Ken Tucker

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.