Charles Taylor

Select another critic »
Salon
For 379 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 63% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 11.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Charles Taylor's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 54
Highest review score: 100 McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Lowest review score: 0 Speed 2: Cruise Control
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 141 out of 379
  2. Mixed: 141 out of 379
  3. Negative: 97 out of 379
379 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Some Like It Hot
    If Some Like It Hot isn’t the funniest movie ever made, you can’t blame it for not trying. The first time you see Billy Wilder’s 1959 farce, you might not believe that anything can make you laugh so hard for so long. Where most comedies wear out their audience after an hour and a half, “Some Like It Hot” goes on for 122 minutes and leaves you ebullient.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Yi Yi
    Quietly overwhelming.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Sideways
    Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    This has to be one of the most completely realized comedies ever made, and, in its odd way, one of the most civilized.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    The movie haunts you like a ballad whose tune you remember but whose words hang just beyond reach. And like listening to a ballad, we know the outcome of the events we're watching was foretold long ago, but we're helpless to do anything but surrender to the tale.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Band of Outsiders
    Band of Outsiders is about the tyranny of living a life of movie-fed fantasies, and while it makes us see the poverty of those fantasies, it also makes them unaccountably rich, poetic, sad.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    It’s no news to anyone that “E.T.” is one of the loveliest and happiest of American movie entertainments. It’s also a greater picture than we could have known. [2002 re-release]
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The Man Who Would Be King
    The triumph of the movie isn't just Huston's realization of a longtime dream to bring the Kipling story to the screen but the way he both honors classical movie tradition and brings it forward into a new era.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Beau Travail
    Claire Denis' baffling and exhilarating "Billy Budd" smolders with heat-blasted rhythms and supercharged acting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Punch-Drunk Love
    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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Honey
    There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Capturing the Friedmans
    Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Y Tu Mamá También
    One of the most joyous movies I've ever seen, and one of the handful of great erotic films the movies have given us.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Small Time Crooks
    The latest from Woody Allen is an enjoyable trifle -- but Tracey Ullman and Elaine May walk off with the picture.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Nobody Knows
    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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Yes, there are some "middle-chapter" problems, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptation hasn't lost its devastating humanity, its heart-stopping cinematography or its epic sweep.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    To Be and to Have
    This heart-wrenching documentary about a French village schoolteacher at work offers the comedy and pathos of great drama and the visual magnificence of painting.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    Million Dollar Baby
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Boogie Nights
    Moore, who may be the most unpredictably talented actress in movies right now, plays Amber with an inseparable mixture of maternal feeling and lust that's flabbergasting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Straight Story
    And now in The Straight Story, no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Apostle
    This little knockout of a movie, written and directed by Robert Duvall -- who also plays the title character, a roving Texas evangelist -- can strike you in the same way that Bible stories did when you first encountered them as a child.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Before Night Falls
    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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The Pianist
    The director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves -- extraordinary.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    About Schmidt
    Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Hero
    One of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Out of Sight
    What makes "Out of Sight" a grown-up treat is that the mixture of lust and longing is as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Calle 54
    Calle 54 doesn't have that coherence or vision of the "Buena Vista Social Club."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Men in Black
    Behind its mask of deadpan goofiness, it's a friendly, clever picture, one that doesn't feel untouched by human hands. And at an hour-and-a-half, it doesn't wear out its welcome.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Local Hero
    Local Hero is as sweet and loving as movies get. But it's also about as off-kilter as they get, too.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Trainspotting
    The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, Trainspotting is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Spider-Man 2
    For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    When We Were Kings
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Lilya 4-Ever
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Vera Drake
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Girls Can't Swim
    It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Memento
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Read My Lips
    It's a wholly amoral movie, but it's honestly amoral. And that's a relief for the audience.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Sum of All Fears
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    A Simple Plan
    Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Station Agent
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Friday Night Lights
    There's some good acting in this mess.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Songcatcher
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The General
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Love and Death on Long Island
    With Love and Death on Long Island, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski makes a very pleasing feature debut.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    On the Ropes
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    In the Company of Men
    A singularly unpleasant movie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Monsters, Inc.
    It's a nice movie. But Disney has never learned that "nice," especially in comedy, is a negative virtue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Two Family House
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Hotel Rwanda
    A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    What Time Is It Over There?
    Tsai Ming-Liang's new movie about urban isolation reinvents the delicate, poetic shadow play of silent movies.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    The People vs. Larry Flynt
    "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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    Consistently interesting without feeling essential until, in its last half-hour, it becomes utterly compelling.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Affliction
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Never less than witty, charming, accomplished.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Run Lola Run
    Potente pumps strong and true from the first frame to the last.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Thin Red Line
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Magnolia
    None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Last Orders
    Unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Panic
    A small movie, to be sure, but it's also a thoroughly original one.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Ratcatcher
    A large part of the movie's problem is that both the characters and the actors who portray them serve as vehicles for Ramsay's stylistic flourishes.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Big Red One
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Donnie Brasco
    You wouldn't mistake Donnie Brasco for a great movie or an important one, but it's something that's become almost as rare in American movies: a consistently absorbing and intelligent adult entertainment.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Butterfly Effect
    It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Our Song
    One of those movies that you continue to pull for even after it becomes clear that it isn't very good.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Monsoon Wedding
    Monsoon Wedding is going to be a big art-house hit because it's one of those movies that reassures audiences that people in other countries are just like us.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    In America
    Jim Sheridan's miraculous In America, a generous but never sentimental fable of Irish immigrants in '80s New York, may be the great movie of 2003.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Morning Sun
    The story they are telling here is still in the process of being written. It's as good a sign as any of how absorbing Morning Sun is that the film's sudden ending makes you greedy for more.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    A Very Long Engagement
    The holiday season's best movie so far.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Iris
    Suffers from PBS syndrome, but Dame Judi Dench cures with a moving portrayal of life with Alzheimer's.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Last of the Mohicans
    The Last of the Mohicans is a striking mixture of the ersatz and the genuine. In other words, it’s vintage Hollywood. It’s also a smashingly entertaining and satisfying adventure.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Anthony Minghella manages somehow.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    State and Main
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Man on the Train
    Watching Man on the Train is like coming across one of those threadbare Persian rugs you see on public tours of private homes. Its elegance is more comfortable than cold, and it carries its worn, battered mien proudly.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Girl on the Bridge
    Shot in sumptuous black-and-white by Dreujou, Girl on the Bridge might just be the most beautiful-looking movie of the year.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Loser
    The bitterness of her new comedy, Loser, comes as a shock. It's not a mean-spirited movie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Bulworth
    As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Boxer
    In some ways, this is the most conventional of Sheridan's movies. But it never feels sentimental because of the grittiness of his approach.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Bring It On
    Unexpected late-summer treat.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Catch Me If You Can
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Believer
    A bad movie -- really a terrible movie -- with a daring idea behind it. And it's had the sort of crummy luck that, no matter what you think of it, can get you steamed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Sea Inside
    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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Joe Gould's Secret
    Carefully made, respectful and dull.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Kundun
    Kundun, which was written by Melissa Mathison ("E.T.") from interviews conducted with the Dalai Lama, doesn't make you greedy for its images the way some gorgeous films do. It allows you to drink each one in tranquilly.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Judy Berlin
    An almost perfectly realized poetic vision of people who continue in their everyday existence certain that life in a larger sense has passed them by.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Splendor in the Grass
    Like nobody else, Kazan succeeded in capturing the overheated, self-pitying dramatization so near and dear to the teenage heart.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Limey
    An art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Show Me Love
    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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Bourne Supremacy
    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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Spider-Man
    What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Last Life in the Universe
    Much of the pleasure of the movie is the way its mood lingers with you afterward.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    L.I.E.
    Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Titanic Town
    In some ways it's not a very good movie... tries to mix comedy and tragedy...but the movie has an exciting subject -- a true story.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Erin Brockovich
    Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Faculty
    It's an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Company
    Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    It's not badly made, but it's a drag. Leconte's virtues can't overcome the plodding glumness that prevails.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Ray
    What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    All or Nothing
    Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Girl with a Pearl Earring
    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?
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Welcome to Collinwood
    A bigger problem is that since the movie is a straight remake that reprises many of the original's scenes, we have those scenes playing in our heads, and the Russos' execution just isn't up to Monicelli's. It's painful to see gags that worked so beautifully fall flat, or wither and die because of indifferent timing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Thomas Crown Affair
    It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Aimee & Jaguar
    A consistently engrossing piece of work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Seabiscuit
    It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Welcome to Sarajevo
    Winterbottom's film is openly a polemic. Messy and visceral, with an articulate, pointed anger that's recognizably British, Welcome to Sarajevo hits with an impact that's not diminished by the fact that Sarajevo's uneasy peace has held.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Heist
    There's something offensive about how Mamet continues to win praise as a serious filmmaker with such a joyless picture, a picture that -- intentionally -- gives the audience so little.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    A Beautiful Mind
    It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Death and the Maiden
    It's an exceptionally intelligent and controlled piece of direction, and for once Polanski didn't hide his emotions in a death's-head grin. The movie is raw and passionate and unresolved in a way that's unique among his work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Ice Storm
    Ricci's Wendy captures the volatile combination of aggressiveness and uncertainty in a young woman trying to come to terms with her sexuality like no performance since Emily Lloyd's in "Wish You Were Here." It's a very different performance, quieter, harder and yet more vulnerable.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Chasing Amy
    The only romantic comedy in quite a while that acknowledges, even celebrates, the fact that love and sex are emotional anarchy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Cookie's Fortune
    Southern Gothic lite -- with a bite.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Intolerable Cruelty
    Has a solid farce structure, a bunch of ripe second bananas, and two sinfully attractive stars ready to raise comic hell. So why is a movie with so many genuine laughs and so many good bits only fitfully amusing? The short answer is that the Coen brothers seem to be incapable of trusting their material.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Intimate Strangers
    To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    The Pledge
    Just a bad movie, with more bits of good acting and flashes of director's invention than you get in most bad movies.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Score
    A weaker actor, one more naked than De Niro is now capable of being, might have revealed some inner compulsion in the character. But De Niro's steadiness becomes part of the movie's rugged stolidity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Spanish Prisoner
    The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Next Stop Wonderland
    Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Pleasantville
    It's tough not to respond to the visual cleverness of Pleasantville.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    By no means a great movie...the movie is most liable to rekindle warm gratitude for all the pleasure he gave us.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Charlotte Gray
    Lush, even juicy entertainment.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Amélie
    The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Girlfight
    A little more flair and polish could have made Girlfight a terrific movie instead of just the decent one it is.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Late August, Early September
    Assayas' triumph here is in making sense of confusion and emotional drift -- bringing his characters gently forward into life, and making the film feel full and rounded while still resisting easy resolution.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Primary Colors
    A slack, tepid picture stuck in a no man's land between satire and drama.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Elephant
    Elephant is not as bad as the National Rifle Association's decision to hold a pro-gun rally near Columbine High School shortly after the killings. Unlike the NRA, Van Sant doesn't have blood on his hands. But he shares something of its callousness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Happy Together
    Happy Together feels joylessly fussed over.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    L'Auberge Espagnole
    Klapisch wants his characters shiny bright, and winds up making them excruciatingly dull in the process. Watching L'Auberge Espagnole is like seeing the young Maoist revolutionaries of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 "La Chinoise" body-snatched by the international touring company of "Up With People."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Strayed
    It's an impressive, intelligent, compact piece of filmmaking...But Téchiné might be one of those directors whose work is best appreciated by critics and other filmmakers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Nurse Betty
    LaBute is some kind of find: an auteur for people who don't like movies.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    There's Something About Mary
    The type of comedy the Farrellys love requires dizzy, pell-mell pacing. If There's Something About Mary were tightened up by about 20 minutes, it would be much funnier.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    Eyes Wide Shut
    Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Le bossu
    A delight from top to bottom, packed with romance, adventure, beautifully executed swordplay and a sumptuous period look.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    From moment to moment, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a pleasure. But when the Coens are really cooking, when the acting and the conception and the music all come together, it's something more -- Dogpatch rapture.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Little Voice
    Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy Little Voice.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Live Flesh
    Live Flesh isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Alice et Martin
    It isn't an entirely successful or satisfying film, but it's far from dismissible.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    A Civil Action
    Millions of people read Harr's gripping bestseller, but Steven Zaillian may be the only one who didn't understand it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Bon voyage
    Watching it is a little like stumbling upon a frayed valentine you put away years ago and then laughing with pleasure at how much it still means to you.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Bourne Identity
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Good Thief
    This long shot pays off -- in spades. Not only has Jordan made a movie that's looser, hipper, freer and -- abetted by his great cinematographer, Chris Menges -- more sheerly beautiful to look at, he's also made the best movie of his career.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Ghosts of the Abyss
    James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    The Door in the Floor
    It's nearly impossible to tell whether Williams thought he was making a family tragedy or a sex farce.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Better Luck Tomorrow
    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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Business of Strangers
    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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Guinevere
    It doesn't take Rea long to decide that he's more interested in extending his record for Longest Acting Career Sustained on One Expression, and he's back to his baggy-eyed, hangdog look.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Private Parts
    The real surprise of Private Parts is that it isn't very funny. It's a flat piece of work with long, slack stretches.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Demonlover
    It's a consistently exciting piece of moviemaking, but it's not a pleasant experience; it's one of the few recent movies that have the power to leave you genuinely shaken up.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Two Girls and a Guy
    You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Something's Gotta Give
    Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Ever After
    Casting Barrymore as Cinderella is an inspired idea, and a tribute to director Andy Tennant's ability to see through the public's perception of Barrymore to her essence as a performer.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    So Close
    Next to the Hong Kong action picture So Close, nearly every Hollywood thriller of the summer looks like an elementary-school project thrown together the Sunday night before it was due.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Tailor of Panama
    A sophisticated, subtle adult entertainment that is also a compliment to the audience.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Forever Mine
    One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Border
    Jack Nicholson is at his best playing a burned-out border patrol officer in a small Texas town.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Barbershop
    So often loose and funny that you'd have to be pretty stingy not to get some pleasure from it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Les Misérables
    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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    For everything wrong with it, A.I. is not a dismissible film. It's too richly imagined, too accomplished. Even as he botches the emotions and the issues he raises, Spielberg goes headlong into them, wrestles with the picture's conflicting impulses. It's the kind of screw-up you get only from a master filmmaker.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 10 Charles Taylor
    The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    This clunky TV remake is stiffer than an iron curtain.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    One Last Kiss
    It's in no way a stupid movie. The trouble is that there's only so much emotional energy you can expend on these assholes before you start wondering why you're paying attention to them at all.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Gingerbread Man
    Branagh is appealing here in the way we remember from movie heroes of the '30s: cynical, wisecracking and wised-up.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Oscar and Lucinda
    Whatever the reason, Oscar and Lucinda winds up feeling like a collection of bits in search of vision and an emotional surge.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Panic Room
    Might be entertaining for those who like seeing a terrified teenage girl watch a loved one get beaten to a pulp while she slides into a diabetic coma. For the rest of us it's both stagnant and vaguely unpleasant.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Ali
    Will Smith flies like a butterfly, but what director Michael Mann does to the greatest fighter of all time just stings.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Sixth Sense
    Because the movie never fully engages us, it never quite manages to allay our queasiness about watching the boy's distress.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Prince of Egypt
    Middlebrow kitsch, but kitsch straining for respectability and therefore without the energy that can make kitsch entertaining.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    One Hour Photo
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    In Praise of Love
    Gives no indication that Jean-Luc Godard has anything left to say that is worth hearing, no indication that he has any drive or passion to continue making movies. What's on the screen is habit -- accomplished, rote, empty.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Enigma
    Director Michael Apted does a smooth, competent job, but like almost all his work, Enigma lacks excitement and a vivid personality.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Better Than Sex
    It could be funnier, sharper, more probing, but at its best it is sexy, and that's always something to celebrate.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Vénus beauté (institut)
    Lets you indulge your taste for soapy heartache without leaving you feeling that you have to wash the bubbles out of your mouth.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Team America: World Police
    Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Chocolat
    A cozy little ode to sensual and culinary pleasure.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Cradle Will Rock
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Amistad
    A little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them… Prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Blood Work
    As much as Eastwood ever expresses pleasure about anything, you sense a flicker of gratification that he can work with actors who can hold their own against him. Lifford does it without breaking a sweat. Howard Hawks would have loved her.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Unfaithful
    It's one of the fullest portrayals of sexual desire and pleasure and fear I've ever seen in a movie.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Out of Time
    Starts out as noir, takes a shift into something like deadpan screwball comedy and ends up as a comedy of remarriage.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Drumline
    When the camera is floating up high, as the band practices its moves on the field, you can imagine Busby Berkeley watching somewhere, jealous that he never got his mitts on a marching band.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    The Game
    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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Spy Game
    Manages to be entertaining and reasonably exciting. Scott's style may be slick and tricky but, if this and his last film, "Enemy of the State," are any indication, he's lost the glossy sadism that characterized his previous work.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Cat's Meow
    If there were any justice in the world, The Cat's Meow would be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Davies' image.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Head in the Clouds
    It's fun, but it isn't believable for a minute.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Dogma
    Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Jackie Brown
    If Jackie Brown lost 45 minutes, it might have been a snazzy entertainment. As it is, it wears out its welcome well before the end.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 0 Charles Taylor
    Air Force One
    If you've ever sat in a jet waiting on the runway, feeling it lumbering along in place and then bucking and shaking when it's cleared for take-off, you know what it's like to sit through Air Force One.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Austin Powers in Goldmember
    It's a mess, and a ridiculous golden shower of toilet humor. But Mike Myers' superspy spoof still provides the summer's purest movie delight.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Antwone Fisher
    There's nothing in either the conception or execution to lift it above a TV-movie tear-jerker.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Claim
    One of those rare literary adaptations that finds its fidelity in freedom, that stands as both a fitting version of its source material and as its own creation.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    G.I. Jane
    This hot-button picture isn't especially well thought-out, but it might be crafty and manipulative enough to rile up audiences.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    U-571
    May be the shoddiest and most incoherent piece of big-budget action moviemaking since "Armageddon."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    As Tolstoy observed, all sappy ethnic family comedies are the same. None is sappy in its own way.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Negotiator
    The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Runaway Jury
    Here's a real mystery: How can John Cusack, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, acting in a John Grisham thriller, be so dull?
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Rush Hour
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Freeway
    With one foot in the grind house and one in the art house, the smarts in Freeway are more than equal to its visceral kick.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    On Her Majesty's Secret Service
    On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the only Bond film that gets beyond the dirty boy’s-book spirit of the series to a core of real emotion. It also has what are probably the best action sequences of any 007 adventure.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Blue Crush
    Offers the most intense visual experience I've had at the movies all year.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Ransom
    The 1996 kidnap drama Ransom traverses the parameters of public life in America, from the image public figures present to us to the image they never intended us to see. Neither one tells the whole truth. Luckily, Ransom isn't content with surfaces..
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Brown Bunny
    In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Mr. Jealousy
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Enduring Love
    If Enduring Love doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    Dogville
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Emperor's New Clothes
    A trifle but an exceptionally civilized, charming trifle.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Devil's Advocate
    The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Femme Fatale
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Ladykillers
    Sructured like a Mad magazine parody where there's a promised joke in each frame. It doesn't add up to a movie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Bandits
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Fantasia 2000
    There's some sort of gross egotism involved in linking great music to visuals that are so unabashedly kitschy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 10 Charles Taylor
    Only the Strong Survive
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Mission: Impossible II
    Even the most spectacular things Woo unleashes here feel strangely impersonal.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Contender
    The most gutless and naive political drama of recent memory.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Mission: Impossible
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Confidence
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Wimbledon
    Slick, satisfying entertainment, as is the chemistry of Dunst and Bettany.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 10 Charles Taylor
    Life Is Beautiful
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Brown Sugar
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Beloved
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Shanghai Knights
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Kiss of the Dragon
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    The Myth of Fingerprints
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    My Wife Is an Actress
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The World Is Not Enough
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    The Human Stain
    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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    The Shipping News
    Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    My Life Without Me
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Titus
    Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 0 Charles Taylor
    Hannibal
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Dark Blue
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Terminal
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Cruel Intentions
    The dirtiest-minded American movie in recent memory -- and an honestly corrupt entertaining picture is never anything to sneeze at.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    Along with Sheryl Lee, Morton is probably the best actress to have emerged in this decade.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Veronica Guerin
    Schumacher's crude bio-drama never comes close to asking the real questions.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Great Expectations
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    All the Pretty Horses
    At under two hours, the movie crawls by; at four, people would become fossilized to their seats.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Secret Things
    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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Missing
    The movie is an unpleasant slog, the gruesomeness working in concert with humorlessness to lend the whole picture a queasy deadliness.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Hulk
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    A truly vulgar movie.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Hidalgo
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    From Hell
    A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Portraits chinois
    Truly is an ensemble comedy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Notebook
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    When Brendan Met Trudy
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Save the Last Dance
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    The Siege
    If The Siege frustrates anyone, it should be the moviegoers who turn up expecting the kind of clean resolution that action movies thrive on.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Fluffer
    Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 10 Charles Taylor
    Vanity Fair
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    O
    The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    40 Days and 40 Nights
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Eight Legged Freaks
    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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Malibu's Most Wanted
    If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Charles Taylor
    2 Fast 2 Furious
    It's a terrible movie, stuck in plot idiocies and big, noisy set pieces like a tire mired in mud.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Tomorrow Never Dies
    The movie is efficient but scores zero in suspense, wit or class.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    Absolute Power
    The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    The Devil's Own
    The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    Nothing but plot and production values, and there's barely a laugh in it that isn't quashed.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Con Air
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Bean
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Serendipity
    Airy and enchanting, this romantic comedy works overtime to sprinkle moonlight and stardust over itself.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Valentin
    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.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Ninth Gate
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Birthday Girl
    It's that sense of ardor that's missing from Ben Chaplin's performance in Birthday Girl.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Le divorce
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    "Star Wars" fans deserve better.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »