Desson Thomson

Equally earnest and unconvincing.

Pontecorvo's pointed 1969 drama of the politics of war feels surprisingly timely.

His (Tarkovsky's) pictures, and his sounds -- such as the symphonic drip of raindrops in a wooded pond -- tell more than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind.

This ensemble comedy has its inventively funny moments. But ultimately, it gets a little too cute for its own good.

Sweet Land is as empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

Remember the peaceful atmosphere of bedtime storytelling? The kind that allows parent and child to take satisfaction in the story, not the teller? That's how "Charlotte" draws you into its web.

Watching Kidman, Leigh and -- in his nutty, damn-the-torpedoes way -- Black as they torment, confound and torture one another amounts to a vicarious thrill ride in human behavior.

Girls is certainly fun for a time, and Goldblum, Davis, Wayans and others have their moments. But you may find your stomach rumbling from a certain emptiness under the glibness, and when it's time for that inevitable return to the planet Jhazzalan, you may hear yourself breathing a sigh of relief.

Testament to the emergence of a visually masterful filmmaker, capable of ingenious, low-tech special effects.

It's uncompromisingly bad, single-mindedly off-target.

I'm talking cheap visual gags, painfully embarrassing moments and other sophomoric humor guaranteed to get you and your friends almost vomiting with laughter.

May not rock the joint. But then, it isn't trying to.

This movie should have blown us out of the water. Instead we catch ourselves occasionally thinking the unpardonable thought: "OK, sink already."

A great American picture, full of incredible images and lasting moments.

Lures us in with extraordinary subtlety. Keeping sound effects and incidental music to a relative minimum, it builds its suspense almost subliminally. So when something scary or shocking does occur -- deprived of those Hollywood-style cues -- we are truly startled.

Not about good storytelling, but it knows to turn up the volume, cut to dizzying closeups of driver's eyes as they negotiate dangerous bends and indulge its audience in the soul slaps, fanny grabs and head nods that govern this racing lifestyle.

Gets more operatically farcical (most of it unintentionally so) by the minute.

Probably the most engaging Potter film of the series thus far.

Even Posey -- who brightens most movies she's in -- fails to stir the movie's unresponsive tectonic plates.

Moore provides a rather rambling discourse of causality, which includes racism, white flight and Africanized bees.

The central story, in which Helms has to make up his mind whether to attend his sister's funeral, is too limited a conflict to hang a movie on. Ultimately, audiences will have to satisfy themselves with the collective presence of these actors and the movie's obviously good-hearted intentions.

There's a little too much over-the-top drama, as well as superfluous detail, in this Icelandic film.

You believe in everything.

A hilarious fantasy, about a plucky piglet that learns how to tend sheep, Babe is a barnyard charmer.

Fails because of its gratuitous rape and violence and also because of its pretentious and intellectually one-dimensional grounds, which make the violence at the end feel even worse.

The reunion is fun and frantic, like the original on double nitro.

The best moments occur when -- as in reality -- we're still in the dark. As soon as the movie gets to its version of a punch line, it turns into another Hollywood vehicle spinning aimlessly in space.

A bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than Groundhog Day.

Such a bizarre movie that it has completely occupied my thinking for days. Not because it's a good movie, mind you. It's more like the equivalent of a botched tooth extraction with a coat hanger. Some bloody shard remains stuck in an inflamed, fleshy part of my psyche, and it's going to take some serious tugging and tearing to root it out.

The movie holds you in thrall from first frame to last. Hatred is hatred unslaked. So is racism, ugliness, love, lust and sorrow.

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed "Deliverance."

Roll past this casino.

The kid chews up the scenery like a baby T-Rex, egged on, no doubt, by director Agresti.

She (Madonna) really ought to be tried for impersonating Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Or playing a second-rate Hitchcock mystery blonde -- she's even named Rebecca.

Even by its own standards, the movie becomes increasingly macabre and ludicrous as Anne's machinations get the better of her, and everyone, including the audience, is left feeling shattered, shaken and vaguely unclean for having participated in all this.

Feckless and crude without any particularly funny redeeming value. If there's anything more to this poor excuse of a movie than immediately meets the eye, I'll get back to you.

A thematically bleak yet subtly comic film.

Takes the spirit of their late night TV show and flies with it.

Entertaining for so long it's a downer to sit through the dumbed-down finale.

A well-intentioned, reverential but unenlightening portrait. It pays tribute to the artist. Yet it doesn't scrutinize him.

After a promising beginning and an amusing middle, the movie gets stuck in limbo.

Apocalypse Now Redux, which contains about 50 minutes of extra footage, is Coppola's final artistic assault. This is the one where he honors his vision -- or clears his name, whichever way you look at it. Does he do it? Perhaps the first thing to get out of your mind when watching this "Apocalypse," or the 1979 version, is worrying about whether the film's a success or failure. It's both. The more you see of "Apocalypse," the more obvious its triumphs and mistakes.

Let's accentuate the positive: Saving Silverman really stinks. No, really. It's bad. Awful.

Robocop is one weird and entertaining hybrid of camp and sci-fi shoot-'em-up.

An intriguing idea for about two seconds.

Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.

It's definitely NOT a conventional biopic about Kurt Cobain. (Nor, as its title oddly suggests, is it about the demise of writer-director Van Sant.) It's a tone poem, an elliptical, fictionalized meditation about the ill-fated rock 'n' roll superstar.

Dull, plodding comedy.

A delirious mixture of spectacular gun battles, furious explosions and breathtaking stunt work, it's also one of the strangest stories to ever get the green light at a Hollywood studio. You have to take your hat off to Paramount Studios for allowing such inspired weirdness to see the light of day.

What starts out as a moody arthouse flick rapidly becomes an uneven B-movie yukfest (sometimes intentional, sometimes not), with low-budget concessions to the Hollywood cop-versus-killer industry.

Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc.

Insufferably cloying experience.

The lighthearted buoyancy comes through. Silver takes her time, just as surely as slowly, searching for nuance between the hackneyed lines of Jewish Moms, Barrow Boys, Famous Authors and English Lit Groupies. Everyone at least has flickering moments of originality.

Has so little going for it, you wonder if you've missed something.

If you do not bring pride, good taste or sense to this third American Pie installment, you'll have a good time.

The movie doesn’t hit one out of the park, the way Get Shorty (another Leonard adaptation) did. But it racks up points with stolen bases and singles.

An engaging battle between terrific acting and a flawed script.

Allen, who's a natural charmer, seems to be at half-strength here.

The wacky incongruity works when debuting director Mamet has tongue in cheek. But all too often he's rechewing film noir, Hitchcock twists and MacGuffins, as well as the Freudian mumbo-jumbo already masticated tasteless by so many cine-kids.

Thanks to Caine's subtly nuanced performance, there's a deeper dimension to everything. He's snappily ironic at times, sometimes amazingly delicate, always engaging.