Kirk Honeycutt

It might even live up to that title: When it ends, you wouldn't mind a bit more, please.

Skateland is every coming-of-age-after-high-school movie you've ever seen with a formulaic plot and well-worn characters.

There are eight individual decisions to be made here, yet Beauvois never humanizes any of his monks. The film instead consumes itself with songs, communal prayers and nightly meals.

Won't likely disappoint fans of men-in-drag comedy but doesn't offer much that's original or funny.

The movie is a mixed bag, with many of the elements fun and intriguing, but since this is also a Michael Bay-produced movie, CG monsters and cartoon bad guys gum up a third act.

Whatever one's view of Christian evangelical beliefs, from strictly a horror-film standpoint the movie needs a better villain.

Easily one of the most dynamic cinematic portraits of that decaying, vibrant, impossible city ever made; it treats the city itself as a character.

The Dilemma is so tone deaf to its themes that it thinks it's a light and slightly rude Vince Vaughn movie. It's not.

Cage supplies energy but no depth in his portrayal of a disillusioned knight. Ditto that for Perlman, who never feels comfortable in the sidekick role so he pretty much goes through the (exaggerated) motions.

Biutiful has a strong, linear narrative drive. Nevertheless, and most of all, it's a gorgeous, melancholy tone poem about love, fatherhood and guilt.

Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's "The Greatest," fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people.

While not the worst in recent 3D films, Gulliver's Travels is more gimmicky than a crackling good yarn.

In the end, this is a smart movie that could have been smarter. The script feels like it was a draft or so away from total clarity and focus. But the energy of the cast and a dive into an unfamiliar world make the movie rather addictive.

Stripped for action without a moment wasted on unnecessary dialogue, exposition or nuances.

Yogi is still smarter than the average bear, but Yogi Bear is much less smart than most of the year's kid-friendly cartoons.

How she (Dunham) made her movie is more impressive or at least unique than the actual story she chooses to tell.

It perhaps started with "The Queen," continued with "Young Victoria" and now achieves the most intimate glimpse inside the royal camp to date with The King's Speech.

Women will love this, and men won't mind the eye candy either, so it looks like this Screen Gems release can't help becoming a hit.

The film starts out as a gentle Hollywood satire, shifts abruptly into a comedy of (bad) manners, turns into a crime story and deviates into a suicide attempt before it reverts to a Hollywood satire with a happy ending. No Hollywood satire should ever have a happy ending.

The film does achieve moments of catharsis, but it can be heavy going.

So like much of this film, the viewer is turned into an observer. You never feel close enough to the action, either in the ring or in the kitchens, living rooms and tough streets where the story takes place. The characters engage you up to a point but never really pull you in.

One ticket buys you cowboys, samurais, gangsters, ninjas, spaghetti Westerns, Hong Kong martial artists, knife throwers and even Fellini-esque circus performers. But like kimchi pasta, some things aren't meant to mix.

Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.

Not hurting matters for foreign and Indian film devotees, the film features two icons of Indian cinema, Madhur Jaffrey and Naseeruddin Shah.

It merely recycles 1987's "Broadcast News" with only a single reference to YouTube.

In retelling the still-astonishing story of the political career of Eliot Spitzer, a shooting star whose spectacular crash might forever obscure his accomplishments, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney has all the ingredients for a potboiler: greed, corruption, sex, power, overweening ambition and jaw-dropping hubris.

Liman outfits the film with spy-thriller packaging worthy of his "The Bourne Identity," so the film probably will attract above-average coin and possibly awards attention.

(Perry) style is too crude and stagy for Shange's transformative evocation of black female life, and his moralizing strikes exactly the wrong notes to express the pain and longing that cries out from her heated poetry.

The movie never overcomes the triteness of its premise.

The movie features a great finish, where three movies' worth of subplots and characters dovetail into a breathtaking climax and final confrontation that is positively soul satisfying.

The final act hits like a gut-punch. Worst fears are confirmed, and the protagonist faces a moral dilemma no father should have to confront. Kormakur and his writers give their protagonist no easy way out.

The film never is less than intriguing, right from its tour de force opening sequence, and often full of insights into why people long for answers, sometimes with great urgency.

There is not a credible moment in this overly calculated melodrama.

A wondrous flight of fancy, a stop-motion-animated treat brimming with imaginative characters, evocative sets, sly humor, inspired songs and a genuine whimsy that seldom finds its way into today's movies.

A fully believable, flesh-and-blood (albeit not human flesh and blood) romance is the beating heart of "Avatar." Cameron has never made a movie just to show off visual pyrotechnics: Every bit of technology in "Avatar" serves the greater purpose of a deeply felt love story.

If sheer cleverness were everything, Robots would be the best computer-animated cartoon yet…Yet, unlike the very best CG animation, Robots doesn't quite connect with the emotions and humor for which one yearns in cartoons.

Might be too realistic for its own good: The film takes perhaps a little too much glee in its abilities to manufacture mayhem. That being said, the ride is extraordinary.

A psychological thriller without bothering much with psychology. Come to think of it, the thrills are pretty much missing, as well.

Da Vinci never rises to the level of a guilty pleasure. Too much guilt. Not enough pleasure.

A muddled and routine murder mystery tricked up with a science fiction gimmick that wouldn't pass muster for a "Twilight Zone" episode. The writing is poor, but the direction is even poorer. This is a film to delete from one's memory bank.

Vin Diesel is out of his element in this lame family comedy.

Singer has crafted a fine film. One just wishes for greater details -- and a different ending.

The period sets, costumes and cinematography all superbly recreate the brutal era, grand illusions and everyday suffering of the Poles under both the Nazis and the Soviets.

Unlike his songs, the film holds something back. It goes deep into a life filled with as much trouble and pain as triumph and accomplishment but never quite gets at the root of who Ray is.

At the heart of the film is a powerful performance by the beautiful and most promising Hao Lei as its tempestuous, complex heroine.

Designed to maximize the visual opportunities for Imax's cameras even as it minimizes the dramatic conflicts that make for a satisfying moviegoing experience.

Sticking to one joke in an unconscionably long film makes for a very stale, witless and repetitive comedy.

What a cast but what a disappointment.

Stalls at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction.

There is nothing we haven't seen here before in terms of chases, intrigue and betrayals, so for all its A-list cast and production values, the film comes off as routine.

The details are what matters, and thanks to a cast of all-star British elders and a mischievous sense of humor, the filmmakers bring those details to vivid life.

The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.

The film is nothing if not provocative.

The vigor and pace is electric, and the movie features three showy performances by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon.

Everything today's young audiences are conditioned to want: incessant noise, jumpy editing, torrential music, shallow, overblown characters and sheer emptiness at its core. Imagine yourself trapped inside a two-hour video game, and you've got the Night Watch experience.

Amusing dark English comedy produces its share of chuckles.

An artistically arresting yet narratively lame and strangely unfocused cartoon aimed at older children and young adults.

Director Jean-Francois Richet shows a career in crime with pulse-pounding moments of pure cinema, then lets you decide what to make of this homicidal sociopath.

A fine dramatic comedy with fresh characters, witty dialogue and a keen interest in how relationships must have developed among frontier folks, tyrannical ranchers, no-nonsense lawmen and -- oh, yes -- the complicated women on that frontier.

This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies.

The film isn't just not funny, it is off-putting.

An entertaining piece of supernatural nonsense whose sheer audacity disarms all (well, nearly all) skepticism.

A "soft" epic, a film touching on childhood fantasies with sturdy, unwavering characters driven to evil or good. More "Harry Potter," in other words, than "Beowulf."

For a man apparently making his first film, Woolard carries the movie like a pro. Cross your fingers that this is no fluke, for this guy could be a real comer.

All of this results in way too much relationship chatter and not nearly enough comedy, romance or even dysfunctional relationships. We want to laugh -- but at what?

Only one of the three episodes of the anthology film Eros delivers on the title's promise.

Director Robert Zemeckis not only deploys 21st century movie technology at its finest to turn the heroic poem into a vibrant, nerve-tingling piece of pop culture, but his film actually makes sense of Beowulf. In Zemeckis' hands, it's an intriguing look at a hero as a flawed human being.

It is truly a mess.

A thoughtful and reflective love story about the impact of time on true love.

The curious thing here is that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor rewrote this long-in-development screenplay. Yet the authors of such smart comedies as "Sideways," "About Schmidt" and "Citizen Ruth" can't move the film away from the world of easy laughs and sitcom jokes into a realm where sexual prejudices and presumptions get examined in a whimsical yet insightful manner.

Beautifully acted and written so its themes are touched upon glancingly rather than with full force.

A somber, often downbeat depiction of human savagery and treachery as well as of human kindness. Writer-director Anthony Minghella has meticulously crafted an intimate epic.

If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of My Sister's Keeper have done.

This remake turns a fondly remembered horror/thriller into a mild and tedious suspense film.

The film, while heartfelt and directed by multiple-Oscar nominee Lasse Hallstrom, is dramatically stillborn.

This is a discouragingly limp movie in which nothing is at stake.

Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.

The film achieves its power through a careful gathering of crucial details, in wordless glances, cruelties of nature and of man and the relentless determination to gain the promised land.

A real audience pleaser, so long as that audience is mentally agile and adult, for it comes at you from odd angles and features three distinct story lines and 10 main characters.

Audiences might enjoy this cinematic sleight of hand, but the key characters are such single-minded, calculating individuals that the real magic would be to find any heart in this tale.

"Phoenix" might go down as the problematic film, full of plot but little fun.

This fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue.

His heart -- and musical soul -- is in the right place, but the film makes you at times uncomfortable with black and Southern stereotypes that may hinder some from fully enjoying an otherwise benign and cheerful tall tale of the Saturday night when rock came to rural Alabama.

Legally bland.

Director Steven Spielberg seems intent on celebrating his entire early career here. Whatever the story there is, a vague journey to return a spectacular archeological find to its rightful home -- an unusual goal of the old grave-robber, you must admit -- gets swamped in a sea of stunts and CGI that are relentless as the scenes and character relationships are charmless.

Arguably Eastwood's most ambitious film since his multi-Oscar winner, "Unforgiven." But it lacks the power and depth of that film's dynamic script by David Webb Peoples.

You do wish Pate and writer Thomas Moffett had gone for more wit given the outlandishness of the melodrama since it would be more fun to laugh at this than take it seriously.

A sprightly musical revue built around Cole Porter songs and a few biographical tidbits culled from his extraordinary life.

A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.

What the film most damagingly lacks though is a sense of mystery and danger.

Indeed a wary viewer must get past the film's infatuation with celebrity culture to enjoy this movie's charms. But charms it has.

A gloriously lead-footed excursion into time travel with all the accoutrements of 1950s science fiction: an absurd plot, cliched characters, corny effects and a race against time to save mankind.

Edward Norton serves as lead actor and producer, but even his star power won't help this misfire reach a wide domestic audience.

"Kings" covers familiar territory but does so with ruthless efficiency, intense performances and a densely packed plot designed to highlight the moral issues that most concern Ayer and Ellroy.

If you're going to tell a wildly implausible tale of fortune hunting and unlikely heroes, you could do worse than National Treasure.

His (Fernando Meirelles) impressionistic, guerilla style of filmmaking works surprisingly well in capturing the hypnotic urgency of le Carre's fiction. And his viewpoint is less British and more Third World.

Perhaps returning to Apocalypse Now will reinvigorate the once brilliant storyteller. Certainly, the images, colors and design still astonish. And let's hope that Apocalypse Now Redux will become the definitive version. For the movie hits home even harder now. [14 May 2001]

Some may find the film overly schematic, but Garcia smartly uses three parallel narratives to probe the extraordinary nature of motherhood.