Ella Taylor

Patriot reflects on nothing, except perhaps that the American Revolution was a golden opportunity for Mel Gibson to go postal.

In the final act, the movie dons a more human face and commits to an absorbing tale of crime and punishment, albeit pushing the fatigued message that you can't always tell light from dark these days.

In his capable, yet only mildly exciting, adaptation of Charles Dickens’ third novel, Douglas McGrath (Emma) keeps reminding us that what we’re seeing is theater. This feels gratuitous.

If nothing else, Chuck & Larry should open up a whole new career path for the ineffably funny, unselfconsciously buck-naked Ving Rhames as an übermacho firefighter who’s been sitting on a little secret of his own.

The less rosy message of Catch a Fire is that aggression breeds aggression.

Against the odds of this wheezy material and Michael Browning's fitfully funny script, director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave), a master of timing, contrives to spin a likable romantic comedy.

War of the Buttons deftly folds France's unsavory collusions into a rather more rousing tale of resistance. I don't doubt that some of these heroics happened. But the way they're framed conveniently takes the edge off saying sorry.

Not especially lively filmmaking, but Zilberman has unearthed some terrific footage of the club in its heyday.

(Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.

Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.

Though hardly a major work, The Burial Society has going for it something that many of the snickering noir comedies currently littering the field lack. Underneath its cheeky amorality, there beats a heart.

Precious little history of any kind shows its face in Marie Antoinette. The omission is strategic.

Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.

Blessed with a lovely score and strong acting, but crippled by an awkward, mawkish script.

The movie feels oddly undercooked and aimless.

Giuliani Time energetically deflates one trumpeted myth after another about Giuliani's success at turning the city around from its doldrums in the 1970s.

A Plumm Summer isn't remotely in the same league as "My Dog Skip," "Fly Away Home," "Lassie" or any of the handful of traditional family dramas that have restored luster to a genre that's been overtaken by techno-acrobats.

The film never coheres. Trying to carve out a space between black comedy and straight evocation of a difficult but rewarding marriage, the movie never settles on a tone.

There's some funny erotic business with gas masks, but neither that nor the unfolding love story is quite as engrossing as the raucous bunch of former Soviet citizens.

An amiable and colorful, if dewy-eyed, documentary.

Like most of LaBute's work, Some Velvet Morning ends as it begins, more clever than wise.

A delicate mood piece that owes much of its languorous charm to the understated intelligence of its two leads.

Meet Joe Black is a hefty three hours long, and just so you know, it is at least two before Claire Forlani, as the Parrish daughter, Susan, unbuttons Pitt's shirt.

Isn't much more than a proficient gothic mystery with a final twist that offers a satisfying little frisson before you start counting how many times it's been used before.

Audaciously conceived, yet at times curiously flat, at others incongruously prosaic in its emotional tone.

Lohan is a warm and engaging presence, but she's completely outshone by the bad girls, and when they're offscreen, Mean Girls is an oddly restrained, barely plotted movie.

Almost nothing comes as a surprise in this stately old fogy of a movie. The pacing is glacial, the screenplay is stiff as a board, and things heat up only in the movie's final scenes.

Sweet but slight pièce de fluff.

Ingratiating trifle.

The effects are terrific, from the two-and-a-half-minute opening sequence that tracks around the brilliantly lit liner from below, above and round about, to some amazing exterior shots of the groaning vessel rolling around in the churning sea like a giant, wounded whale.

Though far from expert filmmaking - visual clichés fly thick and fast - the movie has a swooning feel for the stark beauty of the African kingdom in which it was shot.

Bold in scope and aptly mimicking the loose structures of kinship, friendship and work most city dwellers make do with these days, Breaking and Entering nonetheless plays out too quiet and too loose for its own good.

Like the decent B-movie director that he is, Hyams tosses in two gripping car chases and blows up a few more vehicles for good measure. But otherwise, there's little in this pointless rehash to distract audiences from the pleasure of watching Tamblyn.

A decent thriller trying to overcome a rather preposterous premise.

One Day ends up fatally compromised by its glib recourse to death and cancer as moral wake-up calls.

This likable but utterly conventional movie works harder than is necessary to unpack for us Ethan Canin’s short story "The Palace Thief."

Two-thirds of the way through, Seabiscuit awakes to its duties as a perfectly presentable race movie, rising to a crescendo of satisfying --- if somewhat gaga -- inspiration.

Doesn't seem to quite know what it is or where it's headed. So it goes anywhere it can while treading thematic water.

There is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial.

Mulan, like all the characters in this movie, is a cookie-cutter American prototype, lazily ripped off from the Disney boilerplate that fashioned Pocahontas et al.

The movie always teeters on the verge of something deeper, and Cheadle’s rendering of Greene’s stubborn refusal to be domesticated is funny, exhilarating and then quietly tragic. But Lemmons keeps pulling back into jive-talking shtick, and for much of the time -- I felt as though someone had trapped me in a time-warped episode of "The Jeffersons."

I love what his films stand for -- inclusivity, tolerance, liberation and fun -- but I’ve always felt about his movies as I do about Monty Python: Half an hour is a riot; an hour and half starts to be a chore.

If anything, as it lathers up into an abortive attempt at scarlet-woman branding and a goofy siege on the nunnery where a dazed and confused Antoinette has holed up, The Duchess of Langeais works best as the comic bondage fantasy implied in its deliciously sly French title: "Don't Touch the Axe."

Struggles valiantly to keep its head above whimsy, and though the movie finally succumbs to an excess of heartwarming, it's a promising college try from a first-time writer-director.

A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.

Somewhere buried beneath all this ballast something is being said, again, about flawed middle-aged men falling from grace and redeeming themselves. This time I'm damned if I know what that something is.

The movie serves up a pleasant, if unsurprising, confluence of classic ballet with street dance, not to mention a seamless collusion of polite racial integration with savvy niche marketing.

Even as you're laughing, you get the uncomfortable sense you're being recruited, and not always honestly, to Moore's us-and-them point of view.

Frankel has cut, pasted and rejiggered the novel, mostly for the better. As adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada is crisper, less self-righteous and mercifully shorter than its intermittently funny but interminable source.

The films, both narrative and nonfictional, range from the engagingly elliptical...to the simple-minded... to the cloying and incomprehensible.

Long on hero worship and woefully short on insight, Lula: Son of Brazil oozes good intentions, but it wouldn't look out of place in a retrospective of early Soviet workerist cinema.

Though The Cup is lovely to look at, it has none of the ceremonial rigor mortis of Scorsese's "Kundun."

What gives the movie its coltish charm is Harrison's scene-setting feel for the indomitable brio of kids.

For a movie that boasts a murder, a would-be suicide and the usual generous helping of screwing around à la français, Le Divorce is remarkably calm and contained even as it builds to its climax.

Recalls the structure of Danis Tanovic's 2001 black comedy, "No Man's Land," but not that film' hyperknowing urbanity or strident political savvy.

Bitton is Frederick Wiseman-obsessive about the practical details that make this horrific arrangement work, but she's also an unabashed polemicist.

She makes a perfectly fine role model, if you rate cheerful, sensible and chaste under the skinny tights and glow-in-the-dark tank tops.

The Words founders on a spurious dichotomy between love and art. Which is a pity, because the movie is smart and persuasive on the casually incremental way in which plagiarism becomes an option for people like Rory - and perhaps for anyone.

In the current flood of Holocaust documentaries, stories of righteous gentiles abound, but the singular beauty of Hiding and Seeking is its delicate but relentless probing of ambiguous motivation on the one hand, and its hearteningly conciliatory spirit on the other.

Despite some very welcome black comedy — Jimmi Simpson appears delightfully, but too briefly, as a passive-aggressive co-worker who threatens to unravel the cocoon of delusion in which Emanuel has wrapped herself — the movie, trapped in the weeds of self-pity and skin-deep badassery, never quite earns the sympathy it so strenuously solicits.

Tapa's poetic neorealism is less a stylistic intrusion than a keeping of faith, through the film's deliberately uneven pacing, with a life devoid of rhythms to count on.

Liberal use is made of freeze-frame and flashbacks as a kind of emotional chronology, yet it's precisely in this regard that the characters feel tentative and half-formed. I'm still trying to figure out why this perfectly serviceable movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year.

I've never quite figured out what the poker-faced Peter Riegert does as an actor, but his matter-of-fact minimalism is always funny and affecting.

Crazy/beautiful has a leisurely local specificity, and Stockwell has a tender way with his actors.

A film without attitude or mystery...an exquisitely executed, and exquisitely banal, treatise on the banality of evil.

As a political statement it is either a cry of despair or a grim acknowledgment that in the endless cycles of history, civilization will always have its saboteurs.

You can only cram so much of this stuff into a movie without putting your audience to sleep -- The movie sags badly in the middle, swirling around itself without making headway.

Almodovar is in party mode here, and if you liked his 1990 comedy "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" you'll probably love I'm So Excited! for its candied pastels and its impishly clever design, which transforms the plane into a theater and its galley into a staging area for those three theatrical stewards.

If Drinking Buddies is meant to be his ticket into mainstream comedy, it feels mumblecore-ishly vague and rambling in its construction, like "Hannah Takes the Stairs" without the raffish charm.

The City of Your Final Destination does eventually prove intelligent enough about how we all become prisoners of dependency and obsession. Yet for a movie that argues for free agency and following your bliss rather than your career, it's awfully torpid.

Cumming always gives good value, and his regular bursts into cabaret numbers are certainly an added bonus. Yet this instinctively ironic actor doesn't seem best suited to play the movie's most sentimental creation. A mouthy, heart-of-gold construct, Rudy dresses like Ratso Rizzo and comes on like The Fonz.

Estes never really completes a thought about this sorry group's moral dilemmas.

As a performer, Robin Williams has a wonderfully volatile range; as an actor, he commutes uneasily between over-sincere and over-sinister. Both modes are on full monochromatic display in this stolid noir thriller.

While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.

Sweet, innocuous and about as fresh as yesterday's lettuce.

The movie is calamitously miscast.

I hope to God that Patrick McGrath's novel Asylum, about a bunch of repressed Brits manipulating the stuffing out of one another in a 1950s psychiatric hospital, is better than the shallowly competent exercise in nastiness that British director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Patrick Marber have made of it.

The script groans beneath a mass of symbolic winking and declamatory exposition that has the unfortunate effect of turning the villagers into credulous simpletons, ready to blow with any wind that carries them.

Doubt is only marginally, and tendentiously, about moral uncertainty--it's more about the sins of a nosy old biddy who pulls out all the stops when going through the official channels of a male-dominated Catholic Church would get her nowhere.

The clash between a winning cast, a witty script and Lansdown's technical weaknesses produces a pleasant, if not memorable, film blanc.

Set against a production design seemingly inspired by the American flag, director Kenny Ortega's choreography is industrial and efficient, if haplessly stranded somewhere between Michael Jackson and the Village People.

By herself, Bullock isn't enough to hold up this enervating movie, which lumbers along ponderously until, at the end, it takes a giant leap into the suspension of disbelief that lost me altogether.

In the sense that everyone is interesting once their lives are sufficiently unpacked, Burt and Linda's story is not boring -- but beyond its tabloid sensationalism, it's not especially significant either.

A maddeningly uneven triptych.

On a Clear Day is in most respects "The Full Monty," only with swimming, not stripping, and no bursts into song or dance - only the usual canny sequencing of tears and laughter, interspersed here with fetching underwater photography and father-son issues up the wazoo.

Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall bring some nice ambiguity to their thankless roles as the mothers, while pintsize Kirsten Olson and punked-out Julianna Cannarozzo, both professional skaters, leaven this Disney sugarplum with much-needed wit.

If you're a Cole Porter fan you might like the songs in De-Lovely, but as a portrait of an unusual marriage it's de-lumbering, de-liberate and de-cidedly flat.

For a movie with a lesbian theme, My Mother Likes Women is absurdly coy about gay sex. It may be the most heterosexually minded film about lesbians ever made.

Stephen Frears has had more downs than ups of late, but I would never have thought the man responsible for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Grifters" capable of stooping to pap as pappy as this unbearably chipper take on the real-life story of Laura Henderson.

Withdrawal From Gaza lacks both the nuance and the muscle of Yoav Shamir's excellent 2005 "5 Days," which probes far deeper into the relationship between settlers and the soldiers who came, on the orders of supersettler Ariel Sharon, to remove them.

Surprisingly wan film.

It ends up sagging into a pleasantly undistinguished pudding. The big news is that Matt Lauer, playing himself, can act. A little. Hardly at all, really. But he’s a jolly good sport, and quite handy with a fire extinguisher.

A capable, soulful thriller with a love story as steamy as is possible when its lead characters are Orthodox Jews.

Garner is no more than serviceable as the tightly wound Gray.

Worst of all is the hitching of all this extravagant suffering to an inspirational ending filled with sweet regret, healing hope and some picturesque nestling in the titular oaks with the next generation.

Excusez-moi, but I'd rather see Omar Sharif punching out croupiers in a casino than dispensing comfort and joy in this sugared-up tale.

Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch.

Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.