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.

Reeves has confidently entered his self-parodic period. You’ll enjoy his wry post-Matrix murmurs and squinty stares.

The time shifts are awkward, and Egoyan displays little of the deftness of characterization he evinced in such movies as "Exotica" (1994) and "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997); the result is a cold scold of a movie.

A pungent delight.

It's simply an astringent action flick that uses the wounded sensitivity of Ethan Hawke and Fishburne's witty hauteur to give the shoot-'em-up scenes some juice.

When superb craftsmanship, discipline, and risk-taking (toning down Diaz and MacLaine; treating Collette as a desirous leading lady) are applied to accessible, even frivolous material, the results can be deeply pleasurable. In Her Shoes isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s the best Saturday-night movie millions of people are going to go to.

As a result, Jarhead is utterly predictable (boys endure tough training; boys encounter another culture and are baffled), studded with first-rate performances.

The most blessedly traditional sort of documentary. It follows the twisty, complicated rise and fall of Enron in steady, chronological order, from the mid-eighties to the present.

One reason the Flipper flick is worse than the TV show: Bland, mannered Paul Crocodile Dundee Hogan plays Sandy’s uncle, Porter Ricks, instead of television’s wonderfully grumpy Brian Keith.

Director Ken Kwapis fills the movie with feeble references to Planet of the Apes and King Kong that don’t amuse adults and sail over the heads of tykes who snicker most at the raspberries Dunston blows at anyone he meets.

Mostly stiff acting and intentionally flat, banal dialogue.

A sci-fi saga that manages to be at once stirring and screwball, gut-busting and gut-wrenching, and more fun than you had at any bigger-budget movie this past summer.

Operates as stealth art: stately, moving, beautifully acted, and urgently subversive to our own status quo.

A film that transcends its obvious timeliness to say some elemental things about personal loyalty and institutional betrayal.

Penn is terrific in his low-key doggedness.

Half-amazing, half-ridiculous, thoroughly exhilarating.

In the best moments of Howl's Moving Castle and in his extraordinary body of work, Miyazaki teaches his viewers more valuable lessons.

The visually stunning Sin City has grit to spare and a thrilling undercurrent of morality.

The most impressive thing about A Very Brady Sequel is the shrewd care that has once again been taken to evoke the look and tone of the endlessly repeated, ultimate ’70s family sitcom.

A dubbed Italian botch starring a lithe Burt Reynolds as a Native American.

Aside from yet another solid performance from Catherine Keener-playing a Harper Lee just preparing to publish "To Kill a Mockingbird," and here to act as Capote's unheeded moral conscience-that's the ONLY reason to see Capote.

Jackson's wonderfully nuanced, witty performance, and a few unexpected plot turns, give Coach Carter a subtext that helps complicate such knee-jerk oversimplifications, redeeming the role with energetic humor and a loose-limbed grace.

A ruthlessly heartbreaking tale of a famous gunslinger (Gregory Peck in a black mustache and a little black hat) grown weary of facing down an increasingly young bunch of challengers to his quick-draw supremacy.

A hapless comedy that already seems about ten years out of date, Be Cool is a curious failure.

Lucas is a brilliant technician but a poor philosopher, and his lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires. (You don’t make anything this big, for this long, without aiming for the planet Masterpiece.)

When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.

Delightful, insightful documentary.

It turns out that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is half goofy-great, and half just a goof.

Murray's performance is at once enormously generous and fiercely, concisely witty.

Periscope is filled with such familiar faces as Bruce Dern and Rip Torn playing squabbling admirals, and Harry Dean Stanton in a tiny role as a grizzled engineer. None of them are used to good effect.

Danes gives a marvelously quiet, poignant performance.

The remarkable thing director Ang Lee has done is to have made a film that remains firmly in the Western genre while never retreating from its portrayal of a tragic love story.

A cool summer thriller whose laughs don't slow down the suspense.

So fizzy it nearly fizzles out.

I'd like to hear from some women about the sole scene I didn't buy--Bello getting angry, then super-turned-on when she learns about her calm Tom's tough-guy origins--but otherwise, A History of Violence is a remarkably convincing examination of heroism, hero worship, and the seductive allure of villainy.