Lawrence Toppman

Each major character is complex, none more so than Bill. He's almost Shakespearean in scope.

Anyone who saw the Oscar-nominated Mulligan in "An Education" knows what she can do. If you didn't, you're in for the kind of quietly revelatory acting that portends a brilliant career.

It offers razor-sharp editing, first-rate performances, direction that yields maximum emotional effect and a flabby, unconvincing screenplay.

Malcolm Lee's brilliant documentary about American race relations.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet do exactly what’s asked of them as Frank and April Wheeler, who may be ironically named: They spin emotional wheels constantly but get nowhere.

I can safely say I've never seen anything as ridiculous as Live Free or Die Hard. I'm not saying my 10-year-old self didn't enjoy a lot of it.

The performances do shine out through this dramatic miasma.

It's got a satisfyingly brisk rhythm and two appealing performances by Brendan Gleeson and Peter MacDonald as good-natured ex-cons. But despite the brogues of their bosses, the tough-guy atmosphere is pleasantly old-hat. [10 July 1998, p.12E]

Bertino directs at a funereal pace. Speedman remains comatose, though Tyler flickers fitfully to life. The mournful look on her face suggests she's remembering the days when she was given more psychologically complex scripts, such as "Armageddon."

The result is a beautiful painting come to stately, intermittent life.

This movie is made by and for people who don't care about good storytelling.

Its crass good humor makes it an enjoyable, reasonably faithful but over-the-top successor to the original.

Whedon has made a superb template of an action film.

Betty moves into Coen Brothers territory, a land so unreal that horrific behavior wrings laughter from a disbelieving audience.

Is it a bad thing that Disney has commercialized, denatured and inflated the story to make it indistinguishable from any handsome sword-and-sorcery epic? Perhaps not, for it IS handsome on its grand scale.

The result is one of the twistiest thrillers in recent memory.

The dangers in the lives of these Catholic teens are self-made; they spring from small-town boredom and lead to a conclusion that's meant to be emotionally crushing but is only slightly affecting.

Watching Arthur Christmas is like doing your holiday shopping on Dec. 23: fun and frantic, exciting and maddening.

Satrapi and Parronnaud give us clues but no solution. The fun, for those of us who like fairy tales, is in guessing.

Few white directors depict racial interaction in a thoughtful, non-exploitative way, but Sayles has always been one of them.

Whenever the music subsides and the characters speak the Coens' lines, the film turns back into mush.

Statham fans weaned on the adrenaline flowing through "The Transporter" and "Crank" may feel short-changed, but the rest of us can appreciate the unassuming, old-fashioned craftsmanship of The Bank Job, which is based on a true-life heist.

Watching Wedding Crashers is like stuffing yourself with raw cookie dough. It's a guilty pleasure that goes down easily, but you can't help wondering what it would've tasted like if someone had finished the job.

No matter what character Don Cheadle has played in his 23-year career, he's always seemed to be holding something back...Until Talk to Me.

Details matter here more than in most movies. The world needs to know this story, and nobody’s going to tell it again for a long while. Parker put his heart and soul into it, but sometimes the road paved with good intentions doesn’t lead to Hell: It stops at mediocrity.

Worthwhile IMAX look at the ways nations cooperated to build Space Station Destiny, and what they hope to achieve.

Spike Lee's films have been provocative, blunt, thoughtful, misguided, daring, sentimental, funny, honest and silly. But 25th Hour earns the director two new adjectives: irrelevant and tedious.

The Fault in Our Stars beautifully captures the hesitancy, shyness masked by outward confidence, feelings of unworthiness and quiet intensity of teenagers in love.

The movie has entertaining cameos, too, especially one by Holly Robinson Peete. At 23, she played Officer Judy Hoffs on the TV show. At 48, she plays … Officer Judy Hoffs, the oldest undercover cop on Jump Street. Absurd? Of course. But pretty funny, too.

The story has overtones of “On the Waterfront.”

Production values are acceptable in the Klasky Csupo vein. If you know that company, you're prepared for animation that isn't conventionally attractive: flat backgrounds, characters with big heads, pushed-in faces and beanpole limbs.

The problem isn't that Tarantino's in love with death; it's that he's deadly dull. Even "Natural Born Killers" made a stab at social commentary and satire of America?s celebrity-mad media. Kill Bill merely giggles through gore and asks you to smile at its style.

By the end, Wilbur becomes an unusually complicated character: We empathize with his suffering, find his selfishness appalling, enjoy his gloomy wit and frank self-appraisal.

Juuso, who made her film debut at 22 in this movie, is spunky and funny. The two guys play off each other like bickering old pals, and so they are: They and the director have worked together on three movies and a TV show over the last decade.

It's watchable from start to finish, despite lapses in common sense, and it boasts a terrific cast of over-40 actors.

Sandler, whose mop of curls makes him look like a 40-ish Bob Dylan, acts up a satisfying storm. Cheadle remains an appealing island of calm; other cast members deliver the little that's asked of them.

Infamous, which mines almost the exact same ground as "Capote," comes up 300 days late and artistically close to bankruptcy.

North Country resorts to theatrics a judge would squelch after one outburst, as director Niki Caro and writer Michael Seitzman aim for a "Spartacus" feel.

Where Collins' book paid careful attention to detail, Ross pays far too little. Characters never become exhausted or desperate or gaunt; they don't even get chapped lips or broken nails.

Shows the fate of Sicilians who moved to the Italian industrial city of Turin 40-plus years ago, and it suggests that the experience of relocation is universal.

Should appeal to anyone who likes films as mushy and unsurprising as baby food.

This little piggy's gone to market, and he isn't coming back. Not to suggest the sequel lacks heart or an uplifting message. It has both. But they've been subsumed in slapstick clowning and the introduction of characters with no reason to exist, other than to line the shelves of toy stores. [27 Nov 1998, p.6D]

The film’s well-paced and well-acted, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it most of the way. I faltered as projectile followed projectile and explosion topped explosion, yet even then the excitement held up.

It's "Braveheart" without historical significance and "Passion" without spirituality, though it dabbles in both, and it represents as brazen an act of career suicide as I can recall from a star director. If he were a first-timer, he'd never work again.

His (Spielberg) The Adventures of Tintin jettisons character, back story, plot, depth and emotional ties to deliver 100 minutes of beautifully shot mayhem. It's handsome, hectic, heartless and hollow, a shiny Christmas box with nothing but glitter inside.

Scafaria doesn’t solve everyone’s problems or end with a miraculous change of mind or heart. She writes credible situations...and characters in whom we can believe.

I recommend it to anyone who needs proof that people past 60 have dreams, skills and/or sex lives.

Critics starved for thoughtful movies will often mistake the will for the deed. A serious film about an important subject seems like an important film, even if the effort falls far short of the target. So it is with We Need to Talk About Kevin.

I was a little disappointed by the cop-out ending, in which debut director Gil Kenan gives up the film's frightening elements and comforts the audience with comedy and superficial emotion.

It’s a well-crafted, well-paced procedural drama about a monotonous psychopath.

Gibney also made the Oscar-nominated "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," and he gets remarkable access to people you wouldn't expect to talk to him (including U.S. interrogators charged with crimes at Bagram).

A punch-drunk lightweight. Inside the ring, it lands some forceful punches. Outside the ring, it stumbles around, swinging wildly at nothing, until it collapses.

Every time it starts to feel like something we have known, we realize how unlike us these Iranian characters are.

Just as I was starting to think of it as a “motiveless psychos terrorize rich family” movie (a la “The Purge”), it gave me good reasons to watch.

Even if you don’t get the references, you can enjoy the ripely robust acting – especially Russell, Jackson and Leigh – and Tarantino’s storytelling skill. I could have done without the bad-boy excesses, which always seem like the mark of his immaturity, but the rest of the film comes from a mature and capable artist.

The picture feels like an entertaining short story, competently executed at undue length, and that's its origin.

Everything from the book is inserted with wisdom and care, and everything added to pander to kids with short attention spans or adults who need an overtly religious message is unnecessary.

Everyone's entitled to a slump, and this is only the first blah film in five for Guest.

It's a satisfying experience, whatever kind of picture you label it.

Blanchett is riveting.

This film reminds us you can have a miracle only when David slings a stone at Goliath, not when two Goliaths pummel each other with sticks.

A picture that gallops forward as soon as it breaks out of the gate. Anyone with an open mind and curiosity about history might enjoy it.

One of those rare thrillers where the cops aren't fools, villains don't turn stupid at crucial moments, and career assassins seldom miss targets.

It's a disconnected, implausible story that aims for a tone of magic realism and falls short on both counts.

Sometimes you have to praise a movie backwards. In a season of clamorous action pictures, dopey comedies and grisly horrors, The Way Way Back is notable for what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t yank on your heartstrings, though you’ll be touched gently at last.

Turn a potentially unforgettable movie into a broad crowd-pleaser that sustains itself on three acting performances.

Most crucially, we don't learn what brought the four women together; Olivia's so much younger than the others that there's no reason to think they'd ever have befriended her.

A follow-up with as much artistic integrity, complexity, humor and well-designed action as the original.

[Jarmusch's] most accessible film after "Night on Earth," yet it's still elliptical and enigmatic.

Though it starts slowly, it lumbers toward greatness in the last third and restores him [Lucas] briefly to the top of his class.

I can tell you in nine words whether you'll want to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Writer-director Andrew Dominik wants to be Terrence Malick.

It can devote itself entirely to bodily functions or, having established its grossness quotient, take the high road toward satire like its 2004 predecessor, "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle." It fails mainly because it does neither.

After concocting one tense crime at the beginning, the writers can't do any better than to imitate it later.

Overall, Noah represents a respectful take on an old story by filmmakers who pose a pertinent question. The Creator promises never again to wipe humanity off the face of the Earth, signing that covenant with the cheering image of a rainbow. Does that mean he won’t let us wipe ourselves out millennia later, if we’re hell-bent on doing so?

It's as French as a half-smoked Gauloise and, like a half-smoked Gauloise, it stinks.

When was the last time you had to wait until the final sentence of a film to understand all the details? When was the last time you went to a genre movie – or what looked like one in spooky trailers – and realized the director had fulfilled that promise and meditated on his favorite topic? Shutter Island does just that.

It ends with the corniest convention of all: an absurd mano-a-mano between good and evil.

Hanna's a memorable creation, a girl who carries danger with her like a plague.

That's why Forgetting Sarah Marshall, shorter than "Knocked Up" and more focused than "Superbad," tops all other Apatow productions so far.

Green knows how to convey a mood visually and develop tension with his camera. He just doesn't give people enough interesting things to say or know when to shut them up.

Greenwood, whose range has carried him from the lonely widower of "The Sweet Hereafter" to the creepy husband of "Double Jeopardy," gives a star-making performance.

Bolt has the magical quality of great animation, the ability to touch us without the hint of preachiness or manipulation.

This visually engaging, well-acted story held me for an hour as tightly as anything I've seen this year. But as we neared the climax, I realized only a miracle could resolve the contradictions of the tale – and we didn't get one.

A conventionally violent, do-or-die ending on such an unconventional movie.

The surprising thing about Michael Moore's polemic is not one-sidedness, which was a given: It's his failure to find devastating new weapons of mass destruction to aim at Bush's head. The smoking guns he holds up often fire blanks, and the ones that don't are mostly derringers.

Watching the film is also wearying, like assembling a puzzle from a box into which a sadist continually pours new pieces. I was still processing details when the abrupt ending snatched the puzzle away.

Hanks has a good time, romping around with the assurance of a holy fool. He and Roberts seem "actorish," putting on accents and mannerisms, but they're entertaining. Hoffman is something more, a scenery-devouring force of nature irresistible as a cyclone and irreverent as a stand-up comedian at a midnight show.

The best thing about the picture is Harry's new maturity: For the first time, he dominates a picture named for him.

Good idea for a movie about rebellious Asian Americans doesn't fully pan out.

All the actors give performances so low-key they're almost minimalist. That works, except when we're supposed to believe every woman would throw herself at the closed-off Joe.

Johnny Depp has finally won me over to rabid support after "Neverland" and "Pirates of the Caribbean." He gives the most controlled, least mannered performance of his career, staying sweet and rueful while suggesting unseen emotional depths.

As in “Restrepo,” we never have the sense that Junger makes judgments. Near the end, soldiers in their 20s say their bonds with other servicemen run immeasurably deep, and they never expect to have relationships this meaningful with anyone else again.

Everything about the film seems to have been done on the cheap. The music sounds like it came from a high school band.

Martin, who plays Clouseau and wrote the script with Len Blum, has completely mishandled the character.

Nobody smells of sagebrush, campfire coffee, tobacco (smoked or chewed) and saddle soap like Duvall.

If you're tired of false holiday cheer, Lilya 4-Ever will provide a corrective to the spiritual eggnog force-fed to us all season. The climax takes place during Christmas, though one that would make Tiny Tim grateful for his crutch and cold chimney corner.

Ides can't be said to enlighten any but the naive, and it's not likely to shock us into positive political action So what pleasure can we get from this movie? Quite a bit, as it happens.

This documentary makes a terrible kind of sense. It reminds us that something we take for granted, like air, can be sold to us – if we can afford it. And if we can't, what happens then?

Zach Braff, who shot the film near his hometown of South Orange, N.J., directed this drama with subtle flair and wrote a star part that perfectly fit his acting range.

What makes this film appealingly honest are its details, not its grand events.

For much of the film, Jérémie comes off as sullen, then unsettled, then just creepy. Yet at the end, as he struggles to start over, he engages our pity.

This combination of tightly controlled farce and gross-out comedy works unexpectedly well, until the filmmakers lose their nerve at last and settle for cozy homilies. Still, four-fifths of a rarity is about twice as much as studios deliver nowadays.

With its twist, the movie leaps into a fresh realm of fantasy. But director Marc Forster and first-time screenwriter Zach Helm don't know what to do when they get there, and the film's greatest asset almost becomes its undoing.

Superbad simply isn't. It isn't super, as it intersperses crudely funny gags with an equal number of dry spots. It isn't ever truly bad, because even the lame segments pass quickly.

The result is an odd mix of honesty and hokum that pilots a course toward greatness before settling into a somewhat lower orbit.

The filmmakers try to make us sympathize with Barney by surrounding him with even more annoying types.

When "Hedge" clicks on all cylinders, Chuck Jones smiles down from heaven.

This fairy-tale quality gives director Clooney, who's making his debut behind the camera, his stylistic clue. He's in perfect sync with writer Kaufman; they treat even the most "serious" scenes like Monty Python routines.

Solaris is a film where people...often...speak... like... this, and the camera moves slowly across sterile interiors.

It's visually surrealistic, acted with integrity, so brutal in spots that I averted my eyes.

Isn't quite smart enough to untangle one large, insoluble problem at the end.

As a picture that celebrates one of the greatest archetypes in literature while freshening countless familiar details, I doubt it can be bettered.

If you've never heard his voice, this is your chance, and you should take it.

The strong personalities of Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who play typical supportive wives, keep scenes from sagging.

A well-intentioned but overlong Czech drama that comes apart completely in the last 20 minutes?

An endearing, well-acted trifle with lovely intentions.

Weitz has done one remarkable thing in "Company" that doesn't strike you until later: He's given us a functional family that overcomes difficulties with patience and effort.

Though this film doesn't have the novelty value of the first or the complex plotting of the second, it boasts the most spectacular single sequence.

You know the feeling you get when you make a meal of two mildly savory appetizers that don't quite go together, and you leave you wishing you'd eaten one hefty entrée? That's Julie & Julia. Half an hour later, I wanted to watch another movie.

Whedon has more on his mind than he did in the last one. The Avengers seem not just contentious toward each other but weary, sick of their brutal responsibilities.

It's wise, funny, honest right up to its last sadly dishonest scene, doesn't mock us more than we deserve and offers attractive women in various stages of undress.

People talk non-stop at lightning speed, often while walking. The action sequences, underpinned by a loud and soppy symphonic score, actually provide a sense of respite, as Gojira methodically levels buildings and patiently releases streams of fire from his crimson throat.

Beyond the philosophizing, Mean Girls is a standard collection of low comic jokes.

Paul Schrader's movies depict dark nights of the soul, but sometimes you feel like you have to end the dark night with a shower. Auto Focus is such a movie.

Offers an amusing break to the undemanding.

It's handsomely shot, acted with fervor and reasonably subtle in delivering its message:

I don't know if the new movie is Smith's weakest. It's certainly his most disposable, a warmed-over hash of jokes that will have Mewes fans rolling with laughter and the rest of us rolling our eyes in disbelief.

Del Toro gets the ghostly elements right, with red and black flesh-torn spooks wailing warnings to the receptive Edith. But he goes wildly overboard in aiming for atmosphere after the story shifts to the Sharpes’ crumbling English manor.

When Rock of Ages remembers it's supposed to be a cartoon, it's a noisy, sweaty, giddy ball of fun. When it suddenly develops a conscience or tries to process a thought deeper than "I love rock 'n' roll," it trips over its own feet.

A gently spellbinding drama that captures the old-fashioned enchantment of Roald Dahl’s book.

A well-intentioned but obvious, often clumsy picture.

The feel-good movie of a feel-blah movie year, with all the positive qualities and one negative trait that this description implies.

To talk more about the movie's layers is to risk giving away too much. I'll say only that this film confirms Nolan's status as the director whose work I look forward to more than any other.

Its sensibility stays true to Gaiman's style: heroic, wryly funny, but bloodthirsty as great fairy tales can often be.

They've interspersed laugh-out-loud segments with dry, repetitive material.

The film takes place half in English, half in French. The chilly, responsibility-laden world of British society contrasts with the sunny, relaxed quality of life in fare-thee-well France. If these seem like cliches, Ozon and Bernheim exploit them so adroitly that they never become stale.

Director Fede Alvarez (who did the “Evil Dead” remake) masterfully sustains a little more than an hour of shocks. Eventually, though, he resorts to the ideas lazy or unobservant filmmakers employ.

The rest of us can pass this by, unless we're such fans of the actors - Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Peter Krause - that we'd watch them in anything.

What makes the film watchable all the way through (and it is watchable, though never remarkable) is mostly the stunning scenery and the performance of Hopkins. [26 Sep 1997, p.9E]

There's plenty to admire in the performances and atmosphere, but the writer-director needed someone to pull him up short.

By the way, the other thing that keeps Transamerica from being a mainstream movie is its obsession with penises: showing them, talking about them, placing us in bathrooms and trailers when they're in use.

For all the satisfying details in the script, the big picture remains hopelessly and intentionally trite.

The picture brims over with ideas - good ones, silly ones, maudlin ones, witty ones, absurd ones - and they bump up against each other like ingredients in a vast stewpot that never comes to a continuous boil.

Chaplin's pathos was (at its best) touched with irony. Lane's isn't. [19 Jan 1990, p.68]

If you really must see Miami Vice (and you mustn't), buy a ticket to something better, then slip into "Vice" at the 95-minute mark and watch the last third of the movie. No one involved will profit by your curiosity, and you won't miss a thing of importance.

That dragon represents the best and worst things about the film. He’s terrifying yet slightly droll.

The deliberate editing and quirky cinematography (both done by Cahill) sometimes seem at odds with each other but never get in the way of the story's honesty.

Did we need another Spider-Man this quickly? Debatable. But if you wanted a new interpretation – especially one where story and action stay in the right balance – this is it.

The simple, utterly satisfying Premium Rush delivers just what the title promises.

A typical shallow caper film. Just assume the truth is the exact opposite of what's happening.

95 breezy minutes that typify cotton-candy filmmaking.

Will Ferrell strides through Elf like a crazily cheerful wind-up toy: arms swinging, legs stiff, mouth fixed in an impossibly happy grin, eyes wide with wonder. He's the Christmas gift nobody thought to ask for but everybody will want to play with.

This is strictly a picture for the target audience, though it seems to hit that target regularly.

The filmmakers beautifully balance goofy moments with Gothic darkness.

It’s impossible to envision a sequel with pleasure – this kind of lightning wouldn’t strike twice – but the first one could hardly be improved.

It's overwrought and overplotted, but it's plenty of fun.

There’s not much new to The Infiltrator – perhaps nothing, except the setting of the climax – but the vintage stuff is satisfying.

The first two-thirds are classic science fiction, technologically plausible and emotionally resonant. It's only when God enters the picture that things slide downhill.

Strip away [Hugo's] sociopolitical rhetoric, and you're left with a simple, heartfelt story. The film directed by Bille August and written by Rafael Yglesias does just that, rendering the plot handsomely. It's far from miserable, but it's not "Miserables," either. [01 May 1998, p.10E]

If you wanted to, you could see this movie as an allegory about people who love each other but can never connect. Or maybe it’s a warning to parents who turn a blind eye to children’s failings until the family self-destructs.

“Star Wars” movies have been dazzling, infuriating, heartbreaking, silly, witty, convoluted, gripping and overblown. But until Rogue One: A Star Wars story, I don’t think “dull” was the most appropriate adjective.

This isn't a film noir, but it hovers in the shadows of that genre of discontent and disillusionment.

Whitaker’s performance reveals a man who unobtrusively changes white people around him – perhaps without trying or even knowing it – through his demeanor and ability.

Can there be higher praise for a motion picture designed to capture a beloved book with fidelity, thoroughness and affection? Only this: They made it better.

It's the most claustrophobic, airless movie of the year, a menage a quatre among unstable, manipulative, needy people who prey on each other like sharks at a feeding frenzy of the emotions.

Journalists have a saying for someone who neglects or downplays the most important part of a news story: He buried the lead. That's what Paul Haggis does with "In the Valley of Elah," which submerges two important storylines beneath a pointless, unsatisfying whodunit.

Madden has the wisdom to give most of the heavy emotional lifting to Mirren, who continues to shine at the age of 66.

Eisele and Washington lacked faith in their material. So they've made the big debate opponent not USC but Harvard, a more clear-cut epitome of the white world of privilege that has to face the hard truths of racial equality.

Like a palate-cleansing sherbet in place of an entre?. It's mildly flavorful going down, leaves us hungry for something more substantial and fades from memory the moment we've finished it.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

Wan knows how to sustain tension through terror, though he could have abbreviated the flabby middle of the movie.

Writer-director Theodore Witcher fills his debut with jazz-cool atmosphere. He's got a fresh-faced but mature cast: Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Isaiah Washington. But once he's staked out the territory, he falls back into the most conventional kind of storytelling. [14 Mar 1997, p.4E]

At the center of the film lies a moral question, not a literary one: Should Ginsberg abandon the potentially visionary Carr when he turns out to be a liar, an exploiter and an emotional traitor? Should he, in fact, “kill his darling” when Carr commits a heinous act and asks Ginsberg to lie for him?

Both the good and bad remind us that the most special thing about "Skull" is the man wearing the fedora and the rakish grin. He has never worn out his welcome, and this valedictory – it can be nothing else – is a fitting one.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 has the technical polish and competent acting of the four-film series, though less intensity. It contains no surprises and ends with an anticlimax I have heard is faithful to the book, though it doesn’t amount to much onscreen.

The movie is the usual kind of film biography of a respected figure from the distant past - honorable, oversimplified, handsome.

The vigorous, unsubtle acting provides consistent pleasure, once you stop expecting it to seem realistic.

Director John Lee Hancock and screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith spend about a third of the film exploring Travers’ childhood in Australia, and there the film succeeds.

Most of the actors live their roles, and Fassbender (Rochester in the last "Jane Eyre") is superb as the wolflike, undisciplined assassin.

A wicked comedy with just the mildest amount of pathos to season the blend.

The sense of loneliness and disaffection makes its effect. Guédiguian offers no answers, and the hope he supplies is almost surreal.

Defies logic, the laws of physics and almost anyone's willingness to believe in it. But darned if it doesn't also keep us riveted to our seats.

The year's least necessary and most unimaginative remake slogs half-heartedly to its pre-destined conclusion without making a ripple.

Cook has as much depth as a coaster, so it's impossible under any circumstances to imagine Binoche falling in love with him. Her complicated, heartfelt performance is the reason to see the film: When she's around, she pierces the soothing gray nothingness with shafts of sunlight.

Overlong, entertaining, sense-assaulting drama.

Breakfast on Pluto, like its cross-dressing heroine, is appealing yet irritating, fun company at times but just as often a bore, occasionally quite touching yet frequently fey and self-indulgent.

The credits say DiNorscio, who died during filming in 2004, never informed on anyone. But is that such a great thing? If you live in a sewer, is it so terrible to be a rat?

Remains gripping until the final 15 minutes, when a series of sudden, unjustified plot twists leave us shaking our heads.

Anyone familiar with the movies of Julio Medem knows where "Sex and Lucia" is going. Or, rather, knows that it's impossible to know.

The film, though seldom sleepy, is often hollow.

One of those movies that sticks to your mind like a briar to wool slacks. It has no revelations, no high drama, no heartbreaking tragedy. What it does have is bone-deep honesty, and that's enough for once.

Brice stops his story just before it becomes redundant – most filmmakers these days can’t say that – and although I didn’t believe the outrageous next-to-last scene, he caps it with a laugh-out-loud joke.

All performances remain irrelevant in the face of such expensive, explosive combat and destruction, and there the film excels: You will feel blown back into your seat, starting 40 seconds into the story.

Movies can certainly be worse than bad sitcoms, and this is one of them.

Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin.

It's grim, funny in one sequence about shapeshifters, vivid in moments of violent action, nearly devoid of plot twists and marked by long patches where Harry, Ron and Hermione camp in the woods or by the sea or near a frozen lake and ponder What It All Means.

Anton has a sad, gentle detachment that allows him to turn the other cheek literally through a series of slaps.

Guy Pearce isn’t as physically formidable as Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson in Leone’s classics, but he’s just as determined and dangerous.

Writer-director Coppola and her production team have gotten the look of the late 18th century right...But they've gotten almost everything else wrong.

The result owes a little to the 1927 "Metropolis," a little to film noir, a little to early depictions of H.G. Wells' science fiction -- notably the 1936 "Things to Come" -- and a little to lovably far-fetched sci-fi serials.

A diverting and loosely connected series of episodes about the most bizarre screen family of 2004.

A thriller that's frequently implausible but almost always thoughtful. It asks us to rethink the way we see Muslims

You'll depart with memories of a well-crafted study in quiet horror, and with ideas whirling in your head about the nature of evil and what happens to children caught in its grip.

His movies are thrilling and ridiculous in equal measure, and I often laughed with incredulous approval as he wreaked havoc.

The director is strong on setups, and the hunt for the virus is tense. [10 Mar 1995, p.1F]

You'll respect him more as an actor if you see this film – and you should, even if you haven't enjoyed the action movies he's made over two decades.

I predict Northfork will give you food for reflection or a case of the hives. I stopped scratching 20 minutes into the movie, settled into its lulling rhythm and floated away into the Polish brothers' flaky, austere dreamworld.

Though the writing isn't always specific, Williams is. He differentiates between the murderer in "Insomnia," who wants a cop to understand his motives, and Sy, who realizes no one ever could.

Hoffman and Harwood aren't afraid to show us old people who are rude, demanding, unreasonable and foolish, though the final overall mood remains blissful. Hoffman might have more to say as a director, if anyone in Hollywood cares to find out.

It's clumsy revisionism. As storytelling, its simplistic characters and ludicrous situations would embarrass a ninth-grader shooting a short film on a digital phone. Not one of its alleged revelations has the power to surprise.

Heartfelt, if rather repetitive, documentary.

My sentimentality meter never went off, and Smith proved what people have forgotten since his breakthroughs in "Where the Day Takes You" and "Six Degrees of Separation" 13 years ago: He's a serious actor.

The film works best among the beasts. Their training is impeccable, their emotions are palpable, and almost all of their behavior is credible. One "Jaws"-like encounter sends a carnivorous leopard seal after a fleeing canine, and it's as tense as anything I hope to see this spring.

Most of the actors keep an icicle-stiff upper lip except for Winslet, who darts around like a finch with a beak full of sunflower seeds, and Burrows, who exudes a musk of refined sexiness.

If I understand the intentions of writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the film moved me profoundly. I’ll let you come up with your interpretation – or I’ll share mine privately, to avoid spoilers – but it’s a unique look inside a troubled mind.

For all the talk about passion, the main feeling Youth conveys is self-pity.

Ambiguity can enrich a movie, but artists abdicate their responsibilities if they don't take a stance of any kind.

The outcome is alternately unsatisfying, meaningless, contradictory and laughable.

Intermission is like a creme brulee, invigoratingly grainy when you bite into it but sweet and soft underneath. Director John Crowley and writer Mark O'Rowe infuse this Irish crime drama with such adrenaline that you don't realize how lightweight it is until after it's over.

Bits can be extremely funny. I howled at the ranting, mustard-splotched, wiener-waving Michael Moore.

Dahl has directed half a dozen sardonic noir movies, dating back to "Kill Me Again" in 1989, so he should have been the ideal choice for this material. But even he can't make chicken salad from a pile of beaks, bones and claws.

Often powerful, though presented throughout with British understatement.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Don Cheadle dominates Miles Ahead.

Has its own peculiar, loose-knit kind of charm.

The portrait of Elizabeth Sloane grabs your interest, partly due to the presence of Jessica Chastain in the title role.

Bardem delivers the kind of performance the director might have given himself: subdued, thoughtful, wry, sometimes a bit too detached.

This installment substitutes psychological action for physical thrills.

Certainly satisfies our hunger for a light, bright dessert, yet it may leave you hungry for more.

Call it "Talladega Ice," and you can be nearly certain whether or not you want to see it.

Eventually, though, the movie turns into a "Touched By An Angel" knockoff that dares us not to reach for a hankie while we succumb to its comforting message.

The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.

It's packed with such passion, humor, fine acting in small roles - there are no big ones - and vitality in the storytelling that the lesson comes across entertainingly.

It plucks ceaselessly at our heartstrings to play a sad song indeed.

The mountain, grim and unforgiving, remains the star.

There's an extraordinary subplot in Blood Diamond, sandwiched between a main story meant to arouse outrage and a Hollywood-clumsy finale meant to provoke a standing ovation.

The movie is based on the life of California high school teacher Erin Gruwell, played with captivating honesty by Hilary Swank, yet it feels like the usual Hollywood exaggerations.

Balances brains, brawn and heart in ideal proportions. The actors - some first-rate, all enjoyable - never get overshadowed by the special effects, which dazzle us without gory excess.

The wigs, hats and gowns look realistic, gorgeous and utterly right. In a vapid confection like Stage Beauty, perhaps that's what really counts.

The stars have chemistry, which may be all that we can hope for in factory-line fluff. But why stack the deck so clumsily?

Pattison grows on us as he grows on Bella: His weird mannerisms and nervous delivery stop seeming like quirks and acquire an intensity that's hard to resist by the end.

It's gay in the old-fashioned sense, a giddy whirl for the senses, from chilly English drawing rooms to lush Neverland jungle. It's innocent in believing love banishes all ills, even physical ones, and inspires unthinkable heroism.

Jim Broadbent is the wild card in the cast; he screeches and growls his way through Madame Gasket's lines in the best traditions of British drag.

Eastwood has two knacks as a director/producer: He casts smaller roles well, as he did here, and he can establish an atmospheric mood, often an ominous one. But he hasn't much visual style -- for an action star.

At times, the animatronic effects used to create the wolves are too obvious, and the one-by-one kill-off plotline employed in so many horror films gives The Grey a plodding predictability. At nearly two hours, it's also too long.

Can be unbearably moving or annoyingly mawkish, sometimes in the same scene.

16 Blocks is a burger movie, served by an old pro: 76-year-old director Richard Donner, who hasn't done work this interesting since the other Bush was president but who knows his way around a thriller.

Heavy-handed symbolism permeates the picture, down to the leading lady's name.

Larry Clark's documentary-like direction and Harmony Korine's undeviatingly dull screenplay make it possible to believe these useless lumps of flesh exist. [1 Sept 1995, p.3F]

Except for Sanaa Lathan, who sears the screen in a brief appearance, director Carl Franklin and his cast seem to realize they're making a second-tier thriller.

Director Steven Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson argue that everyone deserves the love that makes them happiest, and that these two will remain miserable until they stumble upon each other.

The final drum-off (c'mon, you knew it would come down to that) resembles a combination of music, gymnastics and martial arts, and I don't think I've seen a more pulse-pounding scene this year.

The best movie I've seen about the Revolutionary War.

The film is a saggy, oddly mean-spirited takeoff of "Walk the Line."

Bloom finally comes into his own as a man here, somberly thoughtful and melancholic. The elfin archer of "The Lord of the Rings" and the trivial boy-toy of "Troy" have been forgotten.

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

Except for the irritating Rockwell, the cast suits the characters.

The movie doesn't need to preach a "we're all equal" message. When we watch the boys bond with their new kin over food or music, then see the lines of Palestinians plodding through armed checkpoints to reach jobs or visit Israeli friends, we get the point.

The movie has been shot with love and wisdom, and its implausible premise doesn't get in the way of a sweetness and honesty too rarely seen.

When the movie becomes pure fantasy, it's impossible to swallow. (No landlord rents an apartment to a 12-year-old with no adult in sight.)

Choreographer Hi Hat and director Ian Iqbal Rashid kick the film into high gear every so often with dance sequences, climaxing with a dance-off in Detroit that seems too short.

The arc of the 800-page novel, crammed into 130 minutes, becomes a line as flat as the heart monitor of a dead patient. A story that ought to possess the mad grandeur of an opera acquires the tedious regularity of soap opera.

Where the musical falls short is – well, music. Hooper's quest for realism leads singers to sob, choke off sentences or drop into inaudible whispers during grand melodies. A musical ought to convey emotions too large for speech: sorrow, joy, love that can't be expressed in ordinary ways. Turning songs into vocalized dramatic monologues misses the point.

Gripping, improbable plot marked by exciting sequences of action.

I can't help but feel that a funny movie was waiting to be unearthed amid all this self-congratulation and juvenile prankishness.

Watching them, you realize how far computers still have to go in accurately depicting the play of muscles as beasts run, crouch and leap. Though Annaud doesn't cut to them for cute reaction shots, as weak directors do, the tigers show near-human fears and affections.

A brazen title card declares this " true story." (Wow, not even "based on.") However many facts may be accurate, the movie feels contrived, with climax piled upon climax.

Stallone doesn't pander to audiences with unearned sentiment. He believes in his story, in the inspirational element that has sent thousands of folks running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art over 30 years.

A film that dares to be smart, reasonably complicated and scary while swashing its buckles.

What surprises us most is the picture's topicality, and not just because terrorists crashed a plane into the Pentagon three years ago.

Plusses and minuses work out about evenly, if you compare the sequel to "Sorcerer's Stone." The three young leads act with more assurance; Radcliffe emerges as a leader, rather than one leg of a triangle. (Too bad he no longer expects to make all seven of the proposed pictures.)

In the end, your reaction to "Hour" may depend on your feelings about humanity's collective common sense.

Bogdanovich adds touches to appeal to serious film fans.

I longed for something - anything - unexpected to occur. What I wouldn't have given for Wilson, the "Cast Away" volleyball, to float past with his bloody "face" print grinning at the pair!

The honesty outweighs the hokiness by a fair margin.

The three leads all played these characters over multiple seasons on the TV show; they're comfortable in these skins, and they show that. (Confusingly, all three appeared in "City of God" under other characters' names.)

The reason to see the movie is Field.

Has its heart in the right place and its head shoved well down into a box of clichés.

It's different from the usual fare in one obvious way -- most of the cast are African Americans -- and, more importantly, in its willingness to leave some problems unsolved and volatile or unhappy people unchanged.

The real surprise is not that the high-strung Key and grounded Peele have rapport – their sketches demonstrate that – but that it can be used to anchor a full-length comedy.

It's as pitiless and brutal as any of their pictures and funnier than any except "Raising Arizona."

Another surefire sports biography from Disney.

The movie gives actors many chances to shine, and they do. But I went away most impressed with Verbinski.

Writer-director Ben Younger has sketched the foreground of this picture but never gets around to filling in the details.

Director Chris Robinson moves his camera aimlessly, cutting in and out of speeches as if he were just as bored as I.

If we had a story we could believe, we'd be in stitches.

Portman doesn't catch fire until the second half, then heaves herself into emotional action; this suits her initially passive, mostly unthinking character. Weaving, who acts entirely with his voice, is V's ideal embodiment: witty, rueful, pitiless, visionary and mad.

The balance between human interaction and mechanical mayhem works well until the end, when flying suits and exploding bodies fill the screen.