Dana Stevens

Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.

Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.

Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.

This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.

A listless and desultory affair.

Documenting war is a small, partial but indispensable step toward its eventual eradication. Mr. Frei's quiet, engrossing film is a sad and stirring testimony to this vision and to the quiet, self-effacing heroism with which Mr. Nachtwey has pursued it.

Ms. Silverman is a skilled performer, and Jesus Is Magic is occasionally very funny, but don't be fooled: naughty as she may seem, she's playing it safe.

A tough and touching exploration of honor and friendship among thieves.

A vigorous and engrossing genre exercise that manages the difficult trick of being both logically meticulous and genuinely surprising. Its elaborately implausible story gestures now and then toward an idea, but the movie's main concern is technique.

A likable, featherweight romantic comedy that hardly asks to be taken seriously, but its very triviality is, in some ways, quite significant.

It is Ms. Dunst who carries the movie and unifies its disparate elements. She's a terrific comic actress.

The actors, too, bring more realism -- more gravity, if you will -- to the film than its wobbly premise deserves.

Though the movie never overcomes the miscasting of its lead couple, The Romantics does show a surprisingly fine authorial touch.

Stripped to its bones, Faces is the elegantly simple story of two equal and opposite betrayals.

A sometimes enthralling, sometimes exhausting tour de force.

Unabashed, and often quite diverting, technological overkill.

Has nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience, the achievement of which it holds up as a brave political accomplishment.

Ms. Depentes and Ms. Thi -- push such chic amoralism to its logical conclusion, composing a numbing alternation of pornographic scenarios and brutal killings. The result is like something you'd see momentarily unscrambled on a hotel television set, but with better music and a little more of a story line.

Endure the long, slow, unraveling of this movie, which can't even muster the intelligence to be pretentious or the bravado to be amusingly bad.

Stupendously entertaining.

Proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.

Nobody else working in movies today can make her (Keaton) own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity.

Though it’s not concerned with global politics and warfare, Seconds is a blistering assessment of the cultural politics of the mid-1960s, equally bleak in its view of the establishment and the counterculture.

More history lesson than dirt-digging expedition, and makes illuminating viewing for anyone curious about how the movies get made - information that is sometimes more interesting than the movies themselves.

This movie operates in the limbo between memory and oblivion that we recognize as daily life. It bears courageous and stringent witness to the impossibility of bearing witness.

With its studied nonchalance, Loners reaches neither the hilarity of an episode of "Friends" nor the ethnographic stickiness of "The Real World" on MTV.

Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.

Lacks the wit to do anything new and instead recycles tired jokes and attitudes.

At a certain point, Mr. Carruth's fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.

The joys of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble aren’t all camp. The script, by Douglas Day Stewart, is surprisingly funny and sharp, especially the prickly banter between Todd and Gina (Glynis O’Connor), the girl next door who teases him at first, then gradually falls for him.

Mr. Sandler has a solid, fumbling likability, without which Spanglish would be not merely annoying but despicable in its slick complacency.

What should be a soufflé of gender-bending mischief is more like a bowl of oatmeal.

Christine Jeffs's film is an emotionally rich biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow.

Lurches when it should glide, shouts when it should whisper and mumbles when it should sing.

Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.

While it demonstrates some formal ingenuity, it is for the most part a tasteless and derivative stew of overdone jokes, chronological tricks and labored shock effects.

Broadly acted, clumsily written and directed with crude sincerity, it is a well-meaning feminist morality play unlikely to be of much interest outside the community in which it takes place.

As sublimely warming an experience as the autumn sun that shines benevolently on the vineyard owned by the film's central character.

If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type-spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes-The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.

The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs, a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.

So mild and thin that it doesn't inspire much of a reaction at all. With one exception - a dinner table scene that is by far the most memorable in the movie - the racial humor is studiously unprovocative.

The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.

It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.

Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.

Told in the usual sequence, the story of Gilles and Marion would be a banal bell curve of infatuation, bliss, boredom, regret and recrimination. As it is, 5x2 does not quite make the case that Gilles and Marion are entirely worth our interest, let alone our sympathy, but the reversal of narrative order gives their ordinary moments together a faint aura of mystery, as Mr. Ozon teases us with the conceit that it will all make sense in the end - or rather, the beginning.

If you have any affection at all for traditional American music, the movie itself -- is pretty close to heaven.

Unapologetically a B movie, its narrative premise whittled down to a mean little nub and placed carefully on the borderline between the wildly implausible and the completely absurd.

Frank, sympathetic approach to the awkward age.

Moment by moment, the film is a font of pleasures, yet there's something about it that keeps the audience at an aesthetic remove. Like Coraline in the doppelgänger world, we swoon over all the neat stuff without ever making ourselves at home.

A graceful and sympathetic look at how the lives of teenagers intersect with a work of literature.

Though Last Resort dwells on sorrowful circumstances and illuminates a grim corner of contemporary reality, it is far from depressing.

An interesting, elusive hodgepodge of comedy, melodrama and implicit allegory, lighted by occasional sparks of formal bravado.

Brain-dead.

Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.

It is fascinating without being especially illuminating, and it holds your attention for its very long running time without delivering much dramatic or emotional satisfaction in the end.

At first House of Sand may seem like a stark tale of survival, but a surprisingly lush and colorful romance blossoms in its bleak and gorgeous desert setting.

The set design is fairly elaborate by the standards of the genre, and the victims don't die in precisely the order you might expect, but everything else goes pretty much according to formula, including a last-minute plot twist that opens the creaky door to a sequel.

Permeated by a self-pitying, adolescent naïveté.

The character as written is incoherent, but Ms. Witherspoon has the reflexes to make Elle both appealing and ridiculous. It's funny -- in that slightly queasy, un-P.C. Doris Day kind of way.

Anyway, you will be glad that they have found each other, and eager to wish them a long and happy life together -- somewhere else, as 95 minutes in their company is plenty.

The director's seriousness and intelligence are evident, but so is her satisfaction in displaying them, and the movie has a self-indulgent, undisciplined tone that nearly obscures its provocative ideas.