Charles Taylor

Something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.

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.

Quietly overwhelming.

Put Bruce Willis and this bewildering World War II movie in front of the firing line.

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

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.

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

The epitome of the small, character-driven film that the indie movement was supposed to champion before it became a hip mirror of the Hollywood star system.

Another Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay demonstration of spectacle -- noise, stunts, the aforementioned incoherent editing -- taking precedence over story and character... by far the most brutal American picture released this summer.

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.

Not even court-ordered rehab could save this stumbling drunk of a picture.

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.

The movie not only approaches a level of shamelessness you have to see to disbelieve, it does it in a manner that's both inept and crass.

The movie is a garage-sale conglomeration of anecdotes and oddballs.

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

Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.

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

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.

There's some sort of gross egotism involved in linking great music to visuals that are so unabashedly kitschy.

As good as it is, Before Night Falls might not work if Schnabel hadn't found a leading man to hold it together and the Spanish actor Javier Bardem has the understated charisma to pull it off.

Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.

Amusing, ultra-deadpan entertainment. The director was lucky enough to have a cast who were in on the joke and tuned in to his wavelength.

Fuller was never a poetic director, but in The Big Red One he finds what in himself was closest to lyricism. Fuller's movie is like flowers thrown on a battlefield in remembrance, and it makes the overblown war movies that have followed seem like cheap and tatty Veteran's Day poppies.

A small movie, to be sure, but it's also a thoroughly original one.

Penn's portrayal strikes me as equally insensitive. It's the nightmare performance of 2001.

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?

Kore-eda doesn't create the simultaneous sense of being destroyed and exalted that the greatest humanist movies do, but he's stayed true to his title.

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").

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

Unwatchable.

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

Happy Together feels joylessly fussed over.

A thoroughly inept piece of moviemaking. You're more likely to find a ham sandwich at a Passover seder than to find a laugh in this picture.

It's not badly made, but it's a drag. Leconte's virtues can't overcome the plodding glumness that prevails.

The point, I think, is the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps -- even the imagined reality of a movie.

A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, Million Dollar Baby tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.

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.

The most dispiriting thing about Gloria is that it's further evidence that filmmakers just don't know what to do with Sharon Stone.

As a piece of craft, and with the exception of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," it's miles beyond any studio film this summer.

Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors.

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.

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

An excruciatingly amateurish production.

This clunky TV remake is stiffer than an iron curtain.

Toback's method of presenting the evidence without judgment backfires, finally appearing just as shapeless as the movie's structure.

An art-house horror movie, and like most art-house versions of genre films, all the vitality and juice of genre conventions have been sucked right out. The irony of the movie is that it puts you into the same torpor that's supposed to be afflicting the characters.

Entertaining, handsome and gripping, The Bourne Identity is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle.

The movie is an unpleasant slog, the gruesomeness working in concert with humorlessness to lend the whole picture a queasy deadliness.

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.

Todd Solondz's newest debacle drips with contempt for his audience, his characters and his critics.

Affliction is a harsh experience, but the harshness isn't a matter of punishing the audience or of the director, Schrader, showing off his toughness: That unvarnished harshness is the very essence of the material.

There isn't a frame of The Musketeer that's believable even as a Hollywood re-creation of a fantasy world. It's conventionally picturesque, except in the nighttime and interior scenes, which are dark to the point of glaucoma.

One of the most joyous movies I've ever seen, and one of the handful of great erotic films the movies have given us.

It's about as phony and manipulative as a movie could be. That Polley seems true every second is maybe the strongest testament yet to her acting. It's exasperating that this movie doesn't have the courage to go places where its actress plainly has the guts to follow.

Probably the worst-directed film Spielberg has ever made. A peculiarly rhythmless piece of work, it seems to go on forever, though nearly every one of the scenes is cut off before it has been dramatically developed.

No one could have held The Fog of War wanting if Morris had concluded that it's impossible to get all the way to the bottom of Robert McNamara. But explicating an enigma is not the same thing as blurring it with artistic ambitions. The thickest fog in this documentary has been conjured not by McNamara, but by Errol Morris.

This adolescent comic-noir trounces Shakespeare's "Macbeth," but Maura Tierney sizzles as a vengeful Lady Frycook.

It's too mild to be crass; it's clumsy. Lehmann has made what amounts to an anti-sex sex comedy, the first youth sex comedy made to be enjoyed by those creepy abstinence teens.