Desson Thomson

At it’s core, it’s just another youth-culture flick about the search for love. It’s also a mediocre bid to join the shoestring pantheon of such filmic self-starters as Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It) and Kevin Smith (Clerks).

There isn't enough magic in the bag this time. Although Parkes and Lasker produce a set of primates guaranteed to charm the upholstery off the theater seats, there is little else.

For all his legitimate laments and pithy documentary moments, Moore gloats too much over his treasure. Where Moore makes his mark is basically where he shuts up and, like a good documentarian ought to, lets the subjects do the talking.

By many other directors' standards, Au Revoir would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career -- when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate -- it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke.

Mulholland Drive is an extended mood opera, if you want to put an arty label on incoherence.

Kettle of Fish, starring Matthew Modine as a commitment-skittish saxophone player, is a warm-spirited romantic comedy, but it tends to have a squawky pitch.

The movie makes an over-long deal about Jody's immaturity and never seems to get beyond it.

The writer in Soderbergh proves the ultimate weak link. In sex, lies' last third, he seems seized with a compulsion to make sense of it all, bring everything to bear, give everyone their moral comeuppance, their screenplay payoff.

For all the When Irish Eyes Are Smiling's and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing's filling the soundtrack, Voices never engages more than your eyes and ears. It leaves you out in the cold and vaguely wondering, Is the entire British nation depressed?

Like Cheung's ethereally plaintive voice, the movie is a siren song that's appealing at first, but held too long. It becomes an increasing whine.

The movie, which is based on the Lowell Cunningham comic book series, throws out some wonderful implications, but they’re frustratingly few and far between.

A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.

There is no evidence of life outside the immediate world of the movie.

The movie, a frenetic, explosive experience full of car crashes and gun battles, is original and exhilarating. But more often, it's so overwhelming, it'll make you want to watch "Die Hard With a Vengeance" for peace and quiet.

The story, such as it is, follows Renton's inconsistent attempts to kick his habit.

Revenge was supposed to be the one that really socked it to us, about Anakin's almost biblical fall from grace. But the movie never rises to its powerful occasion.

The trouble is, this is Hartley all over again. What seemed cutting edge and sharp in the 1990s -- the smart-alecky references to obscure filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Andrei Konchalovsky), the self-mocking tone in the actors' voices, the overall sense that this movie is subverting itself -- feels rehashed and old.

Forgettable the instant it strafes your retinas.

Speaking of jail, "Shawshank"-the-movie seems to last about half a life sentence. The story, chiefly about the 20-year friendship between Freeman and Robbins, becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.

Maddin keeps what could have been a one-joke theme interesting for an admirably long time. But eventually, it becomes, well, hard to breathe. There's something wonderfully unique about the project but the reasons for doing it remain buried.

Although it contains many visually compelling passages and some provocative moments, the movie is strangely banal and simplistic.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

Truth be told, none of it is actual living, and all of it is secondhand re-spinning of such better movies as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Welcome to Sarajevo." To use an antiquated newsman's cliche: Get me rewrite.

Although the movie adheres more closely to history than "Quills," it lacks dramatic punch and depth.

It's been gunned before -- and so much better.

A little too shopworn and pokey to be more than a respectable European diversion.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.