his beck and call seems a lot less objectionable than a director who wants a talented flesh-and-blood actress at his.

The lost opportunity of Hidalgo isn't that it fails to live up to its potential for romantic adventure, but that it fails to dig into the romance between man and horse that's at the heart of the story.

Chan is still one of the most amazing -- and one of the most charming -- physical performers the movies have given us.

The kind of bland, perky comedy that neuters whoever is spun into its cotton-candy web.

Should have been a quick and dirty pulp tall tale. But it pokes along instead of accelerating, and though it isn't exactly smug it's rather too pleased with its own manufactured outrageousness.

Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.

Carefully made, respectful and dull.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

At 2 hours and 20 minutes Les Miserables is an unholy slog. It's the sort of movie where, when a title pops up saying, "Ten Years Later," you sink down in your seat certain it's going to be 20 before you get the hell out of there.

As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.

For all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act.

Here's a real mystery: How can John Cusack, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, acting in a John Grisham thriller, be so dull?

Far from unwatchable. It's not a good movie but at least, on its own schlocky terms, the story makes sense (which is a lot more than you can say for "The Sixth Sense").

Schumacher's crude bio-drama never comes close to asking the real questions.

Happy Together feels joylessly fussed over.

Everything the first "Mummy" was fun for not being. It's loud and chaotic, jammed with effects that don't wow us precisely because they are trying so hard to wow us.

It's fun, but it isn't believable for a minute.

If Bond long ago became part of your fantasy life or your pop iconography, then the anticipation of a good Bond movie would probably survive even if The World Is Not Enough were worse than it is.

Even the most spectacular things Woo unleashes here feel strangely impersonal.

Love's Labour's Lost is flawed, but Kenneth Branagh remains our greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare.

Kate Hudson gives the best performance in the movie, though she seems always on the verge of being funnier and dirtier than she's allowed to be. Elsewhere the cast is accumulated for their cachet more than for any role they're given to play. Some of the casting makes no sense.

The most surprising thing about the movie is the clumsiness of Harold Ramis' direction. Ramis has never equaled the work he did on "Groundhog Day."

Conspiracy Theory doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy, a political thriller, a romance or a satire.

It doesn't take Rea long to decide that he's more interested in extending his record for Longest Acting Career Sustained on One Expression, and he's back to his baggy-eyed, hangdog look.

The movie is efficient but scores zero in suspense, wit or class.

It's in no way a stupid movie. The trouble is that there's only so much emotional energy you can expend on these assholes before you start wondering why you're paying attention to them at all.

Gives no indication that Jean-Luc Godard has anything left to say that is worth hearing, no indication that he has any drive or passion to continue making movies. What's on the screen is habit -- accomplished, rote, empty.

There's nothing in either the conception or execution to lift it above a TV-movie tear-jerker.

Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.

Barbershop 2 is like going out for a bad meal with a group of people you love being with. You're happy to be in their company; you just wish you didn't leave feeling hungry.

A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.

Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.

The new black movies make those of us sitting in the theater watching feel as if we actually count for something. That good feeling can carry you through this movie's silly and dull patches.

The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.

For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.

Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.

Deep Impact is the work of someone crass enough, and in some essential way mad enough, to try to turn the apocalypse into a tear-jerker.

Jackie Chan is thoroughly wasted in a bad suit and a witless comedy.

A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.

The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.

If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.

Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

It's that sense of ardor that's missing from Ben Chaplin's performance in Birthday Girl.