Charles Taylor

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.

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

Sells ignorance as a refined evening's entertainment.

By the end of Love Object a dorky loner who wants a rubber sex doll at his beck and call seems a lot less objectionable than a director who wants a talented flesh-and-blood actress at his.

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.

Chan is still one of the most amazing -- and one of the most charming -- physical performers the movies have given us.

The kind of bland, perky comedy that neuters whoever is spun into its cotton-candy web.

Live Flesh isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable.

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.

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.

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.

Should have been a quick and dirty pulp tall tale. But it pokes along instead of accelerating, and though it isn't exactly smug it's rather too pleased with its own manufactured outrageousness.

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.

The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.

Slick, satisfying entertainment, as is the chemistry of Dunst and Bettany.

Carefully made, respectful and dull.

The only romantic comedy in quite a while that acknowledges, even celebrates, the fact that love and sex are emotional anarchy.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

May be the shoddiest and most incoherent piece of big-budget action moviemaking since "Armageddon."

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.

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.

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.

Quietly overwhelming.

Put Bruce Willis and this bewildering World War II movie in front of the firing line.

As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.

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.

Will Smith flies like a butterfly, but what director Michael Mann does to the greatest fighter of all time just stings.

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.