Charles Taylor

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

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.

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

Anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human. Dogville is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out.

A trifle but an exceptionally civilized, charming trifle.

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

In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller Femme Fatale, De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds.

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.

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

All Only the Strong Survive has to offer are scraps, and it's a sad thing to sit through a movie billed as a tribute to a group of terrific performers and to come away with nothing more than scraps.

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

The most gutless and naive political drama of recent memory.

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.

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.

Slick, satisfying entertainment, as is the chemistry of Dunst and Bettany.

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.

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.

When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose.

What Chan represents -- the humor and charm and the sheer physical beauty of seeing him in action -- as well as the lazy, ping-pong repartee he achieves with Wilson, is the essence of the casual, deceptively artless art of movies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hannibal, which is very likely the worst film of this year and quite possibly the next, achieves what no movie I can recall ever even attempting: It somehow manages to be both repugnant and boring.

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.

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.

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

A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.

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

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

Great Expectations is a triumph because Cuarón's vision prevailed. He seems to be one of those artists capable of reminding us how we first experienced movies, as an overpowering enchantment.

At under two hours, the movie crawls by; at four, people would become fossilized to their seats.

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.

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

The Hulk goes on for two hours and 20 minutes and there's not a stirring or exciting moment in it...At last, a comic-book movie that National Public Radio listeners can be proud to take their kids to see.

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.

A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.

Truly is an ensemble comedy.

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.

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.

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

There may be filmmakers whose own vision is vast enough to take on Thackeray's, but Mira Nair isn't one of them. Her new film of Vanity Fair is a disaster. Scene by scene and moment to moment, it's a woeful misreading of the book.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Airy and enchanting, this romantic comedy works overtime to sprinkle moonlight and stardust over itself.

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.

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.

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.