Desson Thomson

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

Isn't much more than another conveyer-belt romantic comedy.

(Stamp and Fonda's) polar-opposition in acting styles and temperament, their cultural differences and their pop-cultural synergy come together with almost delicious cacophony.

Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.

About half a notch above disaster.

The movie's still a solid "B," a workmanlike drama.

This is the kind of sophisticated and pleasurable movie you dream of seeing from France.

A warmly spirited travel diary of a movie.

Mostly, the movie is riveting, well-done fare -- the stuff of Hollywood epic adventure.

The movie, however, is Pesci's. In that courtroom, he gets on a roll and stays rolling until the end. There's no one better with that New York-New Jersey corridor accent.

I'd rather sit in bumper-to-bumper hell on I-495 for two hours than get caught in Traffic again.

Another sentimental mushfest disguised as a movie.

Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.

In the end, what started off as playful becomes tedious.

Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.

This movie just doesn't match its predecessors.

Feels so slight and pointless.

For audiences simply looking for easy entertainment and some neat-looking robots along the way.

What counts is the comic tension between MacLaine and Cage. It's so well done, it doesn't matter how dumb things get.

Its hackneyed themes prevent the sci-fi flick from feeling like anything more than well-directed mediocrity.

There's your intrigue. There's your romance. There's your x factor, by which I mean your willingness to give two appealing stars an incredible break throughout most of the major obstacles between them and a successful robbery.

Never transports you to another place and time, as it intends to.

Where Avalon works, as with Diner and Tin Men, is where it's improvisory, comic and most artistically humble.

The movie doesn't have the energy to be truly horrible. It's too muted and enervated. But it's a somewhat tedious thing to sit through.

Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.

An impressive but nonetheless obvious imitation has sprung up in the shadows of two brilliant movies-I refer to 1955's "Kiss Me Deadly" and 1974's "Chinatown."

It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.

A hilarious, inventive and goofy breath of fresh air.

A firepowered, blood-drenched action picture that doesn't let up.

Unfortunately, the film, written and directed by Sue Kramer, starts with a distinctly uncomfortable moral baseline: How exactly is any audience supposed to identify with a character whose relationship with her brother borders on the incestuous?

What really reaches us is the collective presence of the cast, most of them monks and other acting amateurs. They seem uniformly imbued with inherent grace and effortless spiritual bearing. And their smallest of gestures exude the kind of un-self-conscious gravitas that constitutes all fables.

Eastwood's elegantly directed Mystic River, a deeply textured drama in which the sins (or perceived sins) of the past weigh heavily on the present.

A documentary that knows to sit back and listen as [Dobson] expounds on a variety of subjects.

Leadenly directed and almost soberly scripted, it never captures the campy brightness of the original series -- the herky-jerky animation, the wacky sound effects, the distinctive character voices and that cheesy laugh track.

Terrifically funny romantic comedy, is a slam-dunk for Julia Roberts, the Michael Jordan of cuteness.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looks like big money. It has the stars, it's based on a classic (and foolproof) story and it's an exhilarating couple of hours. It fills the entertainment megabill utterly.

What keeps the film (adapted from the late John O'Brien's harrowing semi-autobiographical book) from being completely unbearable are the extraordinary performances.

As rich and fun as it was in post-Depression 1937 -- yes, 1937. And the seven dwarfs (Doc, Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Grumpy and Dopey) are every bit as charming as they "Hi-ho" to work at the diamond mine.

[Gere] seemed to be improvising his way from beginning to end, like he was disgusted with the actual script.

In the end, Made is a movie with better potential than actual results.

It's a pleasant experience. But that's what it is: a sequel that replays every aspect of the original movie.

Everyone in the cast is terrific, including Dermot Mulroney as Wolf, the beret-sporting cameraman who thinks he's a genius but can't seem to stop screwing up shots, and Wanda (Danielle Von Zerneck), a tough-talking assistant director who gets weak in the knees whenever Chad gets close. Best of all is Buscemi, a wonderfully offbeat, edgy performer who has appeared in such independent films as Mystery Train and Reservoir Dogs. He carries the emotional weight of the movie as his dream project faces impending doom, his red-rimmed, frog-like eyes threatening to burst with exasperation.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

Devolves into such utter ludicrousness, the best response (other than avoiding the thing in the first place) is to laugh.

An entertainment to be seen and appreciated in momentum. As such, it is constantly gripping

The only active ingredient is the dynamic between Smith and Jones. There's just enough of that to get us through.

A surprisingly gripping experience.

A great director's losing battle against a goofy script.

The movie equivalent of a great read. It's a masterfully conducted concert of characters...already head and shoulders above most of the competition.

It's not often you find a movie as exciting and awful as Rumble in the Bronx. But the sole aim of this so-bad-it's-funny action picture is to introduce Jackie Chan to American audiences. In that narrow sense, it's completely successful.

May leave you more cold and stunned than enlightened.

You're exhilarated from beginning to end.

It doesn't seem like overstating things to say that Eros becomes steadily worse as it goes along.

An extraordinary film ... that's impossible to dismiss or leave unmoved.

Someone definitely inhaled too much before making this one.

We may not get to their innermost feelings, which would have taken this documentary to a deeper, maybe darker level, but the movie's purpose is celebratory. As such, it's a satisfying experience.

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 canny (and profoundly sexy) movie.

The movie's entertaining for some wickedly funny situations and witticisms.

Often wickedly funny, but about halfway through, the premise becomes -- shall we say? -- intestinally overextended.

O'Neal's performance, on the other hand, could incite angels to throw tomatoes from heaven. As the meek-and-noble reporter (who never seems to find time to file stories), he seems to be a confused Barry Lyndon, inexplicably whisked into this century and given a Georgetown lease, a ridiculous movie role and a byline. You get the feeling that, like this movie, his news stories need editing.

Cheerful, energetic and on the money.

A bare-bones outline ignores the performances, the stirring music, the close-in camerawork and the direction of Steve Anderson. The emotional punch and atmosphere of the movie soar through any hokiness. Plummer's search for the son he never saw grow up becomes a powerful odyssey.

A highly watchable slice-of-low-life entertainment. If this isn't her best role, it's Dunaway's gutsiest.

It's more a collection of episodes that build to a complex, richly layered picture of these girls' lives. And the more time we spend with them, the more endearing they become.

The movie Casanova, starring Heath Ledger, not only fetters the randy Venetian in political correctness, it condemns him to dwell inside the modern equivalent of a bad Shakespeare play.

Newton may not be a great actor, either, but she's full of life and charm. She's the only thing holding this movie together at all.

It's full of good heart, and you can't help but like its unequivocal sentimentality.

Compelling, if throwaway, drama.

Essentially, Chuck & Larry is an oafish chance for audiences to laugh at gay-bashing jokes and then feel morally redeemed for doing so -- courtesy of an obligatory wrap-up scene that reminds us that homosexuals are humans, too.

If you're a fan of Witherspoon, this movie was produced, shot, edited and distributed entirely for you.

Like Casablanca, Diva, Clockwork Orange and countless other quality-cult films, Prick Up Your Ears has an indefinable idiosyncrasy that makes you want to come back for more.

It's also genuinely moving to see disenfranchised individuals discovering self-determination from the hard ground up.

Parents is an impressive debut, and certainly the most provocative new release around town. You may leave this movie realizing how dark your childhood actually was. You may also leave a vegetarian.

You'll be rooting for these people to get slaughtered out of sheer boredom.

There are more climaxes in here than in a Swedish blue movie. This is not to say you won't be thrilled, charged up and put through the ringer at times, but your intelligence will need to be shoved under your seat like warm, flat soda.

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

Start lining up now, bring a bullwhip -- and maybe some d-Con. Indiana will do the rest.

Sure, the heroes and villains are arranged in a convenient moral gallery. But the performances, Weir's adroit direction and John Seale's superb cinematography take care of that banality.

As viscerally compelling as smash-mouth filmmaking gets.

Although the movie has its moments, it's a tearjerker that jerks too hard.

Never was the case for psychotropic medication more acute than in Jovovich's performance.

Fails to capture the spiritual hallelujah of the novel.

So full of pep you can't help surrendering to its creative energy.

Ruben, at least, is adept with suspense tactics. He keeps Bergin lurking off screen for an agonizingly long time and he knows his suspenseful way around a bathtub. There's also some respectably scary business to do with neatly arranged bathroom towels and food cans in the pantry. But Ruben is merely modulating mediocre material.

We are left with vivid images of Dominique, whose desire to change his country, despite formidable intimidation, is an inspiration to any supporter of democracy.

The longer I take to review this movie, the more the absurdities loom. So let me finish before I think about the story's stupidly plotted structure or recall how tiring it was to watch apes perpetually pushing humans to the ground or sending them pirouetting into the air.

Hollywood Homicide is about murder, all right: the wholesale slaughter of anything funny, original or even vaguely logical.

Ferrell provides just enough humor to get us through the familiar fare and enjoy the ride.

The suspense is laughably absent.

There may not be a bigger-hearted performance this year than Jamie Foxx's in Ray.

That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."

The problem with this movie is the problem with most Renny Harlin movies: There's an excessive amount of excess -- a mind-numbing plurality of firearm battles, vehicular explosions and brutally frank sexual talk.

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

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

Every moment of the way, there is a delectable sense of subtle menace and, at the center of it all, Huppert's haunting expression, part sphinx, part grace and maybe part scary.

A blundering cringefest, thanks to unintentionally laughable dialogue, hackneyed writing and uninspired direction.

August, who also made "Pelle the Conqueror" and "House of the Spirits," steers this story to its stirring conclusion with firm lack of sentimentality.