Jonathan Rosenbaum

Tries to be an audacious, irreverent satire about youth culture like "Lord Love a Duck," but most of the laughs get strangled at birth by the uncertainty of Siega's tone.

The movie is quite enjoyable as long as it explores the fantasy of a neglected little boy having an entire house of his own to explore and play in, but the physical cruelty that dominates the last act leaves a sour taste, and the multiple continuity errors strain one's suspension of disbelief to near the breaking point.

I don't question the legitimacy of celebrating the courage of these individuals and their families, and I can even tolerate the hokey nostalgia for World War II epics. But I'm troubled that the filmmakers have elided so much else of what happened on that day, as if it were some kind of neutral backdrop.

Another takeout—untidily slapped into a Styrofoam container—is more like it. Aimed at less discriminating viewers, this sequel to the 1987 Stakeout, again directed by John Badham, isn't too bad if you're looking for nothing more than good-natured silliness, low comedy, gratuitous tilted angles, and protracted dog jokes.

The film has little to do with art, intelligence, or values (except for the kind found in department stores).

Unlike many colleagues, I'm not a fan of "Amores Perros" or "21 Grams," scripted by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu. This conclusion to their trilogy is easier to follow as a narrative, but it's even more pretentious, generalizing about the state of the modern world.

Like some of Joan Crawford's and Bette Davis's studio vehicles, this soapy romance exists only for what Gong Li can bring to it: a certain amount of soul and nuance.

Even when his work is at its most contrived, which it certainly is here, writer-director Ron Shelton is the best purveyor of jock humor around.

For all its pretensions and avant-garde narrative dislocations, the star-studded cast...keeps this buzzing.

After a while it becomes apparent that this movie is too eager to please, too willing to sacrifice its point of view toward its targets to sustain itself for the length of a feature.

Leave it to coproducer Jerry Bruckheimer to revive the Indiana Jones cycle without the period setting, the camp elements, or Spielberg's efficiency; director Jon Turteltaub just plods along, and the script by Marianne and Cormac Wibberley is equally poker-faced.

Never all it was cracked up to be.

Has its awkward and square moments directorially, but it's also uncommonly honest and serious.

Somewhere in writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's overstyled movie, about a 12-year-old boy (Sulfaro) during the Italian fascist period who has the hots for a mistreated war widow (Belluci), is a pretty good short story about the fickleness of community and the cruelty of gossip struggling to get out.

More memorable for its title than for anything else.

Part of the minimalist humor growing out of this small-scale event is that they can barely remember anything, because the revolution scarcely made any difference.

All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features.

The main compensation is Harrelson's well-judged and finely shaded performance; the secondary ones are the ladies he hangs out with -- Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, and Kristin Scott Thomas. But the rest of this mainly drifts.

As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton's tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it's a noble failure.

Val Kilmer, clearly pleased to be entering the Oscar disability sweepstakes, does what he can as the hunk who learns how to see.

An amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment.

Well-made treacle.

In spite of the creative team—Hepburn, Tracy, and director George Cukor—this curiously flat 1943 melodrama redeems itself only from moment to moment.

This comedy drama is capably acted and undeniably touching in spots.

It's reasonably well told and well mounted but little more.

Jeremy Piven and Annabella Sciorra exert some charm as bodyguards tracking the couple; Mark Harmon and Caroline Goodall are OK as the heroine's parents. Andy Cadiff directed Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman's by-the-numbers script.

Charmingly low-tech fantasy.

"B.S. I Love You" would be a more accurate title.

Lawrence Kasdan directed this fair-to-middling black comedy from a script by John Kostmayer, and although the pacing is sluggish in spots, people with a taste for acting as impersonation will enjoy some of the scenery chewing.

It's a sure sign of how good Tomei is that she can even occasionally do something with Tom Sierchio's lachrymose script; the usually wonderful Rosie Perez, stuck with an uninteresting part, is less lucky.

This made-for-cable opus, halfway between documentary and docudrama, is willing to try anything and everything except for a consistent relationship to its material.

For the most part I was able to accept this thesis and enjoy Lopez in her usual superwoman role, but the script does get awfully preachy in spots.

This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.

The execution of the script is perfect, as always, but it's the laziest script Brooks has ever directed.

For most of this romantic comedy, fatuous contrivances run neck and neck with what seem to be authentic observations about repressed sibling rivalry; some of the latter are too painful to be funny, and eventually the contrivances win out, but the cast keeps it all watchable.

The story ultimately lands in incoherence; but the cameos and local details, and even some of the gags, keep it perky.

Neither the crime nor its detection is especially interesting, and screenwriter Tony Gayton doesn't appear to be aiming for psychological insights.

Semiabsorbing.

The problem is that happy endings this strident and overextended begin to seem somewhat desperate.

While his film certainly has the nastiness of satire, it doesn't have much political focus; petty malice rather than anger is the main bill of fare, with deep-dish notations about food and sex thrown in for spice.

The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney's effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each other--a weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale.

The direction of Fran Rubel Kuzui (Tokyo Pop) suggests that she's more comfortable with character than action, and Joss Whedon's script has some fun with Valley talk (both genuine and ersatz) but strains to sell the story.

Few recent films have left me feeling more conflicted than Valeska Grisebach's second feature (2006), which is sensitive, moving, accomplished in its extraordinary direction of nonprofessional actors but also a little bogus.

The psychological and psychoanalytical probes into sexual and emotional problems keep this reasonably lively.

This is an ideal straight-ahead version of Jesus's story, built around Christopher Plummer's offscreen narration, for people who don't already know all the details and can't follow all of "The Passion of the Christ" without a synopsis.

Limiting the potential overripeness of the material with tact and sincerity, he (Wang) generally makes the most of his resourceful cast; only the dog overacts.

Munich may have value as an act of expiation but not as entertainment or art.

The limiting factor, despite serious performances by the two leads, is that neither character is entirely believable.

Attractively animated.

A painfully misconceived reduction and simplification by writer Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood in the late 30s.

It shows rare courage in protesting the widespread abuse of innocent Iraqis, but its pseudodocumentary form is full of awkward misfires (such as a protracted use of theme music from Barry Lyndon) and its acting is often terrible.

I could have done without all the pushy tactics of this romantic comedy.

Though Adrian Lyne's clodhopper direction, underlined by a mushy Ennio Morricone score, predictably runs the gamut from soft-core porn in the manner of David Hamilton to hectoring close-ups, this is perhaps Lyne's best movie after Jacob's Ladder--a genuinely disturbing (if far from literary) adaptation of Nabokov's extraordinary novel, written by former journalist Stephen Schiff and starring, predictably, Jeremy Irons.

This is a hokey, old-fashioned melodrama in which the actors scream more often than necessary.

The director's familiarity with silent cinema enhances the prudish pornographic footage, but when he starts cutting between separate perversions, I began to wonder if he was getting as bored with the material as I was.

I wouldn't have minded even the Hollywood schlock lurking behind the studied weirdness if I'd believed in any of the characters on any level.

Apart from a few sleek shots involving boats or helicopters, the action eventually devolves into a standard war-movie shootout.

Some of it looks like a TV commercial, and the characters' motivations could have been generated by a computer, but the cast--Ray Barrett, Julia Blake, Simon Bossell, Saffron Burrows, Pippa Grandison, and Aden Young--is attractive and energetic.

Smith is resourceful in the role, though the story stretches one's credulity about his character's resourcefulness.

A pretty good caper comedy for 11-year-old boys -- "heist thriller" would make it sound too ambitious.

Berri remains a boring director, dotting every i and crossing every t with nothing much on his mind but platitude.

Cheung can't make the woman very interesting in her own right--the most compelling performance here is Nolte's.

On the other hand, the brutality and sadism it delivers at every opportunity, which we're supposed to take for granted as part of the "fun," left me feeling that any civilization that can create such an entertainment may not deserve to survive.

I'm too big a fan of director James Whale (1896-1957) to take a film about him lightly, and I'm afraid this speculative 1998 movie about his last days won't do.

It's silly adolescent stuff, but director Brett Ratner and screenwriters Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg serve it up gracefully.

Story is fairly conventional and not especially well told, though as usual Tran's images are so sensual and beautiful that I was rarely bored or frustrated.

The young heroine is rather humorless, but Gavras's intelligence and skillful touch are evident throughout.

Watchable but not very illuminating.

Unfortunately, the relationship between Cobb and Stump as depicted here isn't very substantial or interesting, and the fictionalized Stump's offscreen narration feels rather concocted; what the movie has to say about Cobb mainly leaks through around the edges of this cumbersome apparatus.

The three actors manage to get a lot of mileage out of the material: although one never quite believes that Tandy's character is Jewish, she is remarkable in every other respect, and Freeman and Aykroyd are wonderful throughout.

The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising.

In some ways, for better and for worse, this is even more about Graysmith (Jake Gyllehaal)--who became obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that terrorized northern California in the late 60s--than about the murderer.

Watchable if relatively threadbare movie.

While the results are far from unprofessional--the cast is uniformly good, including a characteristically slapped-around Meryl Streep...The male self-pity is so overwhelming that you'll probably stagger out of this mumbling something about Tolstoy (as many critics did when the film first came out in 1978) if you aren't as nauseated as I was.

The only one who seems to be having much fun is Parker Posey, camping it up as one of the vampires.

A very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.

It runs out of energy before the end.

This has plenty of designer gore to go with its periodic spurts of bloodletting, and a lot of care and attention were obviously devoted to selecting locations, designing sets, and grooming handlebar mustaches. Much less attention went to making one believe that any of the events took place circa 1879, but at least the bursts of action keep coming, and most survive Cosmatos's addiction to smoldering close-ups.

I didn't feel I was wasting my time but I started looking at my watch long before it was over.

A multifaceted misfire from writer-director Steven Zaillian.

There's plenty of disquieting material here, but I wish the film were less antagonistic in its own right.

I was never bored but only occasionally interested.

About as entertaining as a no-brainer can be--a lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like "Speed," and every bit as fast moving. But don't expect much of an aftertaste.

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

Tries way too hard to be clever and shrewd.

It's a letdown from the man who brought us "Men in Black" and "Addams Family Values."

A brave effort to stare down the specter of American failure, it gets off on the wrong foot by pretentiously turning the doomed hero into a Christ figure--a traffic cop with arms extended in crucifixion mode--before the story even gets started.

While the level of imagination here is scaled to the bite-size dimensions of TV, the sense of an alternate universe felt in Herman's TV show is woefully lacking. But fans and undemanding kids may still be amused.

I enjoyed this while it lasted, especially for the cast.

It doesn't have the polish or the momentum of an Indiana Jones adventure, and isn't too engaging on the plot level, but at least the filmmakers keep it moving with lots of screwball stunts.

The results are too pretty and well acted to be a total washout, but the fascination with evil and power that gives the novel intensity is virtually absent; what remains is mainly petty malice and mild cynicism.

This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions. There's even a good De Palma-style fake shock ending.

I have no objection to soap opera when it's delivered with conviction and a sense of urgency, but this sappy tale ... held my interest only moderately.

A good concert film might have been culled from Vaughn's 30-date LA-to-Chicago tour in September 2005, which showcased stand-up comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco and included bits with Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Dwight Yoakam, Justin Long, and Keir O'Donnell. But this is more like a DVD extra for that film.

Seems like a dopey idea to me, but if you aren't familiar with the Fitzgerald novel, you may enjoy this; at least Jones and his costars play the story as if they believed in it.

This is simply efficient, routine storytelling with a high gloss but an undernourished sense of character.

The only thing that keeps the proceedings bearable is the cast gamely rolling with all the shameless sitcom punches the script keeps throwing at them.

Starts off with a lot of promise and excitement but winds up 165 minutes later feeling empty and affectless.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

The set decor is more intricate than any of the characters.

Apart from McVay and Lea DeLaria (as a lesbian who befriends and advises the hero), the actors mainly come across as movie types rather than characters, and despite the obvious sincerity of the project, deja vu seems written into the conception.

Most features composed of sketches by different filmmakers are wildly uneven. This one is consistently mediocre or slightly better, albeit pleasant and watchable. It helps that none of the episodes runs longer than five or six minutes.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

The whole thing's pretty cute and breezy, but don't expect logic or coherence.

Despite a likable and varied cast—Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake, Traci Lords, and Polly Bergen, with cameos by many others—Waters's feeling for the mid-50s doesn't really match his sense of the early 60s (the problems start with the old-fashioned Universal logo at the beginning, which belongs to the 40s and earlier rather than to the 50s), and his plot moves seem increasingly formulaic. Otherwise, this is agreeable enough as a minor effort.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) are too preoccupied with hip cleverness to have much else on their minds, and the music is so-so.

Though it's full of striking visual ideas and actorly turns, it never fully convinces.

Marsh and cowriter Milo Addica (Monster's Ball) strive for gothic tragedy as they unbuckle the Bible Belt, but despite some credible performances (Hurt is especially interesting) the effort feels willful.

Marion Cotillard tears up all the available scenery in this overblown, achronological biopic of French pop singer Edith Piaf.

A few laughs and a lot of hyperbolic shtick make this a little better than formulaic before the standard-issue resolution.

This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.

The film is watchable as well as informative...But I wish I had a better notion of what story he's trying to tell.

Alan Rudolph's 1994 feature about writer Dorothy Parker and the famous Algonquin wits she hung out with in the 20s certainly has its pleasures, but someone should tell Rudolph that, for all his skill and charm, period movies aren't really his forte.

The involved backstory and Hartley's own generic music both prove burdensome; the main attraction is the cast's amusing way of handling Hartley's mannerist dialogue and conceits.

This exercise in mainstream masochism, macho posturing, and designer-grunge fascism is borderline ridiculous. But it also happens to be David Fincher's richest movie.

If you're looking for a simple-minded farce with campy overtones, this 2008 feature might be your dish.

Another chapter in the ongoing struggle between the talented Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Liebestraum) and studio recutters and reshooters, this intriguing but unsatisfying love story between a manic-depressive (Richard Gere at his best) and his sympathetic therapist (Lena Olin) makes memorable uses of both its west-coast settings and its cast (which also includes Anne Bancroft), but, like Liebestraum, it seems to come to us with several parts missing.

I suspect an account of all the complex business transactions would be more fun than anything in the movie, where you can't see a blue sky that isn't made up to resemble the Dreamworks logo.

Predictably adolescent and smarmy, with the mix of sentimentality and cynical flippancy that's becoming Steven Soderbergh's specialty (even when he's pretending to make art films), this is chewing gum for the eyes and ears, and not bad as such.

Despite the title, this is less a soccer documentary than a corporate hagiography along the lines of "The Last Mogul" or "The Kid Stays in the Picture"; its real hero isn't Cosmos star Pele (who wisely declined to be interviewed), but Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications, which owned the team.

For me, part of the fun of Snake Eyes is the genuine satisfaction of seeing Brian De Palma finally arriving at his own level.

Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work--evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci.

The film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography.

The results are obviously sincere and relatively serious for De Palma (with a fresh handling of wide-screen composition that plays on some of the moral conflicts and ambiguities), but the entire film is predicated on a fairly unquestioning acceptance of the morality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam—the issue of whether the highly principled hero enlisted or was drafted isn't even brought up—as well as a refusal to link this war with other U.S. involvements in the third world. So the feeling of helplessness that the film honors and provokes amounts to a moral cop-out rather than a genuine confrontation with what the war meant and continues to mean.

There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together.

Documentary filmmaker Chuck Workman has a slick and entertaining way of stitching together old footage and practically no analytical or historical insight at all.

The couple's parents have a bit more personality than the other characters, but on the whole this is strictly by the numbers.

Each set piece is effectively executed, but the characters and their motivations become progressively dimmer and more confused.

Whimsical fantasy tends to work best when its premise is used sparingly, but in this case the fantasy element takes over the story, becoming mechanical and often confused.

The characters are instantly reversible--the bratty kid turns out to be a sweetie pie, the mother just needs to be told off. Only Giamatti, as the cliched businessman husband, is irredeemable.

It's not done in a way that suggests a fully formed talent—"promising juvenilia" is about the most one can say for it.

Though director Ulu Grosbard is as good as he usually is with most of the actors, the story problems tend to stump him too.

Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.

An unholy mess that becomes steadily more incoherent -- morally, dramatically, and conceptually.

The sheer oddness of the New York world constructed for this film--where cops and crooks are literally interchangeable, and Oldman and Danny Aiello are stranded in roles that pick over the leavings of earlier parts--ultimately seems at once too deranged and too mechanical.

This picture is packed with fun, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and elements that summon up memories of The Hustler don't work in its favor.

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

While the filmmakers manage to keep things interesting (sexy, kinky, and ambiguous) much of the time, the self-conscious piety that Frears lavishes on this material places it in an uncertain netherworld that prevents it from ever becoming fully convincing, even as a stylistic exercise.

Infamous has dramaturgical strengths, whether or not it gets the facts right. Jones's performance as Capote tends to be delivered in a monotone, yet thanks to Craig all of their scenes together are potently realized.

Death of a President wants to function as a mindless thriller that eventually makes us think -- and only after the film is over question the form that encouraged us to be mindless. These are incompatible agendas, and in the end neither is fully successful.

Doesn't reflect anyone's love or hatred for anything, just a lot of anxiety about test marketing, which means it takes a nosedive when it goes shopping for an ending.

The action has been transferred from suburbia to New York City, but otherwise the filmmakers stick like glue to the formula of the original: a little boy from a well-to-do family left on his own is threatened by low-life working-class crooks whom he repeatedly foils and tortures, and upscale property values prevail.

By the time [James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their "good taste" begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated "Mandingo" is better equipped to deal with.

Murphy takes on a softer edge than usual this time: the plot recalls a Jeanette MacDonald operetta of the Depression, the mythical African country looks like a Beverly Hills fever dream, and, true to Murphy's idealized black middle-class view of things, everybody gets what he wants without much fuss or sacrifice, and virtually the only poor people in evidence are white.

Kevin Jordan (Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire), a protege of Martin Scorsese, wrote and directed this dull 2005 autobiographical feature; it feels real, but solid performances fail to enliven the characters.

Either you like this movie a lot or you run screaming for the exit; I find it rough going.

For my money, what keeps it bearable is mainly the mugging of the older folks -- not just Jack Black, who steals the show in a part seemingly inspired by John Belushi, but Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow, and cameos by Chevy Chase, Lily Tomlin, and Kevin Kline.

More witty than laugh-out-loud funny.

Not very believable, even in relation to its own premises, but if you were charmed by "Somewhere in Time" and/or Jack Finney's novel "Time and Again," this might charm you as well.

The mechanical possibilities are worked out with precision and relish, but [the director] is careful not to allow the comedy to linger too long in the realm of real feelings. A platitudinous ending restores a safe and sane emotional order.”

Baseball fans might find this marginally absorbing; for anyone else it's as conscientious and stylistically pedestrian as director John Sayles's other films, and a mite overlong to boot.

I'm not sure how much has been gained in the updating.

It's ultimately hamstrung by storytelling that seems both underdeveloped and overdetermined.

This sprawling and ambitious three-part Canadian film traces the spread of AIDS on three continents, but it gets off to a confusing start… By the time the movie returned to Africa, it had lost me despite its talented cast and its noble intentions.

It did give me plenty of jolts and surprises.

The Spielbergian attempt at sweetness--heralded by references in Danny Elfman's score to the Nutcracker Suite--never fully convinces.

Hampered by the kind of overacting that the cast seems to enjoy more than the audience.

While competent, it's too routine to generate much interest. Leigh is effective as always, but has little to chew on; Patric has even less.

This highly uneven comedy by writer-director Adam Brooks might be easier to take if it were less infatuated with its own cuteness.

Unlike the campy excess of Jackson's earlier Dead Alive, this kind of deliberate overkill—which extends to the broad caricatures of the girls' families as well as the girls' feverish fantasy life—ultimately points toward a dearth of ideas rather than a surfeit, though the story remains sufficiently interesting and troubling to hold one's attention.

An irrefutable triumph of engineering, and it entertained and intrigued me through two separate viewings...though as a view of the human condition it's astonishingly and depressingly meager.

The movie does have a certain amount of star power and occasional bursts of inventive mise en scene, which do a good job of diverting us so we don't realize that not much else is going on.

Ridiculous but occasionally fun.

Rick Rosenthal's action comedy is positively dripping with good intentions, and although it has its moments of charm, this hands-across-the-waters gesture rarely gets beyond formula Disney material (how far can you get with humanism when the humans are made out of cardboard?).

Hopelessly inadequate as a reading of Dreiser's great novel, and as usual Stevens seems too preoccupied with the story's monumentality to have much curiosity about its characters.

Harold Pinter's cold and gnomic script seems partly to blame, as well as interfering producer Sam Spiegel; but if you forget that you're supposed to be seeing something meaningful or important, this is pretty watchable.

A Disney musical with an undistinguished score (Alan Menken and Jack Feldman), fair to middling choreography (Kenny Ortega and Peggy Holmes), and clunky direction (Ortega) that still manages to be entertaining in spots because of its story.

Pretty enjoyable as a piece of campy sleaze--especially for the first half hour, before the storytelling starts to dawdle.

Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work quite effectively as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick--or rather, your ice pick).

The movie does a pretty good job with period ambience. But it's a long haul waiting for the hero to keel over.

This film sounds better than it plays; there are too many echoes of "Alphaville" and of the dreamy drift of "Blade Runner." But the style of the opening and closing credits is pretty spiffy.

Brewer knows how to guide his leads through this improbable story, and he kept me interested in spite of everything.

A watchable but not very memorable comedy-drama.

Not a movie that needs to exist, but it passes the time, and at least Hopkins manages to look like Picasso at odd moments.

Hurt's character is so inert and unemotional that some spectators may find it difficult to stay interested in him.

Slight but savory.

Originality and even a certain amount of obscurity are more appealing than formula. This doesn't work, but I was never bored.

Reminded me most of Jean Genet's "Un chant d'amour," with bondage and latex replacing incarceration and cigarettes. This is not to say that it's equally good or poetic, but the eroticizing of a whole universe is no less apparent.

A collection of shots and characters designed to circle the globe rather than to say anything much about either the filmmakers or the audience, a triumph of multinational capital at work rather than of people or ideas.

This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or "Kill Bill"-style wisecracks.

Too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it's aiming for--a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark.

It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own--even the jokes are pretty solemn.

An episodic thriller that certainly has its moments, but eventually peters out into dull formula standbys; Eastwood's Harry seems weary of his own sarcastic witticisms, and the ones here won't make anybody's day.

Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.

It opens promisingly, with a fine sense of the disorientation of a monolingual tourist abroad and in trouble. But instead of things building from there, the energy gradually dissipates, and by the time the mystery is solved, it's difficult to care very much.

One reason why it disappoints is that it comes across as more the work of screenwriter Laura Jones ("An Angel at My Table," "The Portrait of a Lady," "A Thousand Acres"), who's lately been specializing in high-minded literary adaptations, than of Armstrong, who tends to do better and more nuanced work with more intimate and domestic material (e.g., "The Last Days of Chez Nous," "Little Women").

The new version has its share of disturbing moments, but writer James Gunn and director Zack Snyder have stripped away the social satire of the original and put little in its place.

This 1996 cartoon feature, based on Hugo's 1831 Notre Dame de Paris, is surely one of Disney's ugliest and least imaginative efforts. It's especially unattractive in its fast editing and zooms.

Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.

Freeman's God is a mix of Old and New Testament, with a dash of both sexism and sitcom; Carell's Noah is a political fool, but that only proves he's honest and sincere. This is idiotic, but it's so good-natured I didn't mind.

The stylistic discontinuities and pile-driver excesses can be off-putting for an outsider like me, but for fans this may well be part of the appeal.

Alternately mawkish and strident, with lots of fades to white and dog reaction shots, this can be recommended only for its good intentions.

In spirit, if not in letter, it often resembles a gritty Warners crime movie of the 30s, and it held my interest in spite of its excesses.

This exudes trendiness at regular intervals, and otherwise manages to be reasonably charming about Manhattan's melting pot culture, but my general response was still "Wake me when it's over."

Disappointingly conventional though well-made...An OK teen movie, but not a whole lot more.

The bursts of sex and violence that earned this picture an NC-17 rating offer only temporary respite from the encroaching dullness.

In short, it's amusing only if you agree not to think very much about it.

Clint Eastwood resurrects the star system, the Hollywood love story, and middle-aged romance, but despite all his craft and sincerity, he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese can't quite turn Robert James Waller's cardboard best-seller into flesh and bone.

So-so ecological SF thriller from 1974 about superintelligent ants.

Thanks to the performers (including Andie MacDowell and John Turturro), this has a certain amount of charm and warmth, but the period ambience feels both remote and uncertain.

Working with a shapeless script, directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Welcome to Collinwood) can't figure out what they're making. They lunge in several directions, but fail to get around the central problem: most of their actors have little flair for comedy.

I'm far from being a fan of the sport, but the boxing sequences held me and the overall atmosphere appears reasonably authentic.

It seems more like an illustration of his (Kaufman) script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits.

It’s a story that seems made for stage magic–which means that without a stage it’s clearly out of its element.

Brooks has an uncanny talent for making us feel insightful.

On its own modest terms, this romp delivers.

Haven't we seen this already?

The problem with all the time-travel high jinks, involving multiple versions of the major characters (a gimmick that Robert Heinlein handled much better in stories like “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—”), is that in order to make the plot even semiintelligible, writer Bob Gale and director-cowriter Robert Zemeckis have to turn all these characters into strident geeks and make the frenetic action strictly formulaic.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

Fairly strong on period atmospherics, but it mainly adds up to yet another pointless adaptation of a literary standby.

At least the special effects and outer space vistas are more handsome than usual.

The special effects are impressive, but they don’t add up to a movie.

The results are pretty obnoxious and only intermittently funny, but certainly characteristic.

The film gets campier by the minute.

Terminally boring.

As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.

While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread.

Tim Burton's new movie is gorgeous -- shot by shot it may be the most impressive thing he's done.

Seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It's a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed.

Moderately watchable but awfully predictable.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.

The main problem here is the gross inferiority of the new version to the old: compare Tracy's handling of the opening monologue with Martin's and you'll get a fair indication of what's become of commercial filmmaking over the past four decades.

Marek Kanievska (Another Country) directs with relentlessly fancy visuals in a series of opulent southern California settings; Ed Lachman's cinematography is letter perfect as always in its handling of light and color (assisted here by Barbara Ling's flashy production design), but it's a pity to see it wasted on such claptrap.

Teen romance and operetta-style singing replace the horror elements familiar to moviegoers, and director Joel Schumacher obscures any remnants of classy stage spectacle with the same disco overkill he brought to "Batman Forever."

The sensibility is Southern California Witless, and the jokey intertitles that periodically take up half the 'Scope frames ("This is a comedy. Sort of.") are even more smarmy than the characters.

This has its moments, but most of these are engulfed by the overall murk.

Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly has a feel for the material, but he's at the mercy of a pedestrian script by David Arata and producer Adam Fields.

The actors make this fun if you can overlook the ludicrous view of Jeremy Leven's screenplay.

Cutesy and unconvincing parable.

Unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy.

Reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans were for me partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief were somehow being ridiculed.

I wasn't exactly engaged, but this time boredom never took over.

Stupid, vicious, and pretentious, though you may find it worth checking out if you want to experiment with your own nervous system.

Of course the movie's real raison d'etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with.

Although I have no facts to support my impression, this erotic courtroom thriller looks as if it grew out of Madonna seeing Basic Instinct and saying, “I wanna do one of those."

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left.

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.

Even though it stars Albert Finney, this is a picture of no importance, undone mainly by its self-ingratiated cuteness.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

Walter Hill directed this 1989 feature from a pulpy script by Ken Friedman (based on John Godey’s novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome), and its nasty, predictable plot and unpleasant characters aren’t made any more bearable by Hill’s customary smoke, sweat, funk, and neon.

It isn't very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing.

The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids.

The actors do a pretty good job, though not good enough to sustain 133 minutes.

Handsomely mounted and stylishly directed but otherwise rather unpleasant.

Grade-school violence freaks may find a few kicks here, but even they may have trouble coping with this ugly movie’s ending about eight separate times.

The martial arts choreography is neither graceful nor exciting--it's worthy of a video game. Only after cars, trucks, and a motorcycle join the action--easily outclassing all the actors--does the movie take on a modicum of vitality.

Seems intentionally slapdash and stupid, but when one of them referred to Europe as a "country," I wasn't sure if it was meant as a joke or not. Even so, I laughed once or twice.

An intermittently enjoyable bad movie that never knows when to stop.

Gamely running through parodies of TV commercials and shows, not to mention Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Selznick, and Gandhi, the movie proves to be awful by any standards--feeble, corny, and labored in script as well as direction--although the Capracorn of the basic premise occasionally manages to convey a certain sweetness.

Never gets around to explaining how he (Michael Morra) picked up the moniker Rockets Redglare. In fact, the intimacy of this portrait may be a disadvantage.

So lightweight that you're likely to start forgetting it before it's even over.

Oscillates bewilderingly between contrived and insightful, mechanical and sincere, clumsy and graceful.

Not so much a sequel to "The Fugitive" as a lazy spin-off that imitates only what was boring and artificially frenetic about that earlier thriller; the little that kept it interesting.

The film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" without any of its wit or focused energy.

Technically speaking, this feeble effort is the ninth Pink Panther or Inspector Clouseau comedy, but only the third without Peter Sellers. Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) does what he can as Inspector Clouseau Jr. (which isn't much, given the degree of prominence accorded to a hackneyed kidnapping plot).

This is a long way from the inspirations of Airplane!

A so-so romantic comedy.

Adapted from a story by Joe R. Lansdale, this might have squeaked by as a half-hour "Twilight Zone" episode, albeit with jokes about toilets and erections in old age.

Thematically, this has a lot to do with the sexiness of class difference and the hypocrisy of marriage and double standards, although, as often happens in porn, the “dream sequences” by the end make it hard to know what's actually happening in terms of plot. But customers looking for photogenic flesh and passion, with a passing plug for safe sex thrown in, won't have much cause for complaint.

A watchable thriller.

Worst of all, the movie's conventional showbiz finale, brimming with false uplift, implies that the traumas of other mutilated and disillusioned Vietnam veterans can easily be overcome if they write books and turn themselves into celebrities.

Though it's not unlikable, John Singleton's second feature ("Boyz N the Hood" was his first) is an unholy mess in almost every respect.

Oscillating back and forth between insulting its two central characters (Muriel and her dad) and showing they have hidden depths, this movie only shows true tact and understanding when it comes to flattering the audience; everyone on screen is strictly up for grabs.

Tierney and Hackman contribute most to keeping this life-size and funny.

I never thought that a thoughtful director like Gillian Armstrong would get trapped in such Euro-nonsense, but I guess there's a first time for everything.