Ken Tucker

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

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.

A pungent delight.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Half-amazing, half-ridiculous, thoroughly exhilarating.

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

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

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

Stunning, explosively moving.

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

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.

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.

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

He’s become such an obvious parody of himself that Frankenheimer has permitted Kilmer to do a wicked mid-movie impersonation of Brando’s character; it’s funny, but it also gives The Island of Dr. Moreau an extra layer of camp it certainly didn’t need.

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

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.

Gloriously filthy, ramshackle, endearing documentary.