Jack Mathews

Whether the movie leaves you confused or angry, you will be stimulated to long discussion afterward. How often does that happen these days?

Whoever wanders into the theater should leave a winner.

A Christmas headache looking for an audience.

Kline will break your heart, while the rest of the movie will just make you sick.

Though The Lookout is eventually a genre film, with a tense, bang-up ending, it is also a thoughtful study of a young man trying to make sense of a world that he is having to learn all over again.

Amen is propelled by a most dubious assumption -- Gerstein's belief that if the German people knew of the Holocaust, they'd stop it.

For those who didn't get enough violence from Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," welcome to City of God.

In A Lot Like Love, there is no doubt - nor suspense, nor depth.

Trudy is really the only character with the "Barrytown" zest, and Montgomery throws herself into the role with unselfconscious abandon. She makes the screen crackle with energy.

The movie works best as a car's-eye travelogue of Jordan. And the three women might be good company on another, less stressful trip. Say to the Caribbean.

It's a bit of a hodgepodge - unnecessarily complicated, clumsily structured, uncertainly directed and, as a whodunit, ultimately unsatisfying.

There's an inherent distance between movies and their audiences that -- combined with the distance between 9/11 and today's opening of the film -- The Guys can't bridge.

Like Schwarzenegger himself, it looks tired, and a little bored.

We Are Marshall is less a movie than a commemoration.

There's no question Carnahan has an eye for composition, an ear for dialogue and a sense of pace that, if put to better use, could make an audience beg for relief. But the characters in Smokin' Aces are about as lifelike as the occupants of vehicles destroyed in a car-safety test.

Creepy in 1980, Cruising is almost macabre now, knowing that most of the young men involved in rough, unprotected sex then began dying of AIDS shortly afterwards.

Man on Fire, with a best-ever Denzel Washington, is the first (nonreligious) sure thing to hit the multiplex this year.

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train - and you must complete every ride.

You won't hear a better soundtrack on a bad movie this year.

Deery's points are well-taken, but they would have been a lot better made if he hadn't taken so many easy shots at the church by demonizing its local authorities.

A weak documentary. There's very little here to demonstrate the personality and leadership qualities that made Massoud both a legend and a martyr. Raw, sloppily edited, unfocused and without any sense of scale, it's personal journalism with its heart in the right place, and that's about it.

Lucky Number Slevin would be too clever for its own good if it weren't so ... darn clever. This violent flick is not in the same league as "The Sting," which has my vote for the cleverest winding road toward a happy ending in screenwriting history, but it contains nearly as deft a con job as that 1973 film.

Glover, wearing his close-cropped hair in a pompadour and striking beady-eyed, furrow-browed poses that scare the hair off a tarantula, makes it as much fun as a rat revenge movie can be.

A well-crafted indictment of the dark side of the modern work ethic.

For a black comedy whose tangled sequence of events is completely improbable, Pedro Almodóvar's Volver feels absolutely authentic. So, think of everything as metaphor and enjoy one of the year's most delectably twisted treats.

The movie is as unpleasant as its hero, and the film audience gets no more for its money than the customers at the Laughing Stock. Still, watching Whaley take Jimmy down his tortured path has some morbid appeal -- like a train wreck in progress.

When it goes wrong, specifically when Bobby is given a badge like an angry Earp brother in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," the story turns into something barely at the level of a TV cop show.

Spider-Man is an almost-perfect extension of the experience of reading comic-book adventures.

Provides an intimate, nonpoliticized, uncensored and totally unappealing look at the lives of U.S. soldiers serving during a grim and uncertain period of insurgency.

Unremittingly bleak and hopelessly outdated parable of American race relations.

Here’s a double-scoop for conspiracy theorists.

While the football sequences are carefully constructed, the sensation we get from the blizzard of images and teeth-jarring sound effects is of having our head used as the football.

What a movie! This is how the medium seduced us originally.

Winslet and Keitel are brilliant as cult member & deprogrammer.

The flat narration by Queen Latifah doesn't help, but Adam Ravetch and his wife Sarah Robertson's nature film, Arctic Tale, fails to inspire the kind of rapturous response we felt for "March of the Penguins" for other reasons.

Tough, unsentimental British film.

The story of the victims on the road is harrowing, but the tale of the kind cop and the teenager with an attitude is a string of big brother clichés.

The two-part film focuses on Jung-rae's one-night stand with the protégée of a colleague he invites to his seaside retreat, and then with a second woman who merely reminds him how much he liked the first. The scenery's great and the performances adequate, but wake me when it's over.

Mostly, it's a story of violence, and it's superbly told.

Convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama.

The result is a feast for the senses.

This fine documentary mixes archival footage, interviews with the sailor's family and sponsors, and - most amazingly - excerpts from the film and audiotape diary kept by Crowhurst.

But Allen can still write a good joke and there are some here. Not enough to say he has returned to form, but enough to remind you of what that form was.

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

Harris brings into focus a nearly forgotten success story, filling in another blank in the ultimate mosaic of the 20th century's greatest tragedy.

From the beginning, Edmond is too self-absorbed for us to care much about his fate, but like the proverbial train wreck, you can't tear your eyes - or your ears - away from the spectacle.

Its noisily inappropriate pop-rock score overwhelms its meager subplots about British class conflict.

This strikes me as the final nail in the franchise's coffin. I can't name an actor who could have made young Lecter as interesting as the older one, but Ulliel does not come close.

It's fitting that the kangaroo gives the most lifelike performance.

Tops Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in anger and frustration.

Offers nothing new to the long tradition of boxing films. But Hill's reverence for the classic form and the stone-cold performances of Rhames and Snipes propel the whole thing forward with a prefight buildup that's more fun -- and probably more honest -- than the awkward attempts at macho showmanship we get from real fighters these days.

Superb, ultimately exhilarating account of Coney Island basketball phenom Sebastian Telfair's senior year at Lincoln High.

Offers a chillingly effective look at the ease with which a suicide bomber could wreak havoc on U.S. soil - specifically in Times Square.

Possibly the worst movie of 2007.

Whether Adam Sandler can actually act is not actually answered in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. But he's great in it.

No second or third act... a one-joke premise and a hundred punchlines.

Perhaps this is just a bad performance by Bana; he's not shown me anything yet. But there's a more basic problem. If money is just a way of keeping score, and Huck doesn't care whether he's flush or busted, why should we?

Of all the Middle East-theme movies this season, Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War is the least political and most entertaining. That doesn't mean it's great, just that it's unimportant.

The opening of writer-director Eric Schaeffer's sloppy, sporadically funny adult sex comedy Never Again shows how an undisciplined filmmaker can sabotage his best intentions.

So what's the point of doing it a second time if you can't make it more realistic?