Jack Mathews

It's too long, unnecessarily complicated and often silly, but Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is still the purest popcorn entertainment of the summer.

Hurt and Dancy are terrific in these roles, but the power of the movie is in the tension created by Caton-Jones on the same sites where this historical event unfolded.

Hilariously funny, full of fang-popping scares, and guaranteed to increase travel by train.

If you can watch it without weeping over your own predicament, you'll see some serious talent bursting out.

A remarkable and moving account of a part of the French experience that needs more remembering and less forgetting.

This is a riveting story about a man who for years moonlighted as an anonymous hangman while holding a day job as a wholesale grocery delivery man.

The new buddy comedy movie that assumes the names of the series' characters and features the same hot-to-trot, tomato-red and shocking-white 1974 Ford Gran Torino is more fun than a Heidi Fleiss open house.

In condensing Rusesabagina's story, George has undoubtedly overstated the specific dramatic moments; the movie has more cliff-hangers than the "Indiana Jones" series.

Looks a lot like 1950s American gangster films -- particularly, John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" -- but it's decidedly French in its sexual candor and moral laissez-faire.

People unfamiliar with either man may think Altman is mocking Keillor and his 32-year-old radio program here. But, it is pure affection, and the movie is as much up-tempo, irresistible fun to watch as the show is to hear.

The story is fanciful, with grotesquely improbable twists involving the fictional Garrigan (James McAvoy) and one of the dictator's three wives (Kerry Washington). But as Amin, Forest Whitaker's command of the screen is so thorough, so frightening, so ripe with malice that you won't move in your seat for fear of catching his eye.

A charmer, a comedy with drama -- or vice versa.

Hand-held cameras give their surface showbiz relationship a sense of immediacy that, like love itself, has more than a hint of danger.

A mostly accomplished first film, with precise comic timing and some hilarious moments.

A dazzlingly original visual adventure.

This is a family movie in the best sense; it plays to children without talking down and to their parents without pandering. Mostly, it's just good fun.

Other than a tortured apology from Bill Clinton for having misunderstood the gravity of the situation, there isn't a peep of remorse heard from the normally sanctimonious West. And Dellaire's final bit of self-abuse is to blame himself for his failure to shame the world to action.

The first of three planned remakes of Dutch films by the late Theo van Gogh, Steve Buscemi's Interview takes the most unnatural act in human intercourse - the celebrity interview - and makes an explosively funny two-character psychodrama out of it.

This is as bitter and despairing an exploration of the human spirit as any of Bergman's films, and it is just as vibrantly written and directed.

Any opportunity to see Pete Seeger perform, even at age 85, is worth taking - and Seeger is front, center and full-throated in Jim Brown's concert film.

As a sign of how stubborn some irrational religious traditions can be, Hindu protesters forced Mehta to close down her Indian location and finish the film in neighboring Sri Lanka.

There is no turning back; the biggest project in China since the Great Wall and the Grand Canal has claimed its human cost and now must prove its own worth. -

This is good clean fun, with or without the soap, and one of the most spirited entries of the season.