Ken Tucker

Gloriously filthy, ramshackle, endearing documentary.

This is Chinatown for chowderheads.

Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year's subtlest, yet most exciting, screen performances.

Kidman is stuck in this pomo movie about the making of a TV-show remake. It’s "Being John Malkovich for Morons."

The result is an admirably bumpy ride of a biopic, a rare one that leaves you feeling not safe but bracingly unsettled.

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is huge and scary, moving and funny--another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis, who's done a lot of briskly unsentimental TV work with young people--"Malcolm in the Middle," most notably--knows how to avoid mawk, keeps the squawk to a minimum, and gets wonderful performances out of at least two of the sisterhood, "Gilmore Girls'" Alexis Bledel as the modest Lena, and America Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") as the stubborn Carmen.

One of the wonderful things about Thumbsucker is that, unlike so many movies in which a character changes in order to propel the plot forward, this one stops to follow up on the consequences of those changes.

Its ambition is so great that the production’s occasional melodramatic touches can not only be forgiven, but viewed as having been executed in the spirit of the man himself.

Given a wealth of acting talent and the freedom to improvise its way past the cliches that hobble so many films by and about women, Chantilly Lace ends up a cliche anyway: a manipulative tearjerker.

John Travolta finds no artistic breathing-room in A Love Song for Bobby Long.

Clooney may be a specialist in embattled camaraderie--he helped revive "Ocean's Eleven," after all--but as in that caper remake, there's no depth to these characterizations, and Downey and Clarkson are squandered in a goes-nowhere subplot about their secret marriage.

Closer is marred by some drippy music courtesy of Damien Rice and a small-surprise ending that feels like gimmicky irony. But the film's core idea is compelling.

Tim Curry makes a fine, flashy Long John Silver, and charming newcomer Kevin Bishop is a lively, toothy young Jim Hawkins, but it’s Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat who make Muppet Treasure Island, the Muppets musical adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson, novel a hoot.

It's a film you won't stop thinking about, arguing over, debating, after the lights come up.

Writer-director Walter Hill follows up last year’s nuanced, underrated Wild Bill with this numskull, overwrought shoot-’em-up.

Gunner Palace too often makes the grunts look like mean slackers -- precisely the opposite, one presumes, of what was intended.

May be at once too gimmicky and too sincere. But it still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodóvar’s work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

There are too many musical performances in this movie, even for a country fan such as myself, to keep the city slickers engaged. This bespeaks great faith in the charisma of the stars, who merit it. They also, however, deserved a better script.

Paths of Glory is all about that greatest of all movie subjects: power.

Penn is mostly in "I Am Sam mode" here, doing a lot of shoe-gazing and mumbly-talk, but not without adding an edge of bitter intelligence to his character; he's just too good an actor to merely repeat himself, even when the material encourages him to.

When are we going to get a generation of actors who will finally decline to succumb to The Woody Mystique, and refuse to accept a proffered role without first deciding whether the entire damn project is worthwhile?

Stunning, explosively moving.

As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie.

The terseness of a thriller, the clarity of a documentary, and a mixture of high drama and low humor.

If only Knightley had a co-star equal to her here: The 1995 edition of Colin Firth, come to think of it, would have been perfect.

Begins, at two-hours-plus, is a nonstarter.

The Frighteners is also that rare horror film that actually gets better as it proceeds; this scare machine has a heart and a brain.