Jami Bernard

Taking one's pound of flesh and having it, too, leads to a queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters.

The movie suffers from tipping its hand too easily and hating its subject so much.

Life-affirming story of love, kinship and sacrifice.

So lacking in insight and gravity that it makes Dahmer seem like a pesky, pasty-faced loser who just wasn't popular enough.

It is a sweet, wonderfully acted cameo of a movie about the lengths to which a lioness will go to protect her cub.

The script provides an excellent payoff, although action fans may not agree, because that payoff is the equivalent of a Cheshire cat's grin.

Annaud is a filmmaker who often works with a bare minimum of dialogue. Yet his storytelling is so strong and emotional that words are barely necessary.

Letting any other actor run wild like this could have been a disaster, but Depp's peculiar buccaneer is an instant classic of actorly charisma.

A slight movie and a major downer, is an acting showcase for Sean Penn. That's good, but not enough.

You'd think it would be boring to stare at Thomas's computer screen so intently for 97 minutes, but the movie is eerily riveting.

Dispels myths about the "gangsta" aura that clings to rap and shows this poetry of the streets in all its different forms: social protest, entertainment and aggression.

The girl's blindness may have been meant to symbolize a trusting populace, but she's the one character who clearly sees what's what and who is trustworthy.

Cinephiles and Billy Wilder fans get a rare opportunity to see the "slightly dirtier" European ending to the director's 1964 sex farce.

A Jane Austen-like tale of sense and sensibility, with some of the wit, but, alas, none of the linguistic legerdemain.

In making such an appealing movie about characters who are usually swept under the Hollywood rug, Binder does us all a service.

Nicolas Cage does such a persuasive job of portraying Chicago TV weatherman Dave Spritz as a train wreck of a guy that you wonder whether this might actually be a training film for a psychoanalytic convention on hopeless cases.

Crushingly realistic.

Fresh and unexpected. It feels like a real window on the lives of disenfranchised youths - these are in South Atlanta - as they make their way in a society that doesn't cut them any breaks.

Hugo Weaving, weaving deftly beneath a fixed plastic grin and Prince Valiant wig as the mysterious avenger in V for Vendetta, both chills and amuses throughout this enjoyable - if occasionally irresponsible - comic-book thriller.

Tough going for most audiences and should be considered more of a rough draft full of lofty ideas unevenly executed.

Charlize Theron's Gilda in Head in the Clouds invites comparison to Rita Hayworth in 1946's "Gilda," which adds a touch of the ludicrous to this already strained material set in wartime France.

There's something sweet yet chilling in When the Sea Rises. If it had explored more of the chill, it might have turned into a knockout, absurdist thriller.

It stands apart when it comes to its extravagant humor and non-judgmental '70s-era reality (smoking dope, hitching rides, playing Frisbee, hanging out).

Niccol doesn't always get the mix right, and the tone here is inconsistent. But the movie remains compelling, largely because of Cage's dry, deadpan delivery.

Has that same air of silly innocence, a rarity in today's movies.

None of the criminal skulduggery feels quite right, but the comic bits between Bobby (Favreau) and Ricky (Vaughn) are freewheeling fun.

Forces the audience to rethink the riots in new and difficult ways, to find empathy and revulsion where it might not have known they existed.

An "American Pie" wanna-be that, in trying to be as tasteless as possible, sometimes succeeds.