Desson Thomson

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

A Chinese film whose simple surface belies greater mysteries.

Imagine settles disappointingly for rom-com cliches. It doesn't even bother to explore its own premise.

This movie's entire raison d'etre (that's French for "shark meat") is to toy creatively with the "rules."

There is a clear festive buzz, as attendees laugh, bob and listen to Chappelle's impish, inventive comedy, and some of the best music hip-hop has to offer.

This all makes for a deeply entertaining experience that engages our hearts as well as our funny bones. And it's gratifying to see Cruz finally get her due.

It's a pleasant movie, written with care for the characters. But as the film's title suggests, scriptwriter Mark Andrus has made too obvious and clunky a metaphor of George's house.

Spielberg takes assured control. In his hands, Minority Report is a classy, chilly quasi-Hitchcockian affair.

To the patient viewer, the rewards are many, especially Bardem's performance.

The result isn't a fragmentary experience so much as an evocative collage.

Its adroit use of suspense makes you overlook the silliness.

Producer-for-Life George Lucas puts his awesome creative machinery to work in Willow, a would-be adventure of little people, big people, good guys and bad. But the fantasy wheels grind to a halt, bogged down in Lucas' flat, derivative story, and not helped in the least by director Ron Howard's clumsy steering.

A truly satisfying holiday picture, the kind everyone can enjoy.

The film degenerates into an overly simplistic satire -- with moon-worshiping, Guatemala-visiting, lesbian aborters on one side, and fetally obsessive, meat-eating, gun-toting Jesus worshipers on the other.

Its greatest asset...Flora Montgomery, a flash of blond, Irish fire who makes Trudy well worth Brendan's trouble.

Ludicrous. Its logic flies out the window like a rocket. It's unbelievable and ridiculous... But fascinating it is.

It's great to watch the cat-and-mouse of it all -- even when the movie might not be firing on all points.

There's a rampant looseness to this movie, and it's subversively liberating.

While this HBO-produced, generically titled family caper isn't quite as dead as you'd expect, it doesn't exactly pulsate with comic originality. Borrowing from successful comedies of recent years, from Big to Risky Business, it bounces along with a familiar, pre-sold air.

An overwrought gangster fable.

The result is astoundingly boring and, frankly, tedious to sit through.

The story is more undead than all of these revenant shufflers. And the orgy of gore and home-engineered special effects doesn't make up for the shortfall.

Burton has evoked the surface of Ed Wood's life, but in a story about a man who loves angora and frilly panties, he has barely unbuttoned Wood's uniform.

Not since the 1972 'Cabaret' has there been a movie musical this stirring, intelligent and exciting.

A disconcertingly assured tango between tenderness and brutality.

Stallone is to humor what John Goodman is to ballet.

Director Pascale Ferran makes this a sort of opera of two bodies, as the characters discover not only each other but themselves. And the French filmmaker cannily turns their corporeal discoveries into a moral mission, two desperately lonely souls crying for spiritual freedom in a world of moral constriction.

A secondhand action movie that retreads all the tired staples of the 1980s and '90s.

The most obvious problem occurs between Snipes and Sciorra. Lee's so interested in the ripple effect they cause, he almost forgets the affair itself. We see anger all over Harlem and Bensonhurst, but we're barely allowed into the main bedroom, where the real hell must be taking place.

A heartfelt but eccentric, pseudo-documentary tribute to his sister Maria.

It's a glossified, cluttered parody of itself. Almodovar is no longer a burlesque auteur. He's a repeat offender.

Possibly the most suspense-charged mountain-climbing movie ever made.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar ... has found the perfect balance of old-fashioned charm and postmodern touches -- but not too many to overshadow the show's precious texture.

A subplot involving Griffith and first boyfriend Alec Baldwin becomes the-subplot-that-wouldn't-go-bust, and comic scenes sometimes go bankrupt because they just hold their stock too long. Light entertainment like this should zip along like those financial quote boards.

The documentary never gets more than skin deep. It rarely delves into the troubling regions that are the very orchards of documentary.

There are two distinctive features to the movie: the mind-numbingly banal plot as one chases another who chases another, and all the offensive material.

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.

The chemistry between the actors, particularly between Anton and Kinnaman, is sometimes magical.

The movie's big action scenes, at times, make you forget you're even watching animation. There's an in-your-face sequence involving a runaway, crashing train that will make you squirm in your seat trying to get out of the way.

It's a wonderful postmodern hug of a movie, and never once do you not know you're watching a movie.

This movie is not only a thrilling experience, it closes the book on a truly satisfying trilogy.

The special twist-which Paramount Pictures has implored critics not to divulge-redefines the story completely. It also ruins everything.

The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.

We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.

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).

If P.S. I Love You proves anything, it's that Hilary Swank may be a great actress, but she can't do cute.

Although this movie shows Lin's promising moviemaking sensibilities, its point of view feels coldly amoral and dismissive.

Wittily scripted, engagingly sappy, completely implausible and unabashedly Capraesque, it's a rather wonderful crock.

It doesn't lack for emotional intensity or persuasive, three-dimensional characters.

It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.

The dance between authenticity and storymaking works beautifully.

It's not art, this movie. But it's much more amusing than you'd expect.

It's gotten to the point where Gooding's presence on a marquee practically guarantees we'll be bashing our heads against the seat in front of us. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

Fat Man seems unsure of which human story to concentrate on.

There's visceral horror, too, including a grisly image -- a horror-in-miniature involving a fingernail -- that located an open nerve in my jaded ability to endure screen violence.

Pitiful.

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

The best thing about the movie is its personable, amusing cast, all members of the five-man comedy troupe Broken Lizard. There's a chemistry among them, which obviously comes from having been together as comedians at Colgate University.

Notre Musique is really a poetic essay, masterfully intermixing the director's mournful-toned, philosophical narration with documentary and staged moments.

Attenborough's aims are more academic and political than dramatic. By following an initially wrongheaded white character, he clearly wants to reach out to similar audiences. Cry could have reached further.

This is a one-riff movie and instant cult classic.

John Boorman's childhood and the London Blitz happened to coincide. Which is great for the movie Hope and Glory, because he turns both events into exquisite myth.

Below the attention-getting surface, there's no sense of humanity underneath. The day De Palma pulls away the masks from his characters, they'll start to breathe -- and so will his films.

Guys, I'm telling you: Don't go to this movie! It's "Chasing Amy" with guns! You're walking into a trap! This is for fans of the holy couple, but they already know that.

Even though Single White Female is more second-rate, knife-stabbing psycho drivel, it's no pain to sit through. It looks great, for one thing. It has two fabulous faces -- Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It's also funny, sexy, suspenseful and, yes, utterly stupid.

Should we really be so moved and uplifted that a horny, ignorant young man begins to join the human race? Not when our voice of conscience is an off-screen filmmaker issuing pseudo-profound, and ultimately banal, pronouncements about the true nature of love and seduction.

The list of great moments is virtually endless.

You may leave this movie exhilarated by its no-holds-barred boldness or annoyed and bewildered at the unpredictable course it takes.

But for most audiences, this bittersweet family saga is going to feel like an ordeal.

Grant's unblinking but sympathetic depiction of this emotionally unhinged world makes the viewer feel like an illicit, enlightened gawker, and it has the enormous fringe benefit of fine performers, including Richardson, who puts endearing vigor into the adulterous Lauren, and Julie Walters, Ralph's aunt, who tells the boy her frequent tipsiness is a recurring case of "sunstroke."

In Things Change, the gangsters and bodyguards, the lounges and limos don't got, whaddya call, da same allure. You watch the whole thing with a detached amusement, like a goon cooling his heels in the lobby, just waiting for things to change.

It's a joy to see nice warm performances by real people of different shapes, sizes and ages, who are seldom to be found in any glamour catalogues. And it's even more rewarding to watch Ferrera's many-sided performance.

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.

Screwball romance, action picture. Summer movie.

The movie may steal a base here and there, but there are no homers.

There are many periods when the two men are traveling and you feel the need to fast-forward the movie to another scene. This is not a great comedy but it's a string of funny highlights.

Too lightweight and streamlined to be memorable.

Unfortunately, The Man makes the mistake of assuming casting is all it takes to make a good comedy.

This Matt Perry vehicle is funnier than anyone could hope to expect.

It feels like real life unfolding before your eyes.

It's the atmospheric sideshow that earns the highest marks.

A galactic slump of a movie that stuffs its travel bag with special effects but forgets to pack the charm.

Even though the story ultimately doesn't match the intensity with which it began, the movie's extraordinary for its two main performances.

Things become almost too strange and convoluted to handle. The story's dramatic effectiveness starts to seriously malfunction. The fascinating and the mysterious become the silly and occasionally comical.

Without its animation, A Scanner Darkly would have made a fine cautionary tale about drug addiction, paranoia and institutional treachery in a police state. But with a technique that turns the existing live action into a two-dimensional cartoon, the movie goes one -- maybe even 10 -- better. It becomes its own living, breathing metaphor.

Mamet doesn't just give us an enthralling heist flick, he makes the language something to savor. You're biting your nails with your ears peeled.

This movie is a predictable, gruesome piece of business.

The film's depicted cruelties (the rape and disembowelment of a woman, a pillow suffocation of a boy after Poelvoorde has chased the terrified tyke through the house) grossly overshadow their satiric purposes.

The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.

As with most sequels, Addams Family Values is a thinner, airier reunion. For those who enjoyed the original The Addams Family, the flavor is still there. But you feel a little undernourished.

Big muscular guys pruning roses IS funny and charming.

Its collection of one-liners and amusing situations could put you in a diverting spell. A studio-generated romp about three 17th-century witches who create havoc in present-day Salem, Mass., it's full of big-crowd laughs (thanks mostly to Midler) and suspense.

He's the anticop, one blood-soaked, quasi-psychotic symptom of Hollywood's desire to outgun, outkill and out-carchase itself.

Housesitter wants to please everyone a little, but nobody a lot. This low-achievement approach may guarantee success in the video stores. But on the big screen, it's fully exposed. For all Steve Martin's rubbery faces, and Goldie Hawn's watery-eyed expressions, the movie just sits there.

Only moderately compelling.

A medium-boil good time, mostly for its humor.

Sadly, this movie is a far cry from the atmospheric, even thoughtfully crafted original, which made you truly scared for the unkempt, everyman victims. But this latest version, though just as grisly, is literally hackwork, and stars a forgettable, airbrushed cast of slaughterees.

A Molotov cocktail of a movie, an engaging conflagration of British B-flick, cockney wit and gallows humor. There's even a delicate little love story in there.

The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.

A historical drama about a black regiment that proves its mettle during the Civil War, may not hold up to intense scrutiny but it marches to the glorious beat that fired up the Massachusetts 54th. And it's hard not to get carried along.

Surprisingly pleasant.

Robb is remarkably assured; there isn't a false note in her performance.

If there's one piece of wisdom to be culled from this botched project, it's this: No one gets Carter.

As with any band movie, this is a moral, rise-and-fall tale. Rock must learn he's a regular guy, not a nasty poseur. Like Spinal Tap, the movie basically peters out, tying up its narrative loose ends. But for the laughs you get, it's a small price to pay.

There's more suspense in On Golden Pond. And when the predictable ending comes, it has none of the titanic man-versus-beast struggle of the original. It all happens so quickly, you wonder if you've missed something. But, no you haven't, because there it is -- the familiar calm sea . . . of credits.

Weitz co-directed the wonderful "About a Boy" in 2002, but in "Dreamz" -- a tediously facile satire -- his comic instincts fail him.

Steers refreshingly clear of the usual cliches. Character takes the wheel and dictates the action, not the other way around.

Nothing more or less than a moneymaking encore. The story is functional. The performers assume their marks with almost flippant ease.

Just like "Bad Boys," only louder, longer and the stars get paid more.

Abomination of a movie.

Filmmaker Gray, only 25 when he made this, expertly delineates the restive characters in this Jewish emigre community, and the existential voids among them all. He's helped by assured, subtle performances all around

The real star of U-571 is its sheer visceral atmosphere.

Instead of "Masterpiece Theatre"-style fawning, [Scorsese] fills this movie with visual flow, masterful cinematography and assured direction. There's an alert, thinking presence behind the camera.

Doesn't deserve the energy it takes to describe how bad it is.

Playing a mentally unhinged, almost wordless naif who finds true love with equally nutty Mary Stuart Masterson, he's supposed to invoke the silent comedian, with a little Chaplin thrown in. But he's just Edward Scissorhands without the scissors -- or the edge.

It's really no pain to sit through Object. Even at its most drawn out, the movie has its comic moments. Malkovich makes a perfect, plastic-souled being.

The stranger and more unusual the characters, and the less they're explained, the better.

Much of the movie -- which Murphy wrote with a small posse of collaborators -- is taken up with the torturously dull, not to mention unbelievable, romance between Norbit and Kate (a disappointingly lackluster Newton) and the tedious agenda of Cuba Gooding Jr. as a schemer-manipulator.

Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.

How can you celebrate a movie in which Zellweger doesn't soar but simply avoids disaster?

A politically incorrect but often hilarious jam session, in which men and women trade insults like musical licks.

Merchant's attention to Trinidadian culture, locales and general atmosphere is inescapably alluring.

You can laugh with or without irony. Or you can simply stay away.

Could have been a sensation if a director with a smidgen of moviemaking instinct had taken the helm.

British director Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, treats the ugliest content imaginable in the most beautiful way possible. Give or take another masterpiece coming down the pike, this intricately assembled, viscerally provocative tract on consumerism gone full and grisly circle, is without a doubt, the most accomplished, astounding film of the year.

First Contact, written by Ric Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, pulsates with great imagination, amusing characters and the fundamental optimism handed down by "Star Trek" founder Gene Roddenberry.

Angel-A is counterfeit art-house chic writ large -- a French film that fails to produce the ineffable charms of the yesteryear movies it brazenly imitates.

It's a wonderfully playful experience.

Vibrant and engaging documentary.

If it weren't for Sharif's extraordinary presence, there wouldn't be a cherishable moment in the movie.

These storied 13 days feel like the Hundred Years War.

In their desire to humanize the big story, director John Boorman and screenwriter Ann Peacock ... have resorted to groan-inducing cliches and clunky narrative.

The best thing about The Island is this: Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, buffed and dressed in sparkling white, wondering how and when to kiss each other.

Proof of Life isn't a movie. It's an overpriced scrapbook.

It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie. Every cliffhanger is enough to make you a cliff jumper. Davis and Modine are almost transcendentally unappealing, as they weather dull sword fights, ship-to-ship exchanges and other action-movie banalities.

In this movie, only one thing is certain: No one remains the same.

This isn't a stand up and cheer flick; it's a sit down and ponder affair. And thanks to Kline's superbly nuanced performance, that pondering is highly pleasurable.

Although the movie never quite dispels the sense of being dated (it could have been made anytime in the past 40 years), it's a memorable, often moving timepiece.

So pleased with its own spoofy conceit it stays in annoyingly self-amused, predictable mode.

Seidelman, Strugatz and Burns are so busy systematically constructing Barr's revenge and keeping her smugly vindicated, they fail to realize they've bulldozed all comical landmarks in sight. So it ultimately doesn't matter whether or not Streep is redeemed, Barr is vindicated, Begley is punished -- or whether or not they all go to hell in a handbasket. They're all buried under the rubble.

The Trigger Effect enjoys bursts of energy as people confront each other in low-budget groups of twos and threes, but it never becomes the subtly powerful experience Koepp was clearly after.

With The Baxter, Showalter's begging his way into the ranks of the safe and the mediocre.

Let's not waste any time: This movie is just awful. Prime problem: Josh Kornbluth, the chubby, wild-haired, bug-eyed star.

Mullan's movie is admiringly uncompromising. He refuses to augment the horrors with relief.

A stunningly insipid romance, marks an all-time low for actor Zach Braff -- his "Gigli," if you will.

Scent is a captured memory, a living, breathing reverie rather than a narrative. It's also the birth of a great talent.

A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.

If Collateral is all formula, it's polished to a fine sheen.

It's almost too dull to pan.

In the end, A Tout de Suite leads to not much more of a point than one woman's loss of innocence.

Follows all these rules, which is why you'll get the enjoyable basic minimum. But not a whit more.

It's a stylish and classic gangster saga about the clashing of rival empires.

Only one filmmaking team should be allowed to make sequels: The Naked Gun people. In Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, they reach maximum velocity immediately. Naked 3 sets such a great pace at the beginning, it can't possibly keep up. Inevitably, the movie has its slower sections, coming almost to a halt in a slapstick finale at the Oscars. But wherever you are in the story, there's always something funny coming at you.

Passionate, literally shimmering movie.

It is the verdict of this court that it be led to a stockade reserved exclusively for cheap, pandering movies and duly shot.

About as funny as digging your own grave in an unmarked part of New Jersey.

This is a fully realized movie, whose intelligence -- despite its grim findings -- dwarfs any Hollywood production.

Brilliant and brutal, funny and exhilarating, jaw-droppingly cruel and disarmingly sweet...To watch this movie (whose 2 1/2 hours speed by unnoticed) is to experience a near-assault of creativity.

It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.

Aside from the plot -- and if you can figure out the plot, the CIA's special projects unit wants to talk to you -- Cop II is a rarity: a sequel that's as good as the original, if not better.

The movie is going to be fine for PG-ready audiences, assuming they don't have a problem with extremely predictable story turns.

A most excellent sequel, funnier and livelier than the original.

As Tsotsi, Chweneyagae turns his face into a living battle mask -- curved, molded and sandpapered into smooth ruthlessness. But as the story unfolds, Tsotsi's mask begins to crack, and his humanity begins to flow through.

Simple, yet quietly astonishing film.

Franklin's picture is effortlessly wise beneath its entertaining surface.

If it does nothing else, Music Within shows us how deeply Ron Livingston's amiable face can take us into a movie. But even likable mugs like his -- remember him in "Office Space"? -- need help from the movies around them.

The best movie derived from a violent computer game we've ever seen. You can take or leave that kind of qualified high-five, but, for us, it was a thoroughly entertaining experience. Think of bargain basement "James Bond" amped up into TV den-sittin', mouse-clickin' overdrive. But with human actors.

In visual terms, it's clear McKee has a talent for moviemaking...But he's going to need better stories than this.

To completely sabotage the work, there is an insipid affair between Manon and a young teacher, Bernard (Hippolyte Girardot). Their juvenile romance blunts the epic effect that Berri obviously is trying to create.

The movie's a treasure of small gems.

Only reason to watch this: the grisly reward Irving receives for being in this picture.

A helter-skelter ride of the soul, an unblinking, white-knuckle crash landing into the mushy mysteries of the subconscious.

It's merely another violent art house picture, slumming modishly in the world of psycho-personalities, and exhibiting only occasional flashes of originality.

Grim, yes, and great viewing.

Ironweed is decent fare, not excellent. It gets by on the strength of the unexpected.

This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.

No matter how you come down on this movie politically, Dogville is a compelling chamber piece with constant cinematic surprises. And you remember that von Trier is, above everything else, a consummate filmmaker.

Although the film starts out with well-mounted menace, Arlington Road becomes increasingly overwrought and predictable.

It's an eroticism of nastiness -- triple-X fare for dirty old men in raincoats. If you resist this sleazy gorefest, you'll be right to feel proud of yourself.

Surprisingly powerful and universal: the search for meaning and small blessings in the face of life's utter randomness.

Kidd, a first-time writer and director, has created a sophisticated but intriguingly toxic comedy of manners.

From its deceptively easygoing beginning to the heart-wrenching finale, The Green Mile keeps you wonderfully high above the cynical ground.

If only The Reaping had the decency to be coherent.

There's something hideously pretentious about the whole thing.

Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Maura Tierney and David Koechner -- all talented -- seem amazingly zombie-like here. And Jackie Earle Haley, as a stoner fan of the Tropics, is more disconcerting than funny.

It's his best work by far.

If there's anything good to be said about Heights, it's Glenn Close's strutty, booming performance.

This story doesn't just belong to them anymore. This richly observed, sometimes heartbreaking movie has become ours, too.

Even in his poorest work (i.e., this movie), director Jarmusch retains an appealing sense of experimentation. He fills his movies with those clumsy, unhurried moments between people. But in Night on Earth, with five vignettes to get through, he's forced to create faster, more sketchlike pieces. He's just not up to the task. Nor do performers Winona Ryder, Isaach De Bankole, Roberto Benigni and others pick up the improvisational ball.

How about a well-sustained argument for saving the planet instead of this round-robin approach? And where are those holdouts of humanity who believe humans shoulder no blame for carbon dioxide buildup? Let's hear from them, too, and draw our own conclusions.

The finale isn't quite as chillingly nerve-wracking as one would hope. Schloendorff, who also made The Tin Drum, directs with a uniform dullness that creates little sense of suspense. In replaying the Atwood novel, he and Pinter ultimately fail to create a significant timbre of their own to make the transmogrification truly effective.

This brilliant combination of stop-motion animation, three-dimensional sets and superbly imaginative graphics, brings animation to new peaks. Burton, whose inventive, delightfully haunted mind put so much zest into "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," "Beetlejuice," "Batman" and "Edward Scissorhands," has done it again.

Few movies have evoked the happiness of a good, strong family as genuinely as this one. And this affecting atmosphere makes the eventual outcome resonate with great power.

To watch this movie is to be moved not only by an affecting, warmly spirited yarn, but also by the wisdom that seems to waft to us directly from those snow-capped peaks.

Paradise may not change anyone's ideology, but it should convince some that, but for some deeply divisive views of religious morality, people are pretty much the same on either side of the holy fence.

Watching this movie, you also have to ask yourself: Just how many acts of self-inflicted finger amputations do I really want to see?

A memorable and devastating indictment of the oppression facing many women in Iran.

All dancing and hugging and no good.

Huppert and Greggory provide the emotional impact. They respond accordingly, imbuing their mutual suffering with an exacting and moving finesse.

The three main performances are uniformly good. Moore maintains a believable air of normalcy pushed into unusual directions. Headly is marvelously kooky, a victim with sporadic moments of spunk. Willis clearly has a blast playing evil unbound. He's disconcertingly good, a whirl of Method-acting menace and goateed aggression.

A movie for almost everyone, from boomer parents (who remember their teens and twenties) to their teenage kids (who can't wait to get started with same). And if there's anyone who can bring so many into the same mosh pit, it's Black, who so occupies the role you can't believe he's acting.

Contains about 10 additional minutes and is as fabulous and enjoyable as ever. To be honest, I didn't even notice the new material, having not seen the original film since its 2001 release. I just saw a film that works beautifully and has held together well.

It's a kill movie, the filmic equivalent of a hate crime.

Deception is another example of when genre-fication (the forcing of otherwise intriguing stories into the straitjackets of horror, thriller or other genres) reduces our entertainment to head-shaking banality.

What engages us is Korine's revolutionary way of telling stories. It's as though he's downloading his dreams directly onto the screen.

Storytelling like this weighs heavier than a standard diving suit, and it's really up to you, if you're ready to take the plunge.

You could be forgiven for thinking -- occasionally -- that you just stumbled into "The Silence of the Apes."

If you skim along the surface of this movie, you'll have more fun than if you submit the movie to scrutiny.

I suggest you RSVP in the negative to this "Wedding" invitation, unless you consider yourself a friend of the obvious bride to be, Ms. Lopez. But even then, you'll have to focus on her presence, rather than the silly ceremony around her.

Nothing from the book is left to wither away. That should please the vast reading audience that'll watch the movie.

Barry's deliberately unspectacular performance makes this even more powerful. He gives "Assassin" a disquieting authority.

It's as much fun to anticipate what he's (Herzog) going to say as it is to appreciate the snowy landscapes, belching volcanoes and mustachioed seals before his lens. And what could have been a conventional travelogue becomes a sort of ruminative odyssey of the mind.

It is stylistically breezy but deeply sincere, as Tickell offers a thoughtful, well-researched argument for alternative energy.

Rules would have been just another good movie if not for its masterly visual design. With it, however, the black-and-white film enters the realm of immortality.

A thoroughly enjoyable entertainment that should play just about everybody's strings right. Kloves proves to be quite a plucker.

The result is a movie of deceptive lightness and powerful sweep. And what makes it truly work is the presence of Kervel, a first-time actor whose Anna is disarmingly self-assured and sweet. Without her, nothing else matters.

For the first time in ages, it seems, there's something in an Allen movie to take home with you. I'm convinced, for instance, my wife will eventually leave me for Liam Neeson.

A movie that jumps between two worlds can be a powerful experience, as any fan of "The Wizard of Oz," "Back to the Future" or "The Terminator" can tell you. But this phoned-in epic is simply a celebration of the inauthentic.

Suddenly, you're looking at life in his (Thornton's) jaundiced way and laughing with a sense of vicarious liberation, even when he says the most outrageous things -- to children, no less. And I daresay you can still recover your holiday spirit when you're through laughing.

There's something rather lovely about the mood and intentions of Michel Deville's French movie.

A sort of thinking-person's cornball movie.

The movie's too slick and obvious about its intentions.

We realize that this romance, like the beautiful land, is doomed almost inevitably to earthquake fissures, to irreversible change. But rather than making us despondent, Climates leaves us peacefully philosophical.

Charming enough.

Fascinating facts and testimony.

Hoffman blows costar Cruise right off the screen...Instead of playing off or with Hoffman (a greenhorn's smartest strategy), Cruise tends to play at him, flailing and swearing like a spoiled, grounded pilot in "Top Gun II."

An insipid potboiler set against the far more enticing surf and sand of Oahu's North Shore.

A lifeless pop vision of the future that tries too self-consciously to be irreverent, hip and cutting edge.

Childishly simple, but extremely funny.

An increasingly ridiculous hybrid of sexy romance, murder mystery and psychological mumbo jumbo, it's another bad spin on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," with plummetings from high-up places, repressed guilt and love for a mysterious woman. But its watchability is more attributable to comic relief from Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren and others than the ballyhooed steam between Willis and March.

On one level, Yi Yi is classic soap opera, with a suicide attempt, a wedding ceremony, even a brutal 11 o'clock news murder, all in the mix. But Yang's direction is so admirably restrained, it lends rich heft to everything.

So resoundingly awful, there may be grounds to sue for mental suffering.

When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.

There is enough "hit" material to make this fun. Delpy is such an infectiously appealing personality, she almost wills this movie to work.

Inspired, sublime fun.

A gruesome detective-thriller about a serial killer who ices egregious offenders of the seven deadly sins, portends an unpalatable combination of formulaic writing and unmitigated nastiness.

Never gets as emotionally involving, or persuasive, as the moviemakers intend it to.

For the most part, the movie's a bland disappointment, on many levels.

Turns out he's infinitely more likable than Vin Diesel, who carries his sense of stardom through every movie like an insufferable Atlas. In fact, Dwayne Johnson is a gentleman, the kind of Rock who puts you in a very easy place.

You emerge from this experience rather like a returning U-boat crewman -- drained, blinking in the light, but oddly triumphant. [Director's cut]

Watching Ali, you can be sure of experiencing two opposing things: a sterling performance from Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and a bewilderingly punch-drunk movie from Michael Mann.

Once again, Frears -- who has enjoyed a glorious run of diverse, good-quality movies, from "My Beautiful Laundrette" to "High Fidelity" -- has crafted a unique gem.

There are scenes that simply ask the audience to drink in the details, to enjoy the repast, just as much as follow the plot.

Let's cut to the chase: We're talking "Ishtar of the Apes."

Yields the same sort of archetype and the usual results: De Niro's workmanlike in a dismayingly familiar role.

The film is all cliched atmospherics and no real insight.

Certainly the going is grim, and there's nothing socially redeeming about "Blues" whatsoever, but writer/director George Armitage's movie is also funny, stirring and full of great moments done in the pop-arty, lightly macabre spirit of producer Jonathan Demme.

Theron has rendered herself 100 percent unrecognizable. Not since Robert De Niro morphed into hulk dimensions to play heavyweight boxer Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull" has there been a transformation this powerful and effective.

For the most part, the film's a bewildering disappointment.

Moolaade, in short, is a movie to rock the soul.

Enjoyable in some places, but dreadful in others. It's boring here and exciting there. And it's almost always goofy.

Whatever this movie's about, it's tailor-made for its audience. It's for those who fantasize about steamy afternoons in European hotel rooms. For those who thrive on meaningful (or meaningless) lulls between isolated events. For those who love the weighty (or lightweight) dialogue of screenwriter Harold Pinter.

Takes unabashed delight in itself and its own culture.

Whatever the title of the next installment, this movie is certainly One best forgotten.

We know the story will conclude with a crescendo of frozen-north hallelujahs. Cheering is endemic to Disney. They can't help themselves.

Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively.

Danner's performance, as she rages against the dying of the romantic light, all but steals the movie from Braff.

Succeeds where 100 studio-generated teen romances -- starring the bland, the blunt or the blow-dried -- have failed.

They (De Niro, Burns) look good together. But what a staggering pity they chose such a nasty, hackneyed movie to demonstrate their chemistry.

Miller time for the funny bone.

Its use of minor expletives and a depressing chapter late in the movie will not satisfy parents seeking something sweet and lively for their children; nor will it charm art house audiences up for a smart adult fairy tale.

Spy movies just got thrilling again.

Let's talk about it quickly, because the thumbs of both my hands have gone similarly crazy. They're pointing downward and refuse to budge until I finish this review.

For those who simply want to drink in the northern Italian countryside and Tyler's physical details, it's quite an experience. But as a story, Stealing Beauty (which Bertolucci wrote with Susan Minot) is a misbegotten, sentimental reunion with old European cinema.

Shallow Hal makes the case for restricting the Farrellys to mere gross-out movies.

Fabulously kinetic.

Even though he shows some master touches throughout the movie, Shyamalan flits a little too lightly across the surface, like a pond skater.

As Morvern, Morton is disconcertingly enigmatic, often bordering on catatonic. But she carries the movie effortlessly. And even though we're on the outside looking in, she carries us along, too.

With conceptual misfires like this, Lee's best work recedes even more swiftly into the past.