Charles Taylor

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.