Charles Taylor

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

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.

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.

There's no doubt that Kill Bill is an epic, and no doubt of the skill that's often apparent. But what it leaves us with is awesomely trivial.

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.

It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.

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.

It's a wholly amoral movie, but it's honestly amoral. And that's a relief for the audience.

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.

Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.

It's hard to say why The Station Agent sends you out feeling so benevolent. It may have something to do with being in the presence of a director who treats you with respect. McCarthy allows us to feel without telling us how and what we should feel.

There's some good acting in this mess.

Songcatcher is like an "All Things Considered" report on "a vibrant and lasting folk tradition" that goes on for two hours. It's so relentlessly, goddamn worthy that you long for some cheapness and dirt, some energetic pop trash to liven it up.

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.

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

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.

A singularly unpleasant movie.

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

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.

A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama.

Tsai Ming-Liang's new movie about urban isolation reinvents the delicate, poetic shadow play of silent movies.

"Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.

Consistently interesting without feeling essential until, in its last half-hour, it becomes utterly compelling.

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.

Never less than witty, charming, accomplished.

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

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.

None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."