David Edelstein

The visuals have so much intrinsic motion that it's too bad Robots is oppressively rollercoasterish.

Ulrich Mühe gives a marvelously self-contained performance. There isn't an ounce of fat on his body, or in his acting: He has pared himself down to a pair of eyes that prowl the faces of his character's countrymen for signs of arrogance--i.e., of independent thinking.

Has the feverish compression of live theater and the moody expansiveness of film. The mix is insanely powerful.

It’s intermittently very funny. But it doesn’t make the existential leap to the big screen, and it doesn’t have the density of gags or the lunatic free-association of the best episodes.

Doubt is still overpowering; it took me a while when it was over to stop shaking. It's the dramatist’s business to sow doubt, to set down points of view that can't be reconciled, and Shanley makes visceral the notion that one can be right but never absolutely right, that doubt might be our last, best hope.

Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."

The movie is a testament to compromise, and so are the Farrellys' other movies--between the freakish pain of living and the wonderfully dumb gross-out slapstick that said freakishness makes possible.

Hong Kong action fans hoping for spontaneous combustion from the American debut of superstar Chow Yun-Fat might want to turn their weapons on the producers.

Charming self-made vehicle.

A warm, ingratiating, and fitfully hilarious epicurean road movie with a steady ache-an ache like a red-wine hangover.

An honest tear-jerker.

This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap.

The best film of 2002.

The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.

The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.

Lake of Fire centers on abortion, but Kaye understands that while dead fetuses are the hook, the agenda covers the whole life cycle.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away

This one is alive with discoveries--of locations, characters, the actors who embody them, and even the medium. In The Go-Getter, filmmaking itself feels like Manifest Destiny.

The movie is a political remake of "The Passion of the Christ," only more aestheticized: It's rigorous, evocative, and, in spite of its grisly imagery, elegant. It's a triumph--of masochistic literal-mindedness.

Good, sometimes thrilling, but it's less a war epic than an evocative romantic melodrama with a patchy first hour.

An unassuming gem: an impishly funny, melancholy, absolutely delightful English ensemble drama.

There's a great, Hitchcockian suspense sequence in a bathtub.

Directed by Bryan Singer in a break from his gayish superhero movies, it's a low-key procedural with a dollop of suspense--although perhaps not enough to make up for the foregone conclusion.

The documentary has its roots in a monologue in which the "guest of Cindy Sherman" (what H-O's place-card read at a gala) stood up for his personhood and made himself the center of the story—only there's NO STORY, not even insight into what made this unlikely couple click. Remove the boldface names and there's no movie; that center does not hold.

If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you.

If "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" are the seminal killer-as-voyeur movies, Vacancy is the nasty little runt offspring with no other purpose in life but to gnaw on you.

Pantheism, Cameronism: In Avatar, what's the diff? Now he's king of a world he made from scratch.

Amounts to a pantheistic love-in: "A Fish Called Wanda" for vegetarians.

Is Fiennes miscast? Perhaps. He's a high-strung, somewhat clammy actor--not the first to spring to mind for this warmly self-effacing plodder. But he's remarkably fine.

As I've implied, this is a great midnight movie: I enjoyed every patchily edited, ham-fisted scene. But I don't like seeing the wonderful Kate Winslet look stupid, or the wonderful Laura Linney abase herself.

The movie makes you empathize with the rage that drives these young men to violence--but it also makes you see how manly action wipes out their individuality, their uniqueness, and turns them into archetypal meatheads.

The band's implosion and reassembly makes for one of the most marvelous rock documentaries of all time.

The music ties together all the pretty pictures, gives the narrative some momentum, and helps to induce a kind of alert detachment, so that you're neither especially interested nor especially bored. Perhaps that's a state of Buddhist enlightenment.

Most haunting of all is Caan, who has never given a performance this layered.

In some strange way, I admire the enterprise. Like his Gerrys, Van Sant doesn't seem to know where he's going to wind up when he embarks on these journeys. The ether that seeps into his head might be the price we have to pay for his keeping his mind so open.

A rollicking, comic-book Robin Hood plot and more furiously entertaining fight scenes than the ones in Ang Lee's solemn martial-arts art movie.

It's bursting with goofy banter, Hollywood in-jokes, sexy love scenes, and chases that go on much too long but have the kind of madcap self-indulgence that makes questions of logic or credibility seem dull-witted. It's a great piece of mindful escapism.

Is A Christmas Tale a masterpiece? Maybe. I have to play with it longer. It's certainly Desplechin's most accessible film, in part because its dysfunctional-family-holiday-reunion genre is so comfy and its palette so warm.

Séraphine is one of the most evocative films about an artist I've ever seen--and in its treatment of madness one of the least condescending.

On one level: groan. On another: No one else seems about to make those arrests. The only thing that would scare Wall Street straight is the image of Michael Moore as the new sheriff in town.

I'm not sure what Kontroll adds up to, but if you're looking for a rackety journey into the bowels of urban life, this is your movie.

Indigènes is a stupendous work--and why that new title stinks to heaven.

You have to give credit to Frailty for jiggering up the formula a bit, so that what starts as an ominously low-key study of a boy coming of age with a mad father escalates into a combination of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Breaking the Waves" -- Grand Guignol religiosity.

While it's true that you can't pack as much psychological detail into a movie as you can into a novel, director Philip Saville and screenwriter Adrian Hodges bring out the yeasty subtext of even the most brittle encounters.

The movie is a polished muddle, fitfully amusing but with no spine.

We’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.

My real problem with Matchstick Men is that it didn't con me well enough: I saw every trick up its sleeve in the first 20 minutes. If everything had been what it seemed--now, that would have been a stunning twist.

If you can get past the craven concessions to formula, though, it’s rather underful--I mean, wonderful. Taking his cues from John Tenniel’s famous illustrations, Burton indulges his delight in disproportion.

This Merchant of Venice comes roaring to life--when it stops, in effect, apologizing for its terrible anti-Semitic worldview and just gives itself over to some of the most furious courtroom drama ever written.

What the film does have is coruscating anger, impish wit, and a breathtaking style.

A fine movie, beautifully acted, but it isn't easy to love--or to watch. It's a parade of miseries, made even more miserable by Gore Verbinski's direction.

The film is overnarrated and in spots overwritten, but Brooks, who's primarily a screenwriter, does well with actors, and he has coaxed an extraordinary performance out of the young Jordana Brewster.

Transcends its murkiness and eats into the mind. Cure is what ails you.

It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.

The documentary is solid as … as … an anvil. And if you can forget Spinal Tap (hard), it's also rather touching the way these 50-year-olds still have the forged-in-fire fortitude.

Margot at the Wedding doesn’t develop; it just skips from one squirmy scene to the next.

It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.

Juicy, revved-up, semi-satisfying biopic.

Devor doesn't endorse horse-on-man sex, but he does attempt--with sympathy--to account for the appeal.

The best movie of the last several years: the most evocative, the most mysterious, the most inconsolably devastating.

I'm not turning cartwheels over Adaptation as energetically as my colleagues. Part of me -- and I'm thinking aloud here, I've likely been infected by Kaufman's comic self-consciousness, and also by his meta-comic impulse to draw attention to that self-consciousness, and probably also by his meta-meta-comic impulse to draw attention to drawing attention to his self-consciousness -- that -- that --

Often plays like what it is: a clunky toga-and-sandals picture, with Hollywood compromises abounding.

Holy Rollers fuses a somber, old-world palette with a jittery urban unease--a good mix of tones. It’s also wonderfully acted.

The most effective counterweight to Polanski's fatalism is young Barney Clark, whose Oliver--although given to few words--is unshakably alive and responsive, even as he's being buffeted violently by forces beyond his control.

The movie works smashingly, especially if you haven't seen its Hong Kong counterpart and haven't a clue what's coming. But for all its snap, crackle, and pop, it's nowhere near as galvanic emotionally.

Coarse and chaotic remake.

Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.

Lost Highway, David Lynch's first movie in five years, is a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes.

I'd have a lot more respect for Scott if he were actually the virtuoso he pretends to be. "Gladiator" had lousy, disjunctive action, and Kingdom of Heaven is even more maladroit.

The movie makes for a good old-fashioned wide-screen wallow. Norton isn’t remotely credible, but Toby Jones is dandy as a sleazeball with a core of decency, and Watts is so open, so soulfully petulant, so transcendentally pretty, that even Maugham might reconsider the pleasures of the flesh.

Exterminating Angels is meant as an autocritique--and yet the director can't get past his notion of himself as a fearlessly transgressive artist-hero, a martyr to the limitations of male gaze.

The film becomes an aria of agony--but with a rousingly yucko finish!

The picture is an empty parlor trick, but it's carried out with a master's concentration.

Gallo’s movie is terrific, an original and disarming vision of a life that's all skids.

This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.

I can't think of too many actors who could bring off Jim Winters. LaPaglia manages to convey, wordlessly, the man's inner struggle.

A minimalist exercise in maximalist suspense.

Freed from the original Halloween template, Zombie is aiming for something hallucinatory, almost abstract: a tone poem of madness and sadism and family ties that bind (and garrote). But the picture runs out of ideas about halfway through, and what’s left is splatter in a void.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

They’ve taken "2001" and Tarkovsky’s "Solaris" and "Silent Running," mixed in stuff from save-the-earth pictures like "The Core" and "Deep Impact," and thrown in a cheesy climax out of "Alien."

Fashioned by a buff, The Lord of the Rings is a banquet for the buff in us all. I left exhausted, happy, intoxicated.

Star Maps reveals its larger (and less interesting) social intentions with a downbeat, slap-in-the-face finale, but along the way it has some good domestic grotesquerie and a layered, ironic attitude toward sex.

The tit-for-tat scenario ought to be wildly entertaining, but the magic is crude, the characters flyweight, and the story protracted and unpleasant.

A wee, breezy thing with painterly cinematography (by Jean Yves Escoffier) and with actors who are mostly fun to watch. It sails by in 103 minutes and the clunky stuff isn't painful, which makes a change from LaBute's usual grueling studies in human callousness and depravity.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons--bunched into the shape of one giant balloon--are as pluckable as grapes.

No wonder Hawke was so hot to pass the script onto Linklater. He's superb, by the way.

Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome.

The 12 scenes of Irreversible--each shot in a single, semi-improvised take--constitute something of a tour de force. But so would being dragged through the streets by a wire noose.

Too bad the movies collapses at the end when we find out what's really going on. Baghead is so much more vivid when it's indefinite.

Leigh has been giving actors their tongues for decades, and of all his films, Happy-Go-Lucky is the easiest, the least labored.

The first half of The Yellow Handkerchief is the half-movie of the year, and the rest isn’t bad--just more sentimental, more ordinary.

Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.

The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn't lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.

It’s campier than its predecessor, but its gung ho union of black, white, and Asian gangs against reactionaries who’d destroy them is a virtuosic assertion of punky Parisian multiculturalism.

Lee views these mortal fools with a sorrowful detachment. He's a sort of clinical humanist, editorializing only by what he leaves out. The downside of this method is its impersonality, which limits our involvement. The upside is its lack of cheap sentiment, and its clarity.

It's evidently important to Allen to work, work, work, but he's starting to make his movies by rote instead of passion. Could he handle -- psychologically -- a year or two off? Could he afford -- creatively -- to keep grinding them out?

Planet of the Apes has been designed and photographed (by Phillipe Rousselot) with real artistry, but in all the ways that matter it's hack work.

In the end, the movie is more than the sum of its fragments. The montages are intense, the images ravishing. The movie is tactile. When you finally feel this place, you understand just how little you understand.

In LaBute's movies, people are either clueless dupes or psychotic manipulators, while art is meant to rub your face in unpleasant "truths." And I think he takes a little too much pleasure in that nose-rubbing.

A brilliant study in the link between moral corruption and narcissism.

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

A climactic twist that's among the stupidest I've ever seen-almost up there with another Costner movie, "No Way Out," and "The Life of David Gale."

The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema.

I like my SpongeBob a little less lumbering, a little more free-associational, without that big, heavy anchor of a story structure to weigh him down.

The Band’s Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy.

The miracle of the movie is the Bolger sisters, who are so direct and matter-of-fact that they hardly seem to be acting. But their simplicity is radiant.

As a film, it's overly tidy, and the surreal concentration-camp climax gave at least one viewer an inappropriate fit of giggles.

It would be imprecise to say that the thrill is gone, because The Lost World recovers from its turgid opening and comes to life, or does so in spasms.

It demands to be seen, for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most magically poised comedienne in movies today.

It gets the job done and then some, but it's ugly and clumsily shaped, and every scene is there to rack up sociological points.

The Savages is a delightful movie--the perfect companion piece (and antidote) to the year’s other superb convalescent-dementia picture, "Away From Her."

It more or less works.

No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition--or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves...It's the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is a cosmic nothing.

Weisz is an excellent Hypatia. For all her intelligence, there's something childish, off-kilter, vaguely otherworldly in her aura. She's just the type to be gazing into the heavens while around her all hell breaks loose.

A grave screwball comedy. Its gags aren't just hilarious -- they have a weighty, plaintive soul.

A brisk feminist melodrama that is, historically speaking, a load of wank. It has the feel of a game of “telephone,” in which information is progressively mangled.

All over the map, but it's worth enduring the botched gags, formula plotting, and even the racism to marvel at the genius of Robert Downey Jr.

The movie's themes are enormously resonant, which makes its doddering tastefulness that much more frustrating.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

But Cate Blanchett ... ahhhh. She doesn't impersonate Katharine Hepburn, she channels her.

There's too much miserable reality and not a lot of transcendent dance, and the director, Stephen Daldry, doesn't cover the action from enough angles.

I don't know what Pollock is supposed to be about, but as it stands—by default—it's the most blood-freezing Jewish-mother nightmare ever filmed. Pollock would give Woody Allen the willies.

The movie is very beautiful, with a shambling pace and slow fade-ins and fade-outs; and when it works there's a tension between its characters' scuffling small-talk and its majestically ruined rural setting.

Libel on one of the true visionaries of American business in the 20th century, a man unfairly demonized for doing what others strove to do but doing it faster and better.

The result, however clichéd, is spectacularly unnerving: hair-trigger horror.

The movie is ludicrous, but Eastwood’s consistency is poignant. He has an agenda and sticks to it.

At its midpoint, the film could go either way: toward "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" psychosis or something more hopeful and humanistic. It’s a testament to Saavedra’s tough performance that even with a happy ending, you wouldn’t want to leave her with your kids.

It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned.

Swinton is good enough to take your mind off the not-too-compelling ambiguities.

Squirmily funny documentary.

At times, you could actually mistake Tears of the Sun for a blunt modern parable instead of an opportunistic mixture of up-to-the-minute atrocities and old-fashioned corn.

You can see the potential, and you can also see the places where Allen didn't (couldn't?) rise to the occasion.

Occasionally you see a documentary and it hits you how much you don’t know about someone who was part of your mental landscape.

Sensationally made and in patches pretty nerve-jangling.

Turns into a pea-brained hodgepodge of "The Omen" (1976), "The Sixth Sense" (1999), and about 30 Grade-Z Bela Lugosi mad-scientist movies.

Michelle Pfeiffer is brittle in a way that's not especially French, but she's poignant and very lovely. Rupert Friend, on the other hand, is difficult to warm up to, especially with his features hidden behind all that hair. It's not a good sign when you have to take the movie's word for it that the lovers at its center are really, really into each other.

By now we’ve seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it’s almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there’s no such thing as too much Downey.

Surprisingly intimate and nuanced.

Russell is a manically inventive writer-director--maybe the most fearless talent of his generation. It's not a contradiction to say that I admire him more than ever while pronouncing Huckabees an unmitigated disaster.

Shows the dying tremors of a generation, and you might feel as if you can see every molecule, every atom give up the ghost.

Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance.

Up in the Air is poised to be a smash, and Clooney--slim, dark, perfectly tailored--glamorizes insincerity in a way that makes you want to go out and lie.

The whole movie, of course, is a setting for its jewel, Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria: With her clear, round eyes, long dark hair, and radiant transparency, she brings to mind two of the loveliest ingénues of the last quarter-century -- Meg Tilly and Jennifer Connelly.

If there’s a sure thing in movies, it’s that if you cast Nicolas Cage in a role in which he goes crazy, he’ll rise to the occasion and keep on rising until he seems even loonier than his character.

It underscores the gruesome legacy of Saturday Night Live in American movies...They haven't liberated screen comedy, they've left it neutered--or, should I say, Spade.

A ferocious yet lyrical piece of filmmaking--an enchanted bloodbath.

Igby Goes Down got a reaction from me: I think it's the movie of the year. I squirmed, I laughed a lot.

A heartbreaking vérité documentary by Jennifer Venditti about a misfit Maine teenager--a film that makes you think about (and question) what fitting in really entails.

In the flawless cast, Williams is the most affecting.

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

A marvelously nasty revenge comedy.

Brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous.

The film is phenomenally well directed by Kevin Macdonald and edited by Justine Wright to bring out every bit of scary volatility in the most casual interactions.

It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in.

The first hour is evocative and creepy...But once the trajectory is clear and the squeamish New York intellectual Quaid has to stand up and fight for his homestead, the boringness seeps into you like the damp.

Cantet's real-time classroom scenes are revelations: They make you understand that teaching is moment to moment, an endless series of negotiations that hang on intangibles—on imagination and empathy and the struggle to stay centered. This is a remarkable movie.

He (Annaud) doesn't have a clue how to dramatize the romance. Fiennes, whose eyes are extremely close together, stares with a mixture of rage and longing at Weisz, whose eyes are extremely far apart, and the film turns into "The Dating Game" designed by Picasso.

Loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn't much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb.

The premise is admittedly a killer--fun to think about, fun to see realized, not so fun to see screwed up in the last half-hour.

This is ho-hum, straight-to-video material. And yet, even at its most crawlingly linear, Jackie Brown is diverting. If nothing else, I was diverted by the director's gall at stretching out those vacuous scenes.

The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.

Soderbergh contrives the perfect voice for Leonard's prose--laid-back and grooving when it needs to be, but also taut, with the eerie foreboding of violence about to erupt.

There's only one surgery scene, but it's the heart (and kidneys) of Turistas. The rest -- especially the incoherent action -- falls well below the mark set by the last Americans Abroad torture-porn picture, "Hostel."

Inland Empire is way, way beyond my powers of ratiocination. It's the higher math.

What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.

Brutally exciting and sometimes brutally inept.

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.

A slick, not-too-thoughtful love story.

Even if you find the satire in Josie and the Pussycats self-serving, you might still love the movie, buy the soundtrack, and surrender to the hype. That's what happened to me.

The most appalling comedy of the millennium after "Joe Dirt," which is so supernaturally terrible that it levitated me out of the theater after 40 minutes.

Any war picture in which the heroine stalls the villain with a quiet, painstaking tea ceremony until the wind shifts direction and the good guys can firebomb the bad guys into oblivion is too ineffably Zen not to love.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

Domino seemed to me the end of the world for movies--a glimpse of a future so excruciating that I'd prefer to take my chances with Hitchcock's eye-gouging avians.

Powerful and then some.

Levinson must think he's on safe ground morally by keeping Bandits bloodless, as if the absence of carnage somehow makes kidnapping and armed robbery wholesome.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

The movie is good enough to put a chill into the late-summer air. Salva has nasty surprises in the grim, minor-key last third, during which the feeling dawns on you that sleep for the next few nights won't come easily.

The film is, finally, a brilliant tap dance over a void: There’s no real drama when the inner life of the female lead is so shrouded, even if that’s the point.

The bad news is that Before Sunset is not as delirious an experience as its predecessor. The good news is that it's wonderful anyway, and in ways that tell us something about our romance with "Before Sunrise."

Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold's attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.

Excitingly convoluted.

Essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

It doesn't entirely gel, but few directors could explore the collision of the ego and the outside world with such sympathy or purpose. It's possible that the NC-17 has never been used to such PG-13 ends.

It thaws the soul.

An extraordinarily potent brew.

The movie is meant to get into you like a virus, and it does.

You have to admire a movie that endeavors to moosh together every successful cross-cultural action picture ever made.

There's a huge change that turns the nihilistic carnage of Craven's original into something suffused with old-fashioned family values, so that we can relax and enjoy watching the bad guys get beaten, skewered, dismembered by garbage disposals, and tortured with microwave ovens.

Makes for quite an emotional roller-coaster ride. You don't know whether to celebrate or mock, to laugh or weep.

It proves that male action stars can triumph not only over space but, more important, over time.

As messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It's an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least).

The movie becomes more and more lugubrious, finally ending on a note of high-tragic operatic bathos.

Morel will inevitably be compared to John Woo, whom he trounces. He has fewer mannerisms (no damn doves) and a keener eye; his fastest, most kinetic shots flow together like frames in a flipbook.

This is a bleak, unresolved film, with no release. What keeps it from being a mortal bummer is the music-exquisite sacred choral works, plus Mozart.

The script plays goofy games, stopping the action for Tarantino-style small talk; piling on alternate, "Rashomon"-style flashbacks; and divulging its characters' secrets in no particular order.

One of the most inspired cases of the medium embodying the message ever captured on celluloid.

I'm looking forward to buying Blades of Glory on DVD so I can get my head around the phenomenal skating routines. Obviously, there were wires and lifts and computer-generated effects, but for my money it looked like the lumbering Ferrell and nerdy Heder were Olympic-worthy stylists.

It's written and directed by Kevin Smith--and hats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action! Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion.

The movie made me laugh a lot anyway. It has a big, inventive cast of loons and a great premise.

Something appalling about the way he turns to the camera with a look of sorrow: Michael Moore as a suffering Christ. It's an insult to his own movie, which at its considerable best transcends his thuggish personality.

It’s everything a mainstream rom-com should be but no longer is — literate, unpredictable, full of bustling tangents.

[Dano] gives his actors space so that the rhythms are their own, and they hold us through the tough final scenes and bittersweet ending. This is a superb film.

Gray knows how to sell the idea of unalterable destiny with a car chase: That’s the mark of a real action director.

The whole movie is like that: showy stunts, explosions, over-the-top acting, fiesta colors, lurid angles, and a sense of nothing--nada--at stake.

Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please.

The film is too metronomically paced for Kilmer's routines to develop any rhythm. The direction by Phillip Noyce is fluid but impersonal. Endless studio tinkering seems to have dissolved its spine.

The fun is in the one-thing-after-another delirium the movie induces, and in our breathless anticipation of what they'll hurl at us next.

One of the more lyrical sci-fi action thrillers ever made, in which space and time become love slaves to the directors' witty visual fancies.

This isn't an objectionable movie, just a mild, obvious, and rather limp one, with plenty of little jolts but no ejaculatory payoff.

Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.

A nutty, zany, wacky, unruly, spastically hilarious hodgepodge that hits at least twice as often as it misses—which is a big deal, since there are more gags per square foot of celluloid than in any film since Joe Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990).

Caine makes a grave, soulful vigilante avenger, and first-time director Daniel Barber gives the film a dank, streaky, genuinely unnerving palette.

As the ghouls evolve toward humanity and the humans toward ghouldom, we can appreciate Romero for using horror to show us How We Live Now, and How We're Living Dead now, too.

The elements in A Walk on the Moon, which is directed by the actor Tony Goldwyn (the bad guy in "Ghost") and written by Pamela Gray, feel miraculously right.

Hats off to Olivier Assayas's plain yet hauntingly beautiful Summer Hours, a true--albeit nonsecular--meditation on art and eternal life.

Guilt and alienation from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, so arty, enervated, and allegorical it might have been made by a European in the early sixties.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

In their last collaboration, "21 Grams," the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.

Frank's writing is razor-sharp, his filmmaking whistle-clean. As a fan of sharp razors and clean whistles, I enjoyed The Lookout--yet I did feel let down by the climax, which ought to have been blunter and messier and crazier and more cathartic.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

Johnson rips off a lot of "Batman," especially in the cathedral climax, but that's not so bad: The movie looks best when it looks like other, better movies.

In The Town, he (Renner) doesn't signal that Jem is a sociopath... It's a deeply unnerving performance, beyond good or evil.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

He thrilled me, then betrayed me in the end.

Jenkins is so desperate to give his love story a social and economic context that he stops the movie cold for a bunch of unrelated white people to articulate their grievances over gentrification--it's as if "Annie Hall" had paused for a seminar on agrarian reform.

The mixture of cartoony stylization and regional realism is completely original--and a testament to the genius eye for color of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and the designer Dennis Gassner.

All along we've known that the contest was a metaphor for getting your act together BEFORE taking it on the road.

A movie about a man forced to stop thinking of himself as the center of the universe ends up feeling suffocatingly self-centered.

At least Kudrow won't get the blame for Marci X: What really sinks the movie is Wayans.

The movie is too long (nearly two hours), but the acting--Gere, Molina, the peerlessly edgy Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's loopy Swiss-German painter wife--keeps you giggling. And the story has something up its sleeve--a dream finish.

This is ultimately a conversion melodrama, and a clumsy one. But until it goes to hell, it's thrillingly good, a fervid answer to the spate of cop movies that glorify brutality and sanction ends over means.

If you’ve never seen a Johnnie To crime picture, Exiled is a simple, stylish, and utterly delightful introduction.

The movie coalesces into nothing: It's one of those films that makes you say, "That was powerful. Now what the hell was it about?"

An uncommonly well-crafted historical feminist tearjerker--both anti-patriarchal and a monument to motherhood.

Beautifully made and unsurpassingly creepy, it's the rare remake with something contemporary to add.

Face/Off is such a blast that at times I forgot I was watching a John Woo movie.

Caine makes Hampton's too-literary narration work by playing it as an inner dialogue: It's the best performance of narration I've ever heard. It makes you want to hear Caine read the whole book--or read anything.

Jake Paltrow's comedy takes familiar male-angst material and turns it into a painful--but fun--string of jokes.

The first two thirds are gangbusters, with marauding bands of tarted-up young witches who look only slightly less scary than Lindsay Lohan and her pals on an average night.

Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I'd like to forget the others--especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I've heard of a water buffalo.

It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't--to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream.

Closer is in the same arena as Labute, and I found it sour and airless, with the feel of a mathematical proof. The acting is superb, though, with one key exception. Jude Law.

What's left is a wan and impersonal whodunnit -- a movie that never gets into your blood.

The tall, cool Kidman works hard to impersonate a woman possessed, but she's not the type of actress to fill in a role that hasn't been filled in on paper.

Cameron has never been known for his dialogue, but Titanic carries some stinkers that wouldn't make the final draft of a "Days of Our Lives" script.

Rich, finely judged, gorgeously acted movie.

I was alternately delighted and irritated, though mostly a very happy camper.

Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?

If his (Zhang's) fight scenes don't fully intoxicate, though, his color and compositional rigor compensate for much. See Hero on the biggest screen you can find, and sit close enough for all that spiraling silk to tickle your nostril hairs.

Cheadle is extraordinary.

Armageddon is awesome, dude, but it's, like, short on awe.

Hordes of good actors evidently lined up to appear in Confidence, which wastes Weisz, Guzman, Logue, Forster, and Paul Giamatti, among others. Midway through, a grizzled Andy Garcia shambles in, chewing on a cigar, as an FBI agent; he's so fatuously hammy that his true narrative function is never in doubt.

Mr. 3000 is refreshing because it ends on a slightly sour, dissonant note: Stan wins, but not in the way he imagines. It's a nice change from the sports films that end with fists pumping and crowds going nuts.

This mad prophet says it will die in a week.

Before it loses its fizz--maybe two thirds of the way through--Volver offers the headiest pleasures imaginable.

A fun ride. It's loud and obvious, but it's also the first high-tech, sci-fi thriller to think through some of the implications of cloning and capitalism.

Early on, writer-director David Michôd serves up "Trainspotting"-like tricks and narration that is beguiling, if rarely apropos. But the actors are something.

This is a star-making performance, as fresh and funny as Christopher Reeve's in Superman (1978).

Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.

Lisa Kudrow does a dazzling turn as a guidance counselor who's a flickering mixture of sympathy and narcissism. But the movie belongs to Stone, that gorgeous, husky-voiced redhead.

Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting.

Shot by shot, scene by scene, it's a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn't bored for a millisecond.

For all its relative subtlety, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 remains a cartoon: Its wit is broadsword rather than rapier, and its motives are elemental. The banter is second-tier Tarantino: a cut above his imitators, but below the standard set by "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown."

When a movie wrenches you with the deaths of children then leaves you with nothing to take home but your confusion, it can make you thirsty for the blood of directors.