Charles Taylor

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.

Such an inept bundle of work -- crying out for the filmmaking equivalent of Ritalin, but still sluggish as syrup -- that it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle properly.

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.

A cozy little ode to sensual and culinary pleasure.

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

The pacing is off, the emotional tone is wobbly, and none of the actors seem to be acting in the same style or the same movie.

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.

Much of the pleasure of the movie is the way its mood lingers with you afterward.

Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.

The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.

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

Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.

An art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.

It’s no news to anyone that “E.T.” is one of the loveliest and happiest of American movie entertainments. It’s also a greater picture than we could have known. [2002 re-release]

It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.

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.

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.

Branagh is appealing here in the way we remember from movie heroes of the '30s: cynical, wisecracking and wised-up.

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."

I understand how hard it is for parents to find movies to take their kids to, but the thought of them or their children getting stuck at this stinker galls me. Summer vacation feels short enough as it is.

The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.

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.

Sandler deserves to be damned to the pits of hell for this witless masturbatory comedy.

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

Not without its own bleak integrity. But the movie wipes you out and leaves you with nothing, not even the feeling of exaltation that can be present in the most tragic works of art.

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.

In some ways, this is the most conventional of Sheridan's movies. But it never feels sentimental because of the grittiness of his approach.

Even dressed up in tabloid lighting and cut with jagged edits, this pulp nihilism never goes beyond daytime TV banality.

Behind its mask of deadpan goofiness, it's a friendly, clever picture, one that doesn't feel untouched by human hands. And at an hour-and-a-half, it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Walking out of the theater, I felt so bereft that I couldn't speak. And it doesn't hurt any less thinking about the movie now, as I write this.

The 1996 kidnap drama Ransom traverses the parameters of public life in America, from the image public figures present to us to the image they never intended us to see. Neither one tells the whole truth. Luckily, Ransom isn't content with surfaces..

It's mostly terrible. The movie has no sparkle, no charm, nothing to sweep us off our feet.

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

Local Hero is as sweet and loving as movies get. But it's also about as off-kilter as they get, too.

A dreary, ludicrous thriller.

Manages to be entertaining and reasonably exciting. Scott's style may be slick and tricky but, if this and his last film, "Enemy of the State," are any indication, he's lost the glossy sadism that characterized his previous work.

Watching it is a little like stumbling upon a frayed valentine you put away years ago and then laughing with pleasure at how much it still means to you.

The dirtiest-minded American movie in recent memory -- and an honestly corrupt entertaining picture is never anything to sneeze at.

The director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves -- extraordinary.

A truly vulgar movie.

When the camera is floating up high, as the band practices its moves on the field, you can imagine Busby Berkeley watching somewhere, jealous that he never got his mitts on a marching band.

The General may be the most intimate and matter-of-fact of Boorman’s films. Movies like Deliverance and Excalibur revealed Boorman as a master of scope. The General, which is one of his masterpieces, proves the depth at which he’s working.

I think you'd have to be comatose or mentally incompetent not to find Enough ludicrous.

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

Kundun, which was written by Melissa Mathison ("E.T.") from interviews conducted with the Dalai Lama, doesn't make you greedy for its images the way some gorgeous films do. It allows you to drink each one in tranquilly.

This heart-wrenching documentary about a French village schoolteacher at work offers the comedy and pathos of great drama and the visual magnificence of painting.

Assayas' triumph here is in making sense of confusion and emotional drift -- bringing his characters gently forward into life, and making the film feel full and rounded while still resisting easy resolution.

The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.

If there were any justice in the world, The Cat's Meow would be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Davies' image.

This long shot pays off -- in spades. Not only has Jordan made a movie that's looser, hipper, freer and -- abetted by his great cinematographer, Chris Menges -- more sheerly beautiful to look at, he's also made the best movie of his career.

What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.

One of those movies that you continue to pull for even after it becomes clear that it isn't very good.

The good-natured silliness of it all kept me laughing.

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.

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.

A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.

It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.

It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.

In some ways it's not a very good movie... tries to mix comedy and tragedy...but the movie has an exciting subject -- a true story.

This alleged thriller, which might be described as "'Gaslight' Goes to College," is one of the most incoherent features in recent memory.

Ricci's Wendy captures the volatile combination of aggressiveness and uncertainty in a young woman trying to come to terms with her sexuality like no performance since Emily Lloyd's in "Wish You Were Here." It's a very different performance, quieter, harder and yet more vulnerable.

Director Brian De Palma is having too much fun zipping around curves and hitting the accelerator to slow down. He's a supremely confident engineer, and if you're game enough to make a jump for it and hold on, he offers the giddy excitement of watching the ground rush by beneath your dangling feet.

It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.

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

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.

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

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

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

Who cares about old guys and young girls? This handsome romantic slop finds other problems.

Unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.

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

The Invisible Circus isn't junk. It's carefully, competently made, though with no particular feeling for technique or rhythm.

The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.

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.

Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.

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.

Ben Affleck provides a charismatic star turn, but John Frankenheimer's out-of-season heist thriller is dead on arrival.

In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.

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.

The triumph of the movie isn't just Huston's realization of a longtime dream to bring the Kipling story to the screen but the way he both honors classical movie tradition and brings it forward into a new era.

Jim Sheridan's miraculous In America, a generous but never sentimental fable of Irish immigrants in '80s New York, may be the great movie of 2003.

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.

It's a terrible movie, stuck in plot idiocies and big, noisy set pieces like a tire mired in mud.

The story they are telling here is still in the process of being written. It's as good a sign as any of how absorbing Morning Sun is that the film's sudden ending makes you greedy for more.

You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared.

Delightful screwball comedy.

And now in The Straight Story, no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch.

With Love and Death on Long Island, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski makes a very pleasing feature debut.

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.

Shot in sumptuous black-and-white by Dreujou, Girl on the Bridge might just be the most beautiful-looking movie of the year.

What makes "Out of Sight" a grown-up treat is that the mixture of lust and longing is as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail.

Claire Denis' baffling and exhilarating "Billy Budd" smolders with heat-blasted rhythms and supercharged acting.