Jack Mathews

The filmmaker's ego and ethics aside, there's no denying the power of Wuornos' behavior here.

Missing beneath its fabulous surface, however, is anything like a beating heart.

The movie ends on exactly the right note, but it hits a lot of bad ones on the way.

The movie falls apart toward the end as it enters "Eyes Wide Shut" territory, but until then, it's fun to see bookworms cast in the James Bond mode.

A long sit for those unfamiliar with Proust's literary quest and output, but the view is sensational.

Completely false, manipulative, exploitative and insulting.

Blood Diamond is, in the vernacular of Old Hollywood, a rip-roaring adventure, the kind made in the '30s with Clark Gable and the handiest leading lady on contract at MGM.

Julie Taymor's beautifully stylized but nauseatingly violent adaptation of Shakespeare's first play.

Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.

In the end, Phantom needed more human and less digital scale. The magic of "Star Wars" lay in Lucas' ability to play the human comedy in a fantastic future. With Phantom, he has brought the series to the brink of total artificiality, the future as a video game.

Something less than a gem. It has a brilliant lead performance from Yuliya Vysotskaya as Janna.

Depp may not be a trained singer, but his voice is more than passable, and his presence - his Sweeney is Edward Scissorhands gone bad - is perfect. Bonham Carter sings well, too, and young Ed Sanders, as the pie shop's Dickensian apprentice, is a delight.

I love golf, history and good stories, and I found this to be among the most boring, flat and cliched sports movies I've ever seen.

The result is a gorgeous, third-person version of an extended family-vacation movie that the Piersons, their friends and their former Fijian neighbors can enjoy for years to come.

It's no great thing, but in their (Weinstein brothers') heyday as Oscar campaigners, they could have made Redford a contender.

A personal eulogy, from one artist to another, and an indictment of all systems of government that deny people the right to free expression and the full realization of their talent.

Refreshingly nondogmatic.

The source for Jieho Lee's The Air I Breathe is an ancient Chinese proverb about the four cornerstones of emotion - love, pleasure, happiness and sorrow. But Lee and co-writer Bob DeRosa went 0-4 with their convoluted screenplay, making me thankful they didn't try to adapt the Seven Deadly Sins.

Not since Philip Kaufman's 2000 "Quills," the story of the Marquis de Sade, have we had so debauched a literary and movie hero, and Johnny Depp plays him with the relish of an actor who has made odd-ball characters his specialty.

To see Allen, now 70, trying to reclaim the persona he's been handing off is like watching Willie Mays fall down trying to hit a slow curve during his last season. Woody may go on to direct many great films, but it's time for him to retire Alvy Singer.

Offers a passably entertaining bridge between empty-headed summer fare and fall awards hunting.

The voice performances are great, particularly those from LaBeouf and Bridges, who's in a "Big Lebowski" mood. But a moratorium on penguin movies may be in order.

The problem is that the movie spends as much time on the boring detective chasing Lucas as on the drug lord himself.

A smartly written, confidently directed film that delivers big laughs while developing two of the year's most earnest characters and some of its most rewarding sentiments.

So far beyond Bollywood, I think it's set in the suburbs of L.A.

"Charlie's Angels," "Survivor," "American Gladiators" and "Girls Gone Wild" are just some of the bad influences on Hong Kong action director Corey Yuen's laughably silly adaptation of the video game DOA: Dead or Alive.

Adapted - badly and unfaithfully - Close Your Eyes is a convoluted jumble of paranormal psychology, occultism and pagan symbolism, topped off with a quest for immortality.

Horror fans will be appalled by the frivolity of the beheadings, amputations and blunt-force trauma. But when Tilly, complaining about all the good roles going to Julia Roberts, says she could have played Erin Brockovich and done it without the Wonderbra, you know you're into something almost inspired.

Among the creepiest adult monologues you'll hear in a regular theater this year comes from Karen Young in Heading South, a well-acted but misguided tale of displaced sexual longing on the beaches of Baby Doc Duvalier's 1970s Haiti.

Slackers depends on the pathetic Ethan and the flatulent Sam for most of its laughs, and both characters are more revolting than amusing.

In the funniest and, coincidentally, most "Jackass"-like scene in Todd Phillips' School for Scoundrels, a planned game of paintball gets off to a bad start when the players begin shooting each other at point-blank range.

It is a sign of the times that audiences will watch these equally selfish lovers and find one infinitely more sensible than the other.

Two hours of the worst sort of sentimental sap.

If the point of this umpteenth posttraumatic stress drama is that war is hell, even years after it's over and you're sitting in a movie theater, Big Bad Love makes it.

It is both inside-baseball and self-parody, exposing a world that is just as ruthless and shallow as we've been shown it is in films like "The Player" and "Permanent Midnight."

Deuces Wild is the worst thing to have happened to Brooklyn since the Ice Age severed it from the mainland.

Vardy draws the moral conflicts in broad strokes, but as a portrait of a man torn between his faith and the urges of his liberated hormones, it has honest depth.

The film is as faithful to its subject as perhaps any film biography has been. As Eastwood said, Parker was a paradoxical character, both self-destructive and full of life, and the movie, simultaneously dark and exhilarating, takes that as its theme. [22 Sep 1988, p. 1]

The monster's mashing of Tokyo looks as Ed Wood-like as ever, but the film's humanity gives it depth.

The World has a pokey pace, but it presents a uniquely powerful look at the new big kid in the global economy.

A ghetto horror movie that sets up some decent scares before becoming so amused with itself, it's a wonder we don't hear the crew laughing.

Travolta is the least of the film's problems. With a script by James Vanderbilt, whose first credit was for a movie about the tooth fairy ("Darkness Falls"), and directed by John McTiernan, last seen struggling with "Rollerball," Basic is a fundamental failure.

Bale gives a near-great performance as a man with all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and the film weaves an ingenious psychological web.

For all its spiritual angst, Constantine is about as silly as fantasies get.

The idea of Bean fitting into this situation, even disastrously, requires more than suspension of disbelief. It requires a full blackout of reasoning. But for the converted, and for people with a low threshold for visual comedy, Bean amounts to a hill of laughs.

It could do without any kind of love story, let alone the one it got.

The black-and-white animation won't dazzle your eyes, but everything else about Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's adaptation of Satrapi's graphic comic book series Persepolis will hold you in its thrall.

Universally appealing story that plays as well now as it did on opening day a half-century ago. Maybe better.

Essentially a home movie, nicely shot but dull.

The three actors do their best to breathe life into their caricatured roles.

Whether you lived through the period and will have fond memories jostled, or are scouting for future DVD pleasures, the surest way to see a good movie in a theater this week is to see one about them.

The screenplay is laced with wit and sharp dialogue, and the supporting cast more than makes up for Johnson's inexperience and occasional stiffness.

Draggy for long stretches, and never funny, Comedy of Power is a showcase - as if she needed another - for Huppert's chameleon qualities. She's an actress who can make a phone-book reading interesting, and that is pretty much the challenge she meets here.

My Fellow Americans is a gang-written comedy that doesn't have a political bone in its body, or much evidence of a funny one, either.

It's an intricate, at times incoherent, but often funny and consistently fascinating trio of stories with the same actors in different but related roles.

A bungled mess that spends an hour creating two characters whose lives are about as believable as a successful ambush set by Wile E. Coyote for the Roadrunner.

Clintonistas may want to look away when Carville and his colleagues lay out their political philosophy for Lozada, or, as he's affectionately known, "Gani." It's pragmatic in a way that defies the needs of the impoverished majority of Bolivians.

Frears story's grotesque subject offers an opportunity for a sick audience payoff that is more "Death Wish" than social commentary, and he takes it. It works -- you'll laugh! you'll gulp! -- but it's cheap.

Treu and screenwriter Jessica Barondes may not have their ears to the ground that's trod by real kids, but as they did with their previous film, "Wish Upon a Star," they're allowed to dream.

The special effects work fine for minor acts of magic, but the climactic aerial dragon fight is lame, and most of the performances are at the level of high school plays.

Some of it is brilliant, some is tedious and some is just plain incoherent.

Hilariously inventive Hollywood satire.

The story, adapted by Dean Georgaris, doesn't come within a light year of science-fiction plausibility, and after a while Woo gives up trying to sell it and reverts to the action choreography that made him a master of Hong Kong martial-arts movies.

This is as cheesy and irrelevant as political documentaries get. Horvath, who is openly critical of the invasion of Iraq, makes game of a handful of Iowans and Nebraskans who are either too dumb, too drunk or too uninterested to have an informed opinion about it.

Truly weird and unworkable thriller.

Rather than heightening our sense of empathy, we become numbed by the repetition.

There are two reasons to see - and hear - Agnieszka Holland's Copying Beethoven. One is Ed Harris' performance as the nearly deaf and totally egocentric Ludwig van; the other is a cherry-picked 10-minute chunk of the composer's soaring Ninth Symphony.

Watching Kevin Costner and William Hurt share grim laughs during Bruce Evans' Mr. Brooks is one of the pleasures of this totally absurd and equally entertaining psychological thriller.

It irks the ink out of me to see Lane exalted as a hero for doing what any responsible editor would do, then being paid to consult on his own canonization.

A brilliantly spare and poignant tragicomedy that projects such savage self-criticism of China's "economic miracle" that the film has been banned at home.

An intended throwback to the halcyon days of colorful studio cartoons, more in the Chuck Jones style than Disney, and the animation of its characters and Western motif is fine. But the writing of co-directors Will Finn and John Sanford and their characterizations are embarrassingly bad.

All trash, all all the time, a run-on burlesque of lust.

A hive of broad, brilliant performances.

Fascinating and often very funny behind-the-scenes look at the tedium and hard work that go into making strangers laugh.

Wild West Show would have really been something if Vaughn had taken a few of his fellow Frat Packers with him - say, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Steve Carell - instead of the struggling unknowns.

Alche has an amazingly expressive face and becomes such a magnetic presence that you'll feel a distinct need to rescue her.

Clearly, Caan's major influence is Quentin Tarantino, though he manages only a weak imitation. But give him credit for casting Kelly Lynch and Jeff Goldblum and letting them go.

The favorable three-star rating I'm giving the animated Pokémon: The First Movie is based at least partly on the fact that I expected to dislike it and didn't.

Yukol has spread a huge canvas, gloriously costumed and photographed, but the staging and acting are often awkward and the saga is simply too dense for good drama.

I have not read the Anne Tyler novella from which the movie is adapted, but it is clear from the earliest scenes that Evie and Drumstrings are of a different generation from 37-year-old Taylor and 36-year-old Pearce.

Unfortunately, what you'll remember most about the movie is its banal script and dialogue so ripe it almost laughs at itself.

A movie about healing that makes us want to scream out, ""Hollywood, heal thyself!"

Could well end up on the coming Oscar ballot for best foreign language film.

Ultimately, The Four Feathers is strong where its predecessors were weak (in the authenticity of combat) and weak where they were strong (in the larger-than-life quality of the characters). It's not a good exchange.

Sigourney Weaver is a riot in the cynical Faye Dunaway network boss role.

There is no excusing date rape, but the revenge conceived and executed by Rosario Dawson's Maya in this revolting, amateurish drama is something you might only wish on Osama Bin Laden.

If there's anything more tiresome in film today than hip irony, it is forced irony, and here comes a boatload with Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

There are certainly glimpses of his underused talent. But there aren't enough of those moments to elevate Croupier above the level of routine melodrama.

An unabashed celebration of her (Amalia) distinctive voice.

In any case, the movie moves only when she's (Richardson) in the center of it, and her complex performance as a woman balancing her dignity with her survival instincts is one of the year's very best.

Dumb fun is the best way to describe The Independent, and I mean that as a compliment.

Buscemi's latest, Lonesome Jim, written by James C. Strouse, asks you to spend 91 minutes with a 30-year-old slacker and would-be writer who has the DNA of a sloth. "Slowsome Jim" is more like it.

A popcorn movie with a protein center, satisfying neither taste.

Shyamalan has learned from his idol (Spielberg) how to manipulate audience emotion through the intimacy of an ordinary family that is "contacted." But he is even more shameless about it.

Among cautionary tales of gloom-and-doom, it may out-gore Gore, but it doesn't entertain.

Only sharp dialogue and a suspenseful buglary might have given this lame, quasi morality play some energy. It has neither.

Earnest but ambling drama.

The acting is more amateurish than Billy's diva act, and for all its ambitious editing, the film looks like something made in the Addams Family's attic.

Only Stanley Tucci seems aware of the drop-dead stupidity of the plot, and acts up a storm of high camp as the narcissistic scientist.

As the relationship between the two British schoolteachers begins (quietly), builds (deceptively) and dissolves (spectacularly), Dench and Blanchett give a master class in acting. Pick your own sports metaphor, but watching them go at each other is the match of the year.

The changes are meant to make it easier for audiences to accept Vincent's loyalty to Angelo and Joey, but they blunt the genetic mystery that made McAlary's story so compelling in the first place.

You have no idea how determined director Rich Cowan is to suck the last drop of sap out of this tree.

You watch with amazement their physical movements, how closely their lips match their overly precise, prerecorded dialogue, yet they're not human enough to get us past the stunt factor and lost in the drama.

Though Brother Bear is as beautiful as any of Disney's hand-drawn features, the gang-written script is deadly flat.

There's no question she's a smart cookie, but as she herself says, "There's a thin line between smart and crazy."

Solondz's refusal to frame his dark, misanthropic impulses with an overriding point-of-view seems a cheap copout for a film whose title proposes that it's about the storytelling process.

It took one novelist, one screenwriter and two directors - Scott McGehee and David Siegel - to cobble together this earnest nonsense, and if it weren't for 12-year-old novice Flora Cross, who plays its central character, all would be lost.

There is a hint of sentimentality among the pals at the end, but not enough to offset the film's harmless combination of camaraderie and wished-for - oh, how they wish for it - debauchery.

Without the surprise, realism, audacity and upstart cheekiness -- pun intended -- that made "The Full Monty's" blue-collar strippers so irresistible.

By turns brilliant and tedious, imaginative and mundane.

Gets the proportions all wrong -- too much magic, not enough realism.

There are some problems with the pacing, but this topical thriller about CIA-sanctioned torture is one of the most important "message" movies of the year.

The Worst Comedy of the Year race heats up today with the release of Keenen Ivory Wayans' Scary Movie 2. This one is so bad, even Adam Sandler will be impressed.

This is extremely dark and politically loaded material.

More amiably mindless summer distraction than just about anything Hollywood has to offer this season.

It's more fun than a turkey shoot. It's also one of the most entertaining riffs on American culture in years.

Surely among the darkest-themed movies ever made.

Jonathan Berman's documentary about California's famous Black Bear Ranch is a trip.

The 20 or so minutes we spend with the Albatross in the squall is high adventure, to be sure. Everything else is ballast.

Some people will want to call it pornography. In one respect, it's the opposite.

The film is otherwise a self-indulgent lark.

Mexican soap opera star Bárbara Mori may be the most beautiful woman to grace an American screen this year, and female viewers may feel similarly about her male co-stars Christian Meier and Manolo Cardona. But a telenovela with three gorgeous actors is still a telenovela.

A sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a soccer fan whose favorite pro team's unexpected success threatens to push him over the edge.

This badly written, badly directed and badly acted little movie about an ordinary guy from Jersey who discovers passion with a fashion plate in Manhattan looks great.

It's almost a surprise that the sequel is actually better - much better - than the original.

Kids are going to adore looking at this movie, living in it, flying through and above its brilliant landscape. It's an animated joyride over a relief map of Manhattan. I just wish the script was as good as the paint.

There’s no questioning the sincerity of the filmmakers or the urgency of the subject matter, but the clumsiness with which this harrowing story of a child soldier in Africa may wear you out long before the puzzle is put together.

Turns everything we know about the contemporary world on its head, and substitutes it with one in which spirits, monsters, magicians and animals mix it up in a carnival of energy, good humor and freewheeling illusion.

Roberts carries the film in the best sense, by taking us on a human journey of genuine discovery and growth.

Dear Wendy is absurd to the point of comic parody. Bloody as it is, it has no access to viewers' emotions, and its message - play with fire and you get burned - is too obvious to be provocative.

The best movie I've seen this year.

This is a very tender portrayal of young people caught up in a blisteringly fast and cynical world, and though their music is hideous, they are a compelling act.

Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's Venus. It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too.

The movie doesn't remind me so much of the movies of Minnelli or Sirk as it does a lavish parody of "Upstairs, Downstairs," with musical interludes (the divas sing, whether they can or not) that are often as painful to watch as they are audaciously performed.

If you find a movie with a more annoying central performance than the one given by Brenda Blethyn in Cherie Nowlan's Introducing the Dwights, keep it to yourself.

The actual fights between the predators and the serpents are too silly to contemplate. Both shiny and metallic, they look like kitchen appliances fighting it out. That's when you can see them. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson ("Resident Evil") has created the darkest, if not worst, sci-fi movie since "Battlefield Earth."

As the story of a romantic office lump, Janice Beard resembles last year's "Bridget Jones's Diary." But it is a far, far lesser thing.

It is a devastating indictment of the ruling class of Money, Miss.

At the end of her spontaneous date, she says it's been the best night of her life. It will not be one of yours.

I'm not sure how tolerable this would be without Palmer's charm, because this is a formulated script where everything is tied up in perfect bows, just like life isn't.

Have Marc's friends tricked him with a conspiracy of silence, or was that mustache a growth only in his mind? The filmmaker has said there is no intended meaning to any of this, so search for it for your own amusement.

Boring is too active a verb to describe this minimalist psychological thriller.

This drama from Fox Faith Movies has a mercifully light hand in selling its Christian-values themes, but its plodding story about a spoiled young scion who must complete 12 tasks assigned him by his late grandfather is still a slog.

A film of epically hollow sentimentality, a movie that tells you how to feel every step of the way and ends on a symphony of false notes. The moment when we learn what Mr. Holland's Opus really means makes the ending of It's a Wonderful Life look like an exercise in restraint.

The song for which Piaf is best-known - "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" ("No Regrets") - leads to a killer finale with Cotillard perfectly lip-synching Piaf's recording of it. Trust me; you'll want to own it.

Oddly, it’s the bawdy silliness of “Dangerous Beauty,” and its jaw-dropping presumptions of Veronica’s liberated lifestyle, that makes the film occasionally entertaining. But it’s a movie without a consistent tone or creative vision.

Given the grim events, the buoyantly goofy An Amazing Couple has the effect of laughing gas pumped through the vents in a funeral hall.

The movie crams in so many of the events and characters of Thack­eray's 900-page novel that the story often seems to be moving on fast-forward, pausing here and there to introduce a character, then skipping ahead — from London to the country to Brussels and on, eventually, to India.

This is one of the scariest movies featuring female heroines since the "Alien" series, and what makes it uniquely scary is where these women are -- in tunnels two miles under ground -- when they realize they are not alone.

Amadeus is about as close to perfection as movies get. [2002 Director's Cut]

The actors are solid at every position, but Broderick, who seems to get better with each performance, is especially good at playing the impulsively self-destructive yet sympathetic loser.

This is first-rate stuff.

This ponderous romantic melodrama...passes like a day behind bars.

A small movie that plays like a Western epic.

Treats the poets not as creative equals but as a groundbreaking genius and a jealous, vindictive hack. Wordsworth is Salieri to Coleridge's Mozart.

It's hard not to like a movie so determined to make you feel the love of a family, to make you feel that every dream can become a reality and that every mortgage - no matter how close to foreclosure - can be rescued by the sudden death of a family member and his inheritance.

Among the unforgettable images is that of artificial limbs floating to earth on parachutes, while below, one-legged men on crutches race each other to the prizes.

Though we had just heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald, I believed he had done it alone. I still do, even more so after watching Robert Stone's meticulously researched, seemingly unbiased summary of the killing and the major conspiracy theories.

The film's greatest strength is its inadvertent timeliness. Parallels between LBJ's Vietnam policy and George W. Bush's Iraq policy go off in your head like flares.

Showing the movie would be a great way to open a debate. I would love to hear its charges answered as clearly as they're stated.

Atoothless morality play.

His (Kaminski) first feature is so thoroughly awful, it isn't even interesting to look at.

The face-to-face interviews laced throughout the movie are fascinating and often laugh-out-loud funny. Ask people to talk dirty and you don't know what they'll say.

Though there is enough haute couture on display for a season of "Sex and the City" envy, it has definite off-the-rack appeal to regular moviegoers. In fact, it may be the one film this year where you'll see Manolo Blahniks and Doc Martens on women sitting in the same row.

In some ways, The Queen is a comedy of manners - bad, good and archaic. The formal bowing and scraping surrounding Her Majesty is as hilarious as it is (apparently) accurate.

The Manhattan movie of the year, Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend, offers a stunning glimpse into how the city - as we know it today - might look in 2012 if it were abandoned in 2009.

The script and the performances are all fine, but it's very slow going.

Strong stuff, compelling drama.

Bittersweet, funny, sad and invariably romantic.

The unlikely cowboys play off each other's strengths like the best doubles team in tennis. The exquisiteness of this match is that Chan and Wilson are both reactive comedy actors.

The overall effect of Lucas' digital mania has been detrimental to the saga. Where the first trilogy was mythological fantasy, the second is pure cartoon. The sad truth is, the more three-dimensional they look, the more two-dimensional they are.

Davis choreographed another rash of spectacular action sequences, but Chain Reaction is doomed by a premise so simple and so absurd, it's easier to sympathize with star Keanu Reeves (poor guy, his career was going so well) than with his character. [2 Aug 1996, p.F8]

There's nothing new here, but Frank provides a genial reminder that politics doesn't always have to take the low road.

The results are often exciting and, except for occa­sional overacting by Calil, feels authentic. But the whole notion of exploiting a war and its victims to shoot a commercial feature is reprehensible.

A reverse male-bonding tale unlike anything you've ever seen. And it's not the easiest good movie to sit through.

A sad, almost morbid -- and cinematically inert -- eulogy to a complex man whose own genius was dampened by arrogance and politics.

What it lacks in irony and suspense, Gilbert Adler's Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood makes up for in whimsy and cheeky self-assurance. The second feature to emerge from the long-running HBO horror show is a bawdy romp into vampire mythology, an empty-headed joyride into a crypt that resembles a costume party orgy. This is the version of "Dracula" that Bram Stoker would have written with the collaboration of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade over drinks at Hooters. [16 Aug 1996, p.F10]

More fun than a company picnic - and a lot more fun than the classic 18th century novel that inspired it - Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is the first good comedy of 2006.

If you care more about the quality of the movie than the food, language or location, there's no choice: Order Chinese.

It all comes together at the end, logically and with a twist. But it's not a game that allows the audience to play along. When the story is controlled by whatever memories the writer and director choose to put in the characters' heads, you're always on the outside looking in.

Plays like a long TV sketch, but with an array of characters, themes, subplots and situations just clever enough to keep it moving, and to give cover to its underlying cynicism.

One of the best things about Michael Apted's uniquely ambitious and continuing documentary series on the lives of a group of British schoolchildren is that you don't have to have seen the last one to enjoy the next.

A quirky comedy-drama that gets the bulk of its humor from the well-placed non sequitur. It never seems to be going where you think it is, and that includes its oddly endearing dialogue.

No masterpiece, but in a season dominated by films as heavy -- and about as time-consuming -- as brain surgery, a little brain candy is sweet.

Not just unromantic, it's unfunny, too.

May be the year's most derivative film, but it's also the most original.

An improvement over "Jackpot," but not much. The best thing about it is Nolte, playing the grizzled priest as an angel in his own right. Everyone else- - save the young boy playing the orphan -- seems to be in on a joke we just don't get.

It's the banal romantic triangle that inspired Sverak ("Kolya"), who obviously didn't see "Pearl Harbor" in time to stop himself.

The Musketeer is the worst Hollywood period film in -- it seems like ages since "American Outlaws."

This kind of parody is hard to sustain for an hour and a half, and "Walk Hard" does gets wearying at times. But the humor is so outrageous, the original music so much fun and Reilly so good - both while hamming it up in the role and in singing the songs - that it's irresistible.

There is really nothing wrong with Peter Chelsom's Town & Country that younger stars would not have solved.

In this documentary, I learn there are people who can solve a Monday New York Times puzzle in less than three minutes - without looking words up! I don't necessarily want to know these people, but they put on a good show at the annual crossword championship in Stamford, Ct., which is the centerpiece of this affectionate, smartly-done promo for puzzling.

It's galling to see such a low-life canonized in a film, but it's also riveting drama.

There comes a time when the future looks old, and that's where "Star Trek" finds itself on the time-space continuum.

Its story, characters, dialogue, humor and voice performances are first-rate.

So clumsy and unfocused that not getting it isn't half as bad as sitting through it.

Once in a Lifetime performs a belated autopsy on the Cosmos and the North American Soccer League and basically concludes that they died of impatience.

Shows what can happen when a bunch of good actors get together without adult supervision. They emote all over the place, banging into each other, talking too loud, knocking over furniture, wallowing in clichés and otherwise behaving like rank amateurs.

As dull and inert as the ink used to print the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that informed Mike Rich's script.

Commits the sin of a hundred sports biographies in overselling its inherent drama.

Thornton, directing his first film since the minimalist "Sling Blade" (1996), has a much better grip on the material when he's focused on the scruffy desert landscape and the adventures of the two Texans.

The movie is full of freshman mistakes, but Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance in the title role is the gutsiest thing she's done since her breakout in "Secretary," and she succeeds despite serious contradictions in the writing of her character.

Filmmaker Steve Anderson stuffs an astonishing 800-plus mentions of the F-word into this 90-minute documentary. When the spectacle ends, the same question lingers: Why?

I'm not sure the filmmakers - one, Harry Thomason, is a long-time Friend of Bill - have connected enough dots to prove a "vast" conspiracy. But that many people devoted much of their lives and resources to destroying Clinton is indisputable.

Here's one for the Sick Voyeurs Club.

The whole movie is some kind of joke, a sick one to be savored by a certain segment of the movie audience. You know who you are.

Slight Canadian coming-of-age drama.

Passingly enjoyable summer fluff, but if you can find a more genial, less edgy caper movie, you might want to own it as a pet.

If you get through the first hour without slitting your throat, the cautiously optimistic last third offers some intriguing options.

Wenham and Porter are appealing actors, and Teplitzky's depiction of their coupling has an unflinching realism.

With more than a passing nod to the Hollywood mob movie, Pavel Lounguine ("Luna Park") crafts this superb post-Soviet "Godfather" movie loosely based on the exploits of bad boy billionaire Boris Berezovsky.

Smith turns it on with co-star Eva Mendes in a manner that will have George Clooney taking notes.

The movie adds up to one of the smartest and most ambitious political thrillers in years. But if you find a more difficult movie to follow this year, it will be in Mandarin without subtitles.

Apocalypto exists solely as an action-adventure and a deft cinematic demonstration of man's capacity for cruelty. This is the true passion of Mel.

Much talking, much sex, much to-do about nothing.

Has so many ideas working in it that they all but suffocate its thin plot.

What the filmmakers missed in assuming the mask from the earlier film is that it was Carrey's astonishing physical comedy that made that film a hit, not the animation.

That's what Bond is all about -- dazzle, some really bad puns and the kind of sexy fun that satisfies high-school urges while masquerading in tux and tails.

Out of place, out of time and out of its own cultural context.

What "Capote" fails to reveal to the audience is the sense of a homoerotic attraction between the author and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). It is more than implied that one exists, but there isn't a scene between them that supports it or even makes it believable.

Too long by about 20 minutes, and takes itself too seriously near the end. But if you're looking for a movie for a boys' night out, it's a winner.

Rai's acting is frustratingly passive in Provoked, and the script is laced with prison and courtroom cliches. But the movie gets most of the facts straight and the flashbacks to the wife's abuse are harrowing.

We're treated to two smashing performances from Morel and Blanc, and all of the mysteries raised before are satisfyingly resolved.

Turturro's Luzhin is a cinematic soulmate of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man and Geoffrey Rush's David Helfgott.

A reasonable facsimile of a perversely funny book whose odd characters are given life by a terrific cast.

Tarantino's gift, at least with "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," is his ability to create comedy within horrific violence. In "2 Days," the comedy and violence travel along different paths altogether, and when they finally do merge, as is often the case on the highways in the Valley, it isn't pretty. [27 Sept 1996, p.14]

A perversely dark romantic comedy shot and edited in the contemporary fairy-tale style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amélie." But this one has a dagger for a heart.

Vampire movies aren't what they used to be. How about a little mist, some shadows, some pale gray faces set off by stark red lips? Maestro, a little Transylvanian mood music, if you please.

With nifty new villains, a revived Green Goblin, plus $300 million worth of aerial special effects, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 is definitely good to go.

Unlike Glenn Ford, a soft-spoken studio star who was cast against type as Wade 50 years ago, Crowe is a perfect fit. Not because of his bad boy behavior offscreen, but because he can blend charm and menace better than anyone.

There's still time, but for now, Fogler gets my vote for the worst performance of the year.

Father Amaro comes off as another pedophile in a frock. You'd have to hose this guy down if he were driving a school bus.

In any case, this is the image of the marquis we would know had he been handled by a top publicity team.

Makes you appreciate opera, or NoDoz.

The brutally ironic ending, I might add, won't make anybody very happy about having chosen The Mist for their evening's entertainment.

The dialogue often sounds like arch Mamet, and John Swanbeck's direction is as spare as the hotel-room decor.

There are funny sight gags strewn throughout, but because so many scenes and confrontations are repeated from the original, there’s a staleness and sense of melancholy to the whole affair.

If you can overcome the graphic nature of its casual violence, it is a lot of fun. The banter among the brothers is well-written and has a genuine fraternal feel to it. And the chases and shootouts have a fresh malevolence to them.

Made for $1 million, its production values are raw and Nicholas makes at least one too many obvious choices himself. But its very rawness adds to its creepiness and keeps us in suspense in ways most studio movies don't.

An instant contender for cult status on the midnight-movie circuit, where lines like "Do we look like quantum wormhole specialists?" will be given the respect they deserve.

Moore is as gutsy an actress as there is today, and I'm not sure I've seen a star as dressed down for a psychological unpeeling since Jessica Lange in "Frances," in 1982, or farther back, Olivia de Havilland in 1948's "The Snake Pit." It's strong stuff.

The story, which was inspired by an Albanian novel and the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, ends with a literary patness. But it's still a potent tale of fraternal love and the loss of innocence.

Cage is a wonderful light comedian; were someone to remake "It's a Wonderful Life," he'd be on the short list for the role of George Bailey. And Leoni is Donna Reed, reborn.

The tension and intrigue between the pretender and his would-be associates is as dense as the woods surrounding their hiding place.

Dunst and Williams...turn ditsiness into a frenetic comic duet.

A curious entry in the current wave of raunchy youth comedies. It's refreshingly free of scatological humor, but even while aiming higher, it can't raise its focus above the belt.

With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, [Hill] seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend.

Maybe you have to have experienced one of these anti-weather urban cocoons to appreciate the concept of the film, and the prickly people who populate it.

Ralph Fiennes has faced a lot of acting challenges in his career, but playing a New York Republican who could win an endorsement from Susan Sarandon might be the toughest. Mostly, he handles the task by simply smiling warmly throughout, and gets away with it.

With any sitcom, the freshness is ultimately in the writing, and I think the jokes are better here than in Analyze This, and the actors are more comfortable together. I don't know if De Niro is softening or has lost his edge, but he now seems content mocking himself.

It's no small trick to blend fantasy, slapstick and genuine emotion, but Ellis pulls it off with whimsy to spare.

Undertow becomes unbearably imitative and predictable. It's a kids-in-peril B horror movie in the guise of an art film.

Saga too arty for own good.

By the end, you may not know whether you've seen a ghost story or a story of delusional obsession, but you'll have had a great time.

The most compelling and least partisan of all the Iraq documentaries.

Unrelentingly bleak, the movie is nonetheless a riveting drama with some outstanding performances.

Say a little prayer and save your money.

There are many ways to say that war is hell, but few filmmakers have said it with as much imagination, humor, intrigue and humanity as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement.

A raunchy, irreverent, generally hilarious sendup of ritual and papal decree.

Remarkable first film.

The question is, can a Slovakian lawsuit against the filmmaker be far behind?

Even if The Mummy is imitation Spielberg, it offers more bang for the buck than we're used to getting.

A slicker, faster-paced, high-tech upgrade that lifts the sprightly spirit and the main action set piece from the original while developing its own twists and a new ending that, though a bit too pat and eager to please, is a vast improvement.

The saga might have worked better as a novel, where we could cast the characters with our imaginations, and keep them straight.

A powerful, deeply moving tale, immeasurably facilitated by the performance of relatively unknown Hilary Swank as Brandon...smartly shot and edited, and the performances are dead-on.

It's impossible not to be moved by its nearly nonstop visual assault.

Once again, the director's eye is faultless as he captures both the essence and beauty of the art of Jang Seung-up, Korea's legendary 19th-century painter. But he doesn't capture the artist's soul.