Desson Thomson

Cornish provides a counterbalance for Ledger's authoritative presence, turning what could have been just another heroin movie into a flawed but engrossing parable on love and sacrifice.

A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.

Straightforward but nonetheless powerful documentary.

The most eloquent and exacting vision of the war to date... Inspired with technique rather than overblown with it, Kubrick, the filmmaker's filmmaker, lays one on you.

Even by Disney's formulaic standards -- is about as cut and dried as the phone book.

That's the only way to enjoy Wolfgang Petersen's nearly three-hour epic: as a Pitt vehicle. In a role that requires larger-than-life dimensions, he's pretty terrific.

A story that rips fleshy holes through your heart.

Exciting, smart and enormously enjoyable.

This French film has a breezy, documentary air that belies the important issues is raises.

At first, the picture is moving. . And suddenly charm turns to quasi-commie didacticism.

A respectably stirring film about the rupturing birth of civil rights in the South. Although most of Walk Home heads down this ready-for-prime-time moral path, director Richard Pearce and screenwriter John Cork uncover some interesting dramatic grays along the way. 

Something to treasure: a thriller whose style, structure and rhythms are so integrated with the story, you cannot separate them.

Best news: over in 87 minutes.

This movie is all pretty faces and six-pack abs, but no characters. All surface and no soul. Come to think of it, the surface isn't so darned hot either.

First-time writer/director Tom Hanks stays about a half-beat ahead of the cliches with rim shots of boyish enthusiasm and deft comedy.

A sequel that eclipses the original. The toys are back with even more hilarious vengeance. The story's twice as inventive as its predecessor.

Performances feel too manufactured to be charming.

She’s the One, Edward Burns’s swift follow up to "The Brothers McMullen," may not have the primitive charm of its predecessor, but it retains the humorous spirit. It’s also graced with returning cast-members Burns, Mike McGlone and Maxine Bahns, whose bright comic interplay makes an enjoyable family reunion.

A Sidney Lumet movie is loose. It's a big vehicle, loaded with the usual artistic statement. But Running on Empty is coasting downhill fast.

A movie that appeals to the eye, mind, heart and funny bone; that's a pretty good quadruple for any movie.

In terms of sheer belly-laugh count, this one's in the same plentiful company as "There's Something About Mary" and "Road Trip."

Penn, who also wrote the script, burdens the story with so many self-indulgent side developments that he loses emotional drive and Freddy's desperate obsession gets lost in the shuffle.

But when mechanical plots are a drama's main engine, we look for something else to divert us, preferably good comedy. That's in short supply, unfortunately. And it's no fun to sit through the movie's retread Woody Allenisms.

Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.

Although Ryan is cannily cast against type, she doesn't bring much more than muttery incoherence and nudity to the role.

You judge a movie by its own standards, right? Bulletproof, starring Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, is rambunctious, crude, ridiculous, violent and -- incidentally -- very funny.

Feels like a prolonged campfire conversation, filled with weathered, measured talk about holistic thinking and finding a new perspective.

The story (adapted by Spielberg and David Koepp from Michael Chrichton's "Lost World") isn't much better than "Jurassic Park." And the predictability factor is high.