Charles Taylor

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

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.

Conspiracy Theory doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy, a political thriller, a romance or a satire.

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

Lacks any layers beyond its own amiable inconsequentiality. It needs the spark of the distinctively American slapstick craziness that has distinguished Frye's previous work.

Hoary epic of British Empire valor and cowardice, remade for seventh time, remains rot, old boy.

A pretty good example of how the studios have taken over the junk that used to be left to the exploitation hacks. The hacks here have millions to work with and the end result isn't nearly as much fun as a cheap, gross horror movie can be.

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

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

What keeps the movie going, besides Softley's intelligent direction and Mathieson's inventive cinematography, is the actors' duet between Spacey and Bridges.

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

Lush, even juicy entertainment.

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.

Chan is still one of the most amazing -- and one of the most charming -- physical performers the movies have given us.

I walked out of Scary Movie feeling as if I'd been whacked around with a two-by-four for an hour and a half.

Wants to be a dizzy, precarious thrill ride. Glenn provides the only gravity that doesn't seem dull, literal and earthbound.

High Crimes does offer good, often sharp and funny work from its two stars. But you can't fake excitement, and it's a lousy feeling to know that the best commercial movie I can point you to right now is this shallow, self-erasing nonsense.

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.

Delightful screwball comedy.

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

Lost the friskiness and wildness and charm the movie might have had.

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.

Mirkin hits just the right note between naughty and raunchy.

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

The movie feels choppy and rhythmless. And he's (Chelsom) rather hopeless at dance sequences.

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.

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

What Picture Perfect sells as romance is a junior high school health class morality lecture we all got years ago. And it was a crock then, too.

For all of their vaunted (and, it turns out, false) fidelity to Nabokov, Lyne and Schiff have made a pretty, gauzy Lolita that replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism.

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

Should have been a quick and dirty pulp tall tale. But it pokes along instead of accelerating, and though it isn't exactly smug it's rather too pleased with its own manufactured outrageousness.

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

Certainly pleasant enough, and if you can put the preachiness out of mind it's entertaining, in its square, conventional way.

The kind of bland, perky comedy that neuters whoever is spun into its cotton-candy web.

Gordon's film is an art-house curio, visually ugly and emotionally and narratively dissonant. Its cheapness and poverty of imagination consistently undermines its ambitions and reduces its complexity to by-the-numbers Freudianism.

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.

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.

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.

A stiff, clunky piece of work that never builds up urgency or tension. The script, by playwright Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," is close to atrocious.

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

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.

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.

An excruciatingly amateurish production.

For everyone who's been waiting for a love story between an anal retentive and a flake.

One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.

So clumsy and crass that it makes you doubt the pleasure of the first movie.

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

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 entire movie looks as if it were processed in the toilet of a Tijuana jail cell. Shot by Dariusz Wolski in colors that are bleached out, over bright and flat, The Mexican is the ugliest-looking major studio release in recent memory.

Punishingly dull.

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

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

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.

When has Woody Allen ever been interested in anything besides Woody Allen? He has no interest in bringing out new sides of his actors. Jim Henson's casts had more spontaneity.

A dreary, ludicrous thriller.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute.

Warchus seems as at ease with the complexity of the style as he is with directing actors.

To say that the film is unpleasant would imply that there's an emotional reaction to be gotten from it. I'd have to believe that there was someone, somewhere, who would actually care.

It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.

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

A sustained piece of showboating mythmaking, and something of a snow job.

A giddy madcap classic, one of the wildest and funniest American comedies in years.

Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.

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

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.

The plot construction here is especially lazy. The whole movie is built toward the dance competition.

What's offensive in Bringing Down the House is the way the jokes have been calculated not to offend.

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.

Jolie is far too good for this tripe but she does give the film its only believable moments, and for the first half, her concentration makes you watch her intently.

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.

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.

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

There are five writers credited with the script for The Medallion, and between them they don't come up with a single original or amusing or clever idea.

A stupid, brutal and nonsensical picture.

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

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

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.

This cookie-cutter spy thriller depends on the chemistry between Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. Um, wait, there isn't any.

Unpleasant would be the word for Mercury Rising if "tired" weren't a more appropriate one.

The most surprising thing about the movie is the clumsiness of Harold Ramis' direction. Ramis has never equaled the work he did on "Groundhog Day."

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

This clunky TV remake is stiffer than an iron curtain.

The disgrace of Steal This Movie isn't just that it fails to do justice to its subject, but that, as a movie, it's barely competent.

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

A grim, sour view of single life.

Sells ignorance as a refined evening's entertainment.

Unwatchable.

Love's Labour's Lost is flawed, but Kenneth Branagh remains our greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare.

A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.

Didactic, clumsily directed and abysmally acted, never lets go of its intellectualized approach long enough to deliver any real kinetic thrills.

The whole movie is overbright, overloud, antic, telling us the characters and animals are endearing rather than allowing them to reveal themselves as such.

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

The movie is so thoroughly lousy. It's loud, brash and obvious, full of car chases and explosions and gunplay.

Isn't particularly offensive, except in its total mediocrity.

What's missing -- apart, of course, from a plot -- is any character development.