Charles Taylor

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.

The latest from Woody Allen is an enjoyable trifle -- but Tracey Ullman and Elaine May walk off with the picture.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.

Whatever the reason, Oscar and Lucinda winds up feeling like a collection of bits in search of vision and an emotional surge.

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

I haven't had a worse time at the movies this summer.

Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.

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.

It's one of the fullest portrayals of sexual desire and pleasure and fear I've ever seen in a movie.

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."

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

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.

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.

Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy Little Voice.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.

The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.