Charles Taylor

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.

The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.

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.

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.

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.

If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.

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

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

Who cares about old guys and young girls? This handsome romantic slop finds other problems.

Unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.

It's that sense of ardor that's missing from Ben Chaplin's performance in Birthday Girl.

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

The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.

There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying.

Nothing but plot and production values, and there's barely a laugh in it that isn't quashed.

Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.

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.

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

In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.

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.