Charles Taylor

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Delightful screwball comedy.

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

Not a great movie, but its daring and seriousness, its refusal to take refuge in the sort of irony that diminishes whatever it touches, its willingness to risk ludicrousness, may be elements that are necessary to achieve greatness.

A movie comedy that manages to be consistently funny without becoming assaultive, and that remains consistently sweet-tempered even at its most macabre, isn't so common that we can refuse this one's modest pleasures.

Lets you indulge your taste for soapy heartache without leaving you feeling that you have to wash the bubbles out of your mouth.

As much as Eastwood ever expresses pleasure about anything, you sense a flicker of gratification that he can work with actors who can hold their own against him. Lifford does it without breaking a sweat. Howard Hawks would have loved her.

It's an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie.

Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.

Mirkin hits just the right note between naughty and raunchy.

When We Were Kings, which was put together by Taylor Hackford and Leon Gast, is a patchy movie that fails to rise to the grace and articulation of its main attraction. But it has Ali, and when he's on-screen, that's enough.

Has a solid farce structure, a bunch of ripe second bananas, and two sinfully attractive stars ready to raise comic hell. So why is a movie with so many genuine laughs and so many good bits only fitfully amusing? The short answer is that the Coen brothers seem to be incapable of trusting their material.

As events in Mr. Jealousy grow more entangled, there is no corresponding escalation in the pace of the movie, and Baumbach misses out on some laughs...But Mr. Jealousy is one of those movies where the less assured passages are a good sign, the mark of a director trying something new.

The only romantic comedy in quite a while that acknowledges, even celebrates, the fact that love and sex are emotional anarchy.

Potente pumps strong and true from the first frame to the last.

It's a nice movie. But Disney has never learned that "nice," especially in comedy, is a negative virtue.

There's a combination of fatalism and hard-edged humor at work in The Sea Inside that you can imagine Irish writers would feel right at home with.

A trifle but an exceptionally civilized, charming trifle.

Southern Gothic lite -- with a bite.

Moore, who may be the most unpredictably talented actress in movies right now, plays Amber with an inseparable mixture of maternal feeling and lust that's flabbergasting.

It's tough not to respond to the visual cleverness of Pleasantville.

It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Anthony Minghella manages somehow.

Offers the most intense visual experience I've had at the movies all year.

For everything wrong with it, A.I. is not a dismissible film. It's too richly imagined, too accomplished. Even as he botches the emotions and the issues he raises, Spielberg goes headlong into them, wrestles with the picture's conflicting impulses. It's the kind of screw-up you get only from a master filmmaker.

It's an exceptionally intelligent and controlled piece of direction, and for once Polanski didn't hide his emotions in a death's-head grin. The movie is raw and passionate and unresolved in a way that's unique among his work.

Whatever the reason, Oscar and Lucinda winds up feeling like a collection of bits in search of vision and an emotional surge.

Along with Sheryl Lee, Morton is probably the best actress to have emerged in this decade.

Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy Little Voice.

It's an impressive, intelligent, compact piece of filmmaking...But Téchiné might be one of those directors whose work is best appreciated by critics and other filmmakers.

Blade in no way resembles a good movie, but its combination of music-video bombast, goth-rock sensibility, high-tech industrial production design, cold-blooded glossy magazine visuals, high-fashion club culture, horror movies, blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong movies and comic-book nihilism make it diverting trash.

Monsoon Wedding is going to be a big art-house hit because it's one of those movies that reassures audiences that people in other countries are just like us.

It isn't an entirely successful or satisfying film, but it's far from dismissible.

A light, enjoyable night out. This happens largely because of Charlotte Gainsbourg, who's simply adorable. Attal shoots her with tenderness throughout, a tenderness that comes from familiarity.

By no means a great movie...the movie is most liable to rekindle warm gratitude for all the pleasure he gave us.

Unexpected late-summer treat.

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.

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.