Desson Thomson

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.