Jack Mathews

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.