Lawrence Toppman

Amiable bundle of broad, easy laughs rather than bitingly fierce satire.

If you used this guy's umbilical cord for fishing line, you could land a world-record marlin.

Cohen and his gang are smart enough to know when to quit. Like a loud but amusing guest at a dinner party, Borat collects his coat and goes home just as his hosts are starting to fidget.

Bogdanovich adds touches to appeal to serious film fans.

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 loose, slightly lazy sequel is both funnier than the original and more bizarre.

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

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

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.

To my detached eye, this slender biography suggests that Curtis went from a faintly interested glam-rock wannabe of 16 to a mildly talented performer to a quietly glum fellow of 23 whose frustrations drove him to suicide.

One of those rare action comedies that actually delivers action and comedy.

The main message of this drama is driven home with emotional hammer blows.

The film whirls by in a satisfying torrent of chases, escapes and discoveries.

Feuerzeig leaves a lot of territory unexplored. Why did people overlook his suffering and bizarre behavior for so long? Were they cold-hearted profiteers, onlookers enjoying a freak show or honestly ignorant of his troubles? Are there links between Johnston's creativity and madness?

On the most basic level, Cars is an old-fashioned fable about an egotistical, talented loner who learns humility and redeems himself by helping unfortunates.

If you want my rock-solid statement on whether The Fountain is a masterpiece or a muddle, check with me in 2026.

After an hour, The Pianist stops being the Holocaust movie and becomes a Holocaust movie.

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

It warms the heart in the hands of such sensitive storytellers.

It's fascinating to watch others sweat, suffer and triumph in the documentary Dust to Glory, which chronicles the longest nonstop, point-to-point race on our planet.

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

How bad, really, could it be? I couldn't have guessed.

He presides over the picture with such assurance that even longtime Denzel-watchers gape.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

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

If it were 10 minutes shorter, it would've been just the right length and almost wholly honest.

If serious intent led inevitably to greatness, The Good Shepherd would be a masterpiece. It turtles forward for 160 minutes with unrelenting, humorless solemnity, as if everyone involved were unaware that it has arrived three decades too late to matter.

Once again, something that might have been a faintly amusing sketch on "Saturday Night Live" -- maybe even a tolerable 30-minute short, had the writing been more clever -- gets tortured into the shape of a feature film.