Charles Taylor

There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.

Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There's some good acting in this mess.

Songcatcher is like an "All Things Considered" report on "a vibrant and lasting folk tradition" that goes on for two hours. It's so relentlessly, goddamn worthy that you long for some cheapness and dirt, some energetic pop trash to liven it up.

A singularly unpleasant movie.

"Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The bitterness of her new comedy, Loser, comes as a shock. It's not a mean-spirited movie.

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

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.

Carefully made, respectful and dull.

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.

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.

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?

A bigger problem is that since the movie is a straight remake that reprises many of the original's scenes, we have those scenes playing in our heads, and the Russos' execution just isn't up to Monicelli's. It's painful to see gags that worked so beautifully fall flat, or wither and die because of indifferent timing.

A consistently engrossing piece of work.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

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

Just a bad movie, with more bits of good acting and flashes of director's invention than you get in most bad movies.

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

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.

The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.

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

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

Elephant is not as bad as the National Rifle Association's decision to hold a pro-gun rally near Columbine High School shortly after the killings. Unlike the NRA, Van Sant doesn't have blood on his hands. But he shares something of its callousness.

Happy Together feels joylessly fussed over.

The type of comedy the Farrellys love requires dizzy, pell-mell pacing. If There's Something About Mary were tightened up by about 20 minutes, it would be much funnier.

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

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

James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.

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

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.

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.

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

Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.

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

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.

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.

Might be entertaining for those who like seeing a terrified teenage girl watch a loved one get beaten to a pulp while she slides into a diabetic coma. For the rest of us it's both stagnant and vaguely unpleasant.

Will Smith flies like a butterfly, but what director Michael Mann does to the greatest fighter of all time just stings.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

As Tolstoy observed, all sappy ethnic family comedies are the same. None is sappy in its own way.

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

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.

If Enduring Love doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be.

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

Nothing is more dispiriting than forced high spirits. Bandits keeps reminding you of what a good time you should be having. You leave with a feeling of being swindled, and that's the only genuine thing about it.

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

A long plod to the finish line. It's a movie about a long con that, like its leading man, has no wit or style to speak of.

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.

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 most dispiriting thing about Kiss of the Dragon, is that it's another example of how Western filmmakers fall on their faces when they try to evoke the feel of Hong Kong action films.

The Myth of Fingerprints is only 90 minutes long, but watching all this tasteful torment, you can't help thinking that if you were watching a Jewish family or an Italian one, the air would be cleared -- and you'd be out of the theater -- a hell of a lot quicker.

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.

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.

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

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.

A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.

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

A truly vulgar movie.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.

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

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.

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.

The characters in the Argentinean heart-warmer Valentín spend so much time squabbling and yelling that after a while I began to long for a nice movie about a family of mutes.

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

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.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

This Saint is a glum piece of post-Cold War paranoia, and director Phillip Noyce approaches it with the same plodding earnestness he brought to his Tom Clancy adaptations ("Patriot Games," "A Clear and Present Danger").

Lean, fast and undeniably entertaining.

You need a pair of huge, hairy ones to make a picture this bad and call it Flawless.