Jonathan Rosenbaum

In general, the dogs-as-mirrors theme--the crazy things people do with and in relation to their pets--is what keeps this going, and the laughs are sporadic but genuine.

There's something offensive about the movie's chintzy view of death and the way it periodically flirts with promising conceits (i.e., Goldberg offering her body as a surrogate so that Swayze and Moore can "touch" one another) only to back away from them in as cowardly a manner as possible.

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.

Dog slobber enthusiasts (as well as fans of dog farts) will have a field day. Everyone else will have to settle for a formulaic cop comedy that has Hanks but little else.

DuBowski focuses on religious faith as much as sexual preference, which may be the most interesting aspect of the film.

I can think of only one bit of Tin Cup that's beautiful, imaginative, and different, and it lasts for only a few seconds: a speech delivered by Russo, before her character is transformed into the standard-issue cheerleader, is broken into fragments by jump cuts.

As a well-directed star vehicle with a couple of good action sequences, this is good, effective filmmaking, but I was periodically bored; when Ford and Pitt aren't lighting up the screen nothing much happens.

This is thoughtful nihilist provocation at best.

There's something stirring and gutsy about this evocation of collective ferment -- not to mention timely, in the wake of the Seattle uprising against the World Trade Organization.

An amiable demonstration of how two charismatic actors and a relaxed writer-director (Brad Silberling) can squeeze an enjoyable movie out of practically nothing.

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

Contradictions confound certain aspects of this project--such as the language spoken by Pocahontas (which, in the Hollywood tradition, oscillates between tribal talk and the unaccented chatter of a contemporary Valley girl)--but overall this seems like a reasonable stab at an impossible agenda.

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.

It's a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star).

Pretentious, boring, and consistently uninvolving, this effort by producer Robert Evans and director William Friedkin to make comebacks with an incoherent Joe Eszterhas script simply won't wash.

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.

It's predictable stuff, though with a nice old-fashioned edge.

The general idea is to exploit a certain amount of role reversal, and Reginald Hudlin, who directed "House Party," does a fairly good job of making this fun.

Despite a good deal of witty, bantering dialogue and clever plotting, some interesting moral ambiguity about the relative corruption of a cop (Russell) and a drug dealer (Gibson), and a likable performance by Raul Julia, this film seems overinfected by the kind of southern California narcissism that makes all of the male characters a little too pleased with themselves, with Pfeiffer little more than a beanbag in the little-boy macho games.

The main problem is that Burton operates best on a modest scale; saddled with a blockbuster, he doesn't know how to animate all the dead space.

Thematically the film starts off like “The Believer,” Henry Bean's 2001 drama about an anti-Semitic Jew, and winds up like “Sullivan's Travels” without the comedy.

Mimi Leder directed Michael Schiffer's script, handling some of the action sequences deftly enough to promote the latent idea that people who don't speak English don't deserve to live.

If you treasure Gilliam at his best and take his ideas seriously, you'll probably be infuriated as well as delighted.

As a moral reconsideration of the role of violence in previous Eastwood films, this is strong and sure, and characters who play against genre expectations give the film a provocative aftertaste. The only limitation, really, is that the picture hasn't much dramatic urgency apart from its revisionist context.

About eight minutes of this comedy is devoted to some terrific breakdancing; the rest consists of wall-to-wall product placement and politically incorrect bad-taste comedy.

Tacky in the extreme, this self-congratulatory 1988 film is an exercise in hypocrisy, indulging every form of Christmas exploitation that it pretends to attack, and many of the laughs are forced.

The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else.

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.

Proves that the Disney people can sell just about anything--including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution.

Bernardo Bertolucci's visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time.

It's not terribly interesting on the subject.

The result is somewhat better than a Masterpiece Theatre gloss job, but it's far from the essence of Woolf.

Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

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.

Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

A stiff. I don't know the comic book series, but it could hardly be as lifeless as this leaden adaptation, in which the weapons have more personality than the characters and the nonstop action often feels like no action at all.

A veritable salad of mixed genres and emotional textures, this exciting black-and-white cold war thriller runs more than two hours and never flags for an instant...A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.

More enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.

At times the plot developments in this post-Tarantino story seem so random they suggest automatic writing, but the characters and some of the settings kept me interested.

There's enough whimsy and Capracorn here to choke a horse, and things get even more complicated when the four dead people enter the body of Downey in turn—to help him help them. Fortunately the talents of the actors—especially Downey and Woodard—sometimes make this effective (i.e., funny or moving) in spite of all the goo.

Dopey, violent horror thriller.

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

The film raises many interesting questions about our own responses, but it may finally be too open-ended for its own good.

The ideological reasons for the heroine's project aren't divulged, so I guess we're supposed to be fascinated simply by the fanaticism of her will, doubts and all. I wasn't.

An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson.

The filmmakers aren't exactly cruel, but they focus on compulsion rather than passion, which by implication tends to tarnish the more intellectual and scholarly members of the breed.

What's mainly missing is the sort of conviction and passion that gave El mariachi its charge; one feels at almost every moment that Rodriguez is fulfilling a contract rather than saying something he has to say. There's a lot of panache here, but not much inspiration.

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.

Shot during the March 2003 invasion and the early stages of the American occupation, it tells us more about how the channel decides what to report than we probably know about most American newscasts.

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

This is a good, solid, intelligent drama about the ambiguities of what does and doesn't constitute courage under fire

Brainlessly efficient action thriller.

Without ever posing a serious challenge to the original, the new Nutty Professor is much more respectful of its source and funnier than I'd anticipated.

The last and best of his "Tales of the Four Seasons."

The film has a fresh and imaginative feel for period detail that the talented cast - which also features Gabriel Byrne, Christian Bale, Eric Stoltz, John Neville, and Mary Wickes - obviously benefits from.

The film's oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories (ranging from “poor” and “well-to-do” to “avant-garde” and “vulgar”) is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience.

This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us "The Full Monty," and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart.

Searing drama that uses the police procedural to explore the moral and psychological devastation of the Iraq war for U.S. soldiers (and, incidentally, for Iraqi citizens).

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score.

If you've never seen the lovely Wenders film, maybe you'll be charmed by this low-grade variation, all of whose best qualities--such as the airy crane shots poised over city vistas and freeways--can be traced back to the original; otherwise you might run screaming from the theater.

Part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate.

A piece of cheese without much flavor.

Brooks has an uncanny talent for making us feel insightful.