Jack Mathews

Just as surely as the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, this domestic comedy follows a direct path through every crisis, every resolution and every sentimental heartbeat laid out in the script.

Has many of the qualities that made the actor such a great target for self-parody in Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" - it's sober, deliberate, self-consciously mysterious and no fun at all.

This particular script is deplorable. It's a pure cribbing of Ron Bass' screenplay for "Sleeping With the Enemy," which was no prize itself.

The dialogue between the captive and the captors gets a little didactic, and the ending is as contrived as it is cynical. Weingartner obviously has more in common with the rich man than the kids.

More than the sum of its parts.

Perversely funny.

That's a lot just to justify a cute title, but cuteness is the engine driving the slight, obvious but occasionally very funny film.

Given the tragic events that actually happen, "Nickleby" ends not knowing what it was supposed to be. But those first two acts are nearly worth the price of admission.

Josh Hamilton gives a marvelously engaging performance in this fish-out-of-water comedy.

Manhattan has always been a fat target for apocalypse filmmakers, but with its 9/11-inspired imagery, Matt Reeves' breathlessly fast-paced Cloverfield is going to resonate with New York audiences in a way no other horror film has.

One of the most original and ultimately confounding mind games to reach the screen since "The Usual Suspects."

The Spanish writers-directors often overreach for humor, and really overreach for a happy ending. But there's a strong heart beating beneath the foolishness and one wonderful performance from Leonor Watling.

Essentially conversations, confrontations, and an extremely pat -- and very verbal -- reconciliation.

Joy Ride is plenty spooky but there's also plenty of comic relief -- mostly from the perennially goofy Zahn.

Built from a perfect story-telling collaboration.

If you're game for something different, it's worth a few giggles.

Like previous films by the literary-minded auteur John Sayles, Honeydripper takes forever to develop its characters, its period and its location. But once it's done all that, the payoffs are rich.

Having these characters interact is both the joke and raison d'etre of "League." Its story is beyond banal.

If you approach this movie in the right frame of mind -- that is, with total contempt -- you can still enjoy it as a comedy.

The story feels as urgent as the latest bad news out of the Middle East.

Sitting through the film is punishing work. The jittery closeups create a response that is more physical (I'm thinking nausea) than emotional, and there are no respites.

In trying to disguise his themes within the structure of a noir thriller, Parker was simply more successful at fooling himself than us.

A grim, poetic, heart-wrenchingly fine ode to the lost children of Glasgow's forgotten class.

Japanese Story could have been a two-character play staged in front of a desert mural. It wouldn't have been as pretty, but it's that tight.

Not wildly imaginative, and it has a tepid mix of movie references. But the physical environment and characters make it irresistible.

The memories recalled here aren't epic tales, just moments that make life worth living. Like seeing a good movie. [12 May 1999, p.44]

When the producers of Eros, a triptych of short stories about eroticism and desire, described what they wanted from Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, American Steven Soderbergh and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, they must have written the memo in Chinese. Only Wong attempted something sensual.

A fascinating story.

The movie turns into something strange and annoying, an attempted blend of a suburban thriller with an Old West shoot-'em-up.

Despite a relatively paltry $40 million budget, Stormbreaker has the sheen and special effects of a Bond movie, and the ambition as well.

Dunst makes Davies the most confident and interesting person aboard the Oneida and makes this voyage almost, but not quite, worth taking.

Drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge.

Cats Don’t Dance treads this territory with a whimsy that will be over the heads of young kids and too unimaginative for adults.

Minghella has certainly mounted a gorgeous movie and the battle scenes are brutally spectacular. But overall, "Cold Mountain" is like a fine piece of hand-crafted leather, where the stitching shows its quality. That looks good on a handbag, not so good on the big screen.

What is lacking in suspense is more than made up for in passion and in sports cinematography virtuosity.

Surely, Vinterberg was high on some inert gas when he embarked on it.

It doesn't strike a single note of authentic emotion.

Works on every level. The humor and language are as crude as an R rating allows, but Carell and Apatow's script is so hip, funny and - yes - innocent that it's never offensive.

If there is a casting agent in hell, ­Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry will soon put on their fat suits as Big Momma and Madea Simmons and show up as a tag team in a big-screen ­Wrestlemania.

Meandering, overlong digital soap opera.

There is one good, legitimate scare in Robert Zemeckis' quasi-ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, and that's just not enough for a movie that lasts more than two hours.

Arguably Lumet's best film in 20 years.

The actress' [Julianne Moore's] goodwill, alone, holds this schizophrenic story together - if just barely.

It's never a good thing to notice that the actors in a movie are having a better time than you are. It's so unfair. They're paid to work, you're paying for fun.

The documentary plays it down the middle, neither condemning nor romanticizing the political outlaws, but making sense of who they were and what they did.

Humorist and liberal radio talk-show host Al Franken is a funny guy, and most of the people he attacks - Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney - are not. But the joke was on him when George Bush won re-election in 2004.

I'm no psychologist, but it took about half this film's overlong running time to figure out that Metallica's problem is that Ulrich is a major pain in the butt.

Neither can I imagine many sane adults wanting to put themselves through this movie.

As a story, Burton's Planet of the Apes is more of a comic-book creation than either of his "Batman" movies.

For each joke that is fresh, there are at least three that fall thuddingly flat. Rock suffers a problem common to comedians moving from sketches to features; he hasn't quite been able to get his performance level above caricature. To his credit, he's made more of this than you'd expect from the lame premise.

Directed with his usual flair for the obvious by Dennis Dugan ("The Benchwarmers), "Chuck and Larry" has the nowness factor of a Polish joke. Does anybody laugh at this stuff anymore?

Locks in on its self-destructive subjects so precisely, it's almost unbearable to watch.

The movie has a terrible premise compounded by a lame script and the miscasting of its surfeit of talented stars. You have to wonder why Dobkin, whose last film was the hilariously raunchy "Wedding Crashers," would be attracted to this tame material.

Every once in a while, a performance pops out of a Hollywood movie that is so brilliant and unique to the matching of actor to role that it's impossible to imagine anyone else achieving it.

May be free of gay stereotypes, but it's absolutely riddled with romantic cliches. It's hard to see the progress in that.

Given the near total absence of intellectually ambitious American movies today, a critic's first impulse after seeing Francis Ford Coppola's reedited Apocalypse Now may be to treat it as the new, improved version he says it is and proclaim it a masterpiece - if not in 1979, then now. But it's not that simple: Apocalypse Now Redux is not a new movie, and neither is it necessarily improved.

By describing the structure of a great trick in a movie about a great trick, The Prestige makes a promise it can't keep. Its third act is about as convincing as a photo of a cow jumping over the moon.

A pretty run-of-the-mill B suspense movie.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

Finally, you get down to the music, which is easy to take for the first hour, before it starts doubling and tripling back on itself, in an unnerving and seemingly unending spiral of repetition.

If you have a serious interest in wine and the ­patience for this kind of rangy, undisciplined filmmaking, you'll learn something. But you'll have more fun at a winetasting.

The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving.

In a clear case of substance over style, this stark, clumsy documentary tells the heart-breaking stories of a dozen law-abiding Muslim or Arab immigrants and visa workers.

Has the integrity of good dialogue and enough of a writer's preserved craftiness to make it a worthwhile date-night attraction.

A flawed but highly entertaining B Western blown up to John Ford scale.

Gerry isn't much of anything, and doesn't claim to be. It's a movie stripped of its movieness.

It has a nifty premise and outstanding performances from Ferrell, as the protagonist-in-progress, and Emma Thompson, as his blocked creator.

This is a crazy, gorgeous, disturbing, darkly comic horror story about an early-18th-century Frenchman born in a Paris fish market without any odor of his own but with a sense of smell that would make a pack of bloodhounds wail with envy.

As dazzling a feast for the eyes as the hungriest eyes can take.

The themes are about the power and consequences of sex, but the stories are too glib and episodic to leave any impression.

A slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget.

Frenzied, gothic nonsense.

A slog to get through, but Jeanie Drynan's nuanced performance as the enduring matriarch makes it all worthwhile.

Represents the year's biggest gamble - and it delivers the year's biggest and most ambitious fantasy.

Like a lost recording by the Beatles, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo arrives with its feet planted firmly in the past, a reminder of a time when Stallone, Chuck Norris and other wooden soldiers of the big screen filled multiplexes with the floor-shaking thunder of trivialized war.

It's not as clever, or as consistently funny, or as well-cast as "Shakespeare in Love," but Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty is the most fun I've had with the Bard since that 1998 Oscar winner.

Fujimori comes off as amiable and in full denial, recalling the positive headlines of his presidency - and there were many - while laying the scandals off on Montesinos.

Does something no other Jesse James movie has done: It tells the truth.

The best comedy of 2004. In fact, it's so far the best movie of the year.

Bernstein blunts the inherent tension by zipping everything along at the pace of a snail with a sore foot. Still, Montenegro does wonders in her long silences, and makes her love scene with the eager 72-year-old Cortez look like a hookup at Club Med.

Ends up a portrait through a rose-colored lens, turning a social parasite into a Greek hero.

If "The Sixth Sense" was a bad movie redeemed by its surprise ending, Marc Forster's Stay is a seemingly good movie leading to a devastating letdown.

The film's appeal is for the eyes. Because Henry got to call it art, it's on display once again.

Reilly can play nuts, too, and in a lower gear that reins Ferrell in. They're a great team.

The movie includes a postscript about her (McKinney's) loss, blaming it on more dirty tricks. That may be true, but it doesn't put the steam back in the film.

From the moment we meet Abby, whimsically soothing her callers, we're turned into lap dogs, ready to follow her -- ready to follow Garofalo -- anywhere.

This is cheeky sitcom in a minor key, and fated to be a mere footnote on McAvoy's resume.

There are terrific performances from Kline and Judd, some breathtaking staging and production design, and, of course, some of the best music and lyrics of the 20th century.

Jovovich, Besson's 24-year-old ex-wife, hasn't a clue how to project shadings, interior emotions, character or personality. Everything's in a full screech.

Darkly hilarious.

If you've got the patience, this is still one of the all-time exercises in cinematic cool.

McCann's point of view overwhelms the human elements of his story, but this is, nonetheless, a riveting piece of filmmaking.

Beautifully shot but overly spare documentary.

It's a slice of life, with all the trimmings, and one of the strongest films of the year.

The only good thing about this on-the-fly, low-budget quickie is its Cape Cod setting and the in-focus cinematography of Ernst Kubitza. Very pretty. Otherwise, it is a speechifying bore.

The film is beautifully shot and edited, but these emotional snapshots won't stay long in the memory.

Images wash over you like wind-blown rain, fierce and beautiful at the same time, largely shaped into themes by the haunting music of Philip Glass, who is here joined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

28 Weeks Later has a stronger story line, equally fine performances, greater tension, enough gore to satisfy the most hard-core zombie fan, and a narrative pace that flings us from the opening scenes to the very last image.