Lawrence Toppman

The leads blend as seamlessly as any young-old character coupling I've seen. The prosthetically altered Gordon-Levitt, unrecognizable at first, really resembles Willis.

Rodriguez' inner peace wins us over. He seems to have enjoyed recording music, fathering kids, cleaning houses, playing sold-out gigs and simply strumming a guitar in his kitchen. Searching for Sugar Man reminds us that a wise man knows lasting riches are never the result of record sales.

Anderson tells this story slowly, inexorably, with a sense of control I've never felt from him before. This is the least violent of his five dramas, the first where nobody dies. It's also the bleakest.

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.

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

It's freakishly funny, suddenly tender, gleefully macabre, genuinely scary, and full of a moral – fear turns weak people into bullies – which is dosed out so gently that it never tastes like medicine.

The worst thing about the picture is that the people involved all seem to realize it's generic.

I rarely pinpoint the exact moment when a promising action movie turns into a pulpy, asinine mess, but I can do that with Total Recall.

It's an approachable film that handles a serious topic deftly and offers a fresh take on a familiar subject.

Perhaps Zeitlin isn't really making an issue of class distinctions. Maybe he's just suggesting that we don't know these people very well, and our lives would be richer if we did.

Director Christopher Nolan, who wrote the script with brother Jonathan, gets so many of the big things right that I wished they had taken more time with the little ones.

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 film has two active virtues, too. It shows human beings in all their pitiable, noble, stupid or sensitive modes of action, and it reminds us there's always time to fall in love, if only for a few days.

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.

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.

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.

The film's filled with inconsequential scenes and supporting characters who add useless atmosphere or by-the-book diversity.

It's a brisk but restful breeze blowing through our heads, requiring no thought whatsoever – in fact, thoughts are an impediment to enjoying it – and touching us just a bit in unexpected ways.

So Depp summons every type of behavior Burton requires: heroism, zaniness, longing, wit, ferocity, sexuality, icy resolve. Had they stuck to one or two of these, we might have had a terrific film.

Whedon has made a superb template of an action film.

Cedar is mostly interested in the father-son dynamics, and he cast excellent actors. Lewensohn, a famous Israeli theatrical director, makes his film acting debut, while the veteran Ashkenazi ("Late Wedding") handles his low-key role with bearlike grace.

The film's main virtue, a large virtue indeed, is that it does not give anything away before its shockingly apt time.

It's hampered further by a piece of star miscasting unmatched in recent memory: Julia Roberts' archly evil queen remains as jaw-droppingly dull as her costumes are jaw-droppingly gaudy.

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.

Every decade or so, someone proves animation can tell a serious adult story.

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.

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.

Did anybody expect it to be a metaphor for modern America?

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

Crash. Kick. Stab. Punch. Talk (briefly). Smash. Chase. Screech. Shoot. Mumble. That's the wearying pattern of Safe House. Had "think" been an action verb, the movie might have risen above the knee-jerk excitement of the second-tier, "Bourne"-style spy thriller. But it never does.

Most documentaries put us inside people's heads. The dazzling, experimental Pina puts us inside people's feet.

In rare cases – and The Woman in Black is one of them – a story may be more atmospheric when less is left to the imagination.

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.

Most movies about people passing themselves off as the opposite sex can't sustain the illusion, but "Nobbs" does.

He (Horn) gets so deeply into the whirling mind of Oskar Schell, dominating every scene he's in – which is almost every scene, period – that he lifts the movie out of the realm of "Forrest Gump"-like emotional manipulation.

The film requires close attention, especially while it jumps back and forth in time for the first half-hour, but all the pieces lock into place tightly by the end.

Talkies may have killed silent movies, the way TV serials and soap operas wiped out radio dramas. But there are stories most effectively told in the old style, and The Artist is proof.

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.

For certain movies, the adjectives "formulaic" and "predictable" are complimentary. War Horse is one of them.

This film has two of Fincher's happiest trademarks: It's full of information and stretches over a remarkably long time (165 minutes), yet it's neither confusing nor overextended.

It's funny, in a can't-look-away-from-the-train-wreck way, and it's brutally honest. But it's not pretty.

At bottom, all Payne's films make us smile, often ruefully but hopefully.

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

So what's the motivation for the earnest, handsome, well-acted, unenlightening, workaday J. Edgar in 2011?

Anonymous is fun – if you take the anti-Shakespearean tale as events set in an unreal, alternate universe.

The Fords give us old-fashioned predators: Zombies shuffle slowly, silently, patiently forward, as implacably destructive as Time itself. Meanwhile, the Fords play off our memories from books, TV news and other movies.

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.

The filmmakers do everything they can to balance levity and leavening. The subject says "drama," and the three supporting women deliver well-shaded, understated performances. (Howard shows us how weakness can be just as destructive as malice.)

It's tense, strangely funny in a lot of spots and – if you grew up loving old-fashioned, seat-of-the-pants baseball, as I did – the most depressing movie of the year.

Creature is refreshingly and intentionally silly, in an era when horror has devolved mostly into torture porn and high-tech, computer-generated assaults on our senses.

Nobody puts the "angst" in "gangster" like a European director. When the director's a Dane, you can count on gloomy, chilly visuals and deliberate pacing. And when the director is Nicolas Winding Refn, who made the "Pusher" series in his native country and "Bronson" in England, you can expect intense, often brutal spurts of violence.

Though the movie short-changes us emotionally, it delivers a credible, disheartening picture of greed and panic.

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

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.

The two actors are at their best when Emma and Dexter get emotionally naked. It's mildly enjoyable to listen to the self-deprecating banter people use to conceal anxieties, but we connect to them most deeply when they bare their souls.

Writer Steve Kloves, who adapted all of J.K. Rowling's novels except "Order of the Phoenix" over the last 11 years, neither wastes a word nor leaves out any essentials.

Markowitz, Daley and Goldstein sounds like a New York firm that delivers financial advice, but they're asking you to invest only $9 of your cash and 100 minutes of your time. They have written the funniest movie I've seen this year in Horrible Bosses.

Inside this film, a poignant and personal story is struggling to get out. But it's couched in such awkward sentiments that it can't emerge.

The story might have worked as well without that stick-in-the-craw coincidence, which was inserted to maximize the horrors of Nawal's past.

The picture doesn't inspire or reward high expectations, but it raises smiles.

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

The film has a huge heart, and it's in the right place.

Like all his movies except "Badlands," a taut 1973 debut, "Tree" looks gorgeous, has philosophic ambitions, meanders wherever Malick's imagination takes him and stays dramatically inert.

A hymn to that beautiful city, is among his least consequential efforts. It's attractive and easy to slip into, but he didn't put enough thought into the design, and it soon falls apart.

Super 8 takes its place among the best B-grade science fiction movies of this generation by copying the best of the past 50 years.

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

I have never seen elementary schoolers more passionate about education than the ones I met at a school in rural Kenya, not far from the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

What seemed laugh-out-loud fresh in its unpredictable rudeness (at least intermittently) is now chuckle-to-yourself funny with about the same regularity.

This installment, which is subtitled "Give Us Your Money, Sheep," really isn't a Pirates of the Caribbean movie at all.

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

His (Branagh) Thor has more complex characters than the usual "Transformers"-style melee; though that may not be what the readers of Marvel comics now want, it satisfied me most of the time.

I can't recall the last film that so wholly, honestly and movingly explained what it means to be a Christian.

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

Sitting through Source Code is like watching a chef coax a beautiful soufflé into perfect shape for 80 minutes, then drop a bowling ball on it.

The biggest irony of this project is that it was made by a company that calls itself Original Film but has produced perhaps the least original movie of the year so far.

So despite fine acting and swift pacing and well-managed effects, it falls apart.

Fans of their grossest stuff needn't fear: The Farrellys are still the guys who put the last three letters in "crass," and their potty humor was too extreme for me once or twice.

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

He (Chomet) keeps us waiting for a narrative payoff that will equal that visual splendor, and he makes us think that many small inspired touches will add up to something memorable. But when he opens his hand at last, there's nothing in it.

An honest, basic story set forth with brevity, skill, care and intelligence.

You may not realize the imprint it has left until its last season comes to a close.

Mitchell keeps the direction simple and well-behaved, usually just pointing the camera at the speaker, but you can see why this topic appealed to him.

After 30 minutes, I wondered why I was watching a drama about a quarrelsome couple who seemed so obviously wrong for each other. After 60 minutes, I knew. After 90 minutes, I cared. By the end, I was riveted.

Polished, thoughtful and touching.

Those of us who admire Charles Portis' novel have waited 40 years for a screen version that's as literal as possible – and the Coen brothers just about deliver it.

Like all his (Aronofsky) films, it's lurid, visually stimulating, thoughtful, absurd in spots, well-cast and unrelentingly intense.

A movie's in trouble when neither the hero nor the villain has charisma, and Clu is a dull dog.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway exert considerable powers of hangdog charm and fierce independence, trying to give firm shape to the saggy script. But if you want to watch these two struggle through an up-and-down screen relationship, rent "Brokeback Mountain."

The Critic's Code of Honor forbids me from explaining in detail why the storytelling is so inept, because I'd have to spoil the silly surprises. So I'll say only this: You can interpret the climax two ways, and both will probably infuriate you.

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.

The acting is so exact and the timing so crisp that it delivers precisely the satisfaction you'd anticipate.

The writer-director waited until he had the clout, budget and prestige to attract a top-flight cast, then turned Colored Girls into a movie with a little less darkness but plenty of heart and guts.

Damon, trapped in an inert character, shows little inner turmoil.

Pitt coasts through the movie in second gear. I have no idea what he's trying to accomplish with his tight-lipped, low-key performance; maybe he's angling to replace Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible IV."

Puts a fun, frothy spin on the 1960s TV show before sinking back into the mundane.

You can get all of this free on television any week, so why pay for it?

I spent The Kids are All Right wondering whether director Lisa Cholodenko was affectionate toward her self-absorbed characters or gently mocking them. In the end, I thought she was both and liked the film more.

Writer-director Caroline Link (who did the Oscar-nominated "Beyond Silence") adapted Stefanie Zweig's expatriate memoir gracefully, languidly and with full understanding of its heroine.

This film might have been daringly funny 10 years ago, even with its broadest elements intact. Now it's comfortable as old slippers and unthreatening as a sleeping kitten.

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

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

Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.

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

It’s the first Pixar effort that feels less like a creative outpouring and more like an obligation met to satisfy a distribution schedule.

The movie seemed a disappointment at first, until I decided I was missing the point: It’s actually a drama about the way people treat a celebrity – with fear or reverence, as a source of income or reflected glory– and the way their own personalities change around him, while his stays the same. In that way, the film’s a small triumph.

Reflective, deliberate, building gradually to a climax that left me touched.

Proves two things irrefutably. First, Fishburne doesn't get enough work that tests his acting abilities… Second, Luke's breakout performance in "Fisher" was no fluke.

The result is two-tiered humor, broad enough to appeal to anybody but overlaid with jokes that will be funnier if you know the show.

He's (Soderbergh) among the few directors working today who makes me wonder what he'll do next - and draws me into the movie house, whatever it may be.

I realize fantasy-based action movies aren't supposed to be as complex as William Gibson's novels. But do they have to be this simple-minded?

Pearce, who's in every scene except the Sammy flashbacks, dominates the picture through his feral performance.

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

Totally underwhelming.

Like "Shattered Glass," the other picture Billy Ray directed, Breach probes a guilty mind and reveals how he baffled people. We get a Hitchcock-like pleasure from knowing the protagonist is guilty and watching other shocked characters realize his wickedness.

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.

Easy to like.

It's an uncoordinated, flailing hodgepodge of music videos, chases, crashes and moronic plot twists.

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.

The film seems like a loose and uncredited updating of "The Great Man Votes," a more serious 1939 entry.

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.

The extraordinary canine performances in Shaggy Dog and "Eight Below" lead me to wonder whether Disney could dispense with two-legged creatures altogether, until further notice.

Director Vondie Curtis-Hall has managed to top (or should I say "bottom"?) his last theatrical release, Mariah Carey's "Glitter," with a movie that offers not one praiseworthy moment: not a scene, not a performance, not a technical achievement, not even a line of dialogue.

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

An animated film that challenges preconceptions about the genre and foregoes the usual romance/adventure structure.

Begins and ends quietly, like stirrings of thunder from a distant storm. In between comes a tragedy that rolls over us like a compact hurricane.

Parker's afraid that we'll be bored by the language alone, so he throws in absurdities.

The result is a film that has "Masterpiece Theatre" production values but not an ounce of dust upon it.

The performances do shine out through this dramatic miasma.

A spruced-up version has been re-released after 22 years, and the addition of 43 minutes means the story really has room to breathe.

For all the story's bland familiarity, it has winning moments. Allen's no actor, but he projects a likeable personality.

You can approach it as a surreal story -- you'd have to, to find value in it -- but happy chuckles are miles away from the point.

The kids provide all the vitality, but even they've been muffled by the director.

We waited 10 years for a sequel to the movie version of "The X-Files" – and the best Chris Carter could do is The X-Files: I Want to Believe?

Epps emerges mostly unscathed, and Dutton gives an excellent performance; he's as able before the camera as he is inept behind it.

Control Room ends by acknowledging that independence, accuracy and even truth itself may be illusory.

The movie hasn’t one character or sequence more memorable than the next. It’s as violent, humorless and brutally efficient as a Stalinist purge, a juggernaut of slaughter and smashing that stuns the senses and leaves nothing behind in the memory.

It's among the most inventive, screwily funny and consistently surprising movies I've seen in years.

Executive Decision, a film as generic as its title, follows its 'subdue the terrorists' template by the numbers - but they're numbers that can work over and over, when handled as competently as they are here by director Stuart Baird. [15 Mar 1996, p.8E]

Aspires to rise above the conventional drugs-and-action genre and succeeds about half the time.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

May wrestle with big ideas, but it does so through a succession of small emotional moments.

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

If you see Hot Fuzz, you'll never again watch a Michael Bay film without howling with disrespectful laughter.

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.

Bad actors, bad music and bad plot make it a hellish bummer.

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

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

Dragonheart is all dragon, no heart. [31 May 1996, p.3E]

It never commits the sin of sentimentalizing old age, as Hollywood usually does when it deigns to admit that people over 55 exist.

See not only the original "Detective" but the Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters film "Pennies From Heaven." If you insist on giving Downey and company $8 instead, you'll be getting wooden nickels from Hell.

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.

It makes "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "12:08 East of Bucharest," the last glum Romanian movies about life under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, seem merry.

MacDowell gives an uneven performance, as she often does, but Strathairn is ideally cast as the conflicted husband.

Blethyn glides through the proceedings elegantly, a comic swan among ducks.

Allen, rejuvenated by foreign settings, makes us appreciate posh parts of England as he always did Manhattan. (Credit cinematographer Remi Adefarasin for showing us how seductive upper-crust London can be.)

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.

On their accounts (Williams/Collette), The Night Listener is compelling viewing-but on their accounts only.

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 picture sufficiently shallow that you'll discover everything that lies beneath it well before the end.

A director needs to know how to pace the tale, where to place the camera, how to draw out a shy actor or get out of the way of a strong one. Those skills are rarer than you'd think. Sarah Polley, who never wrote or directed a feature film before Away From Her, has them all.

Souza and Shelton throw in all kinds of ridiculous devices they learned in second-year screenwriting class.

OK, so no plot, really.

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

Brilliantly embodied by Jamie Foxx in this unflinching, entertaining biography.

An experience as tender and troubling as any you're likely to get - or not likely, if this subject puts you off.

It pays homage to the genre's most glorious days.

When we're outside Frank's body, Osmosis Jones drags. When we're inside him, it zooms.

You can also see Sylvia without realizing she could be witty and bemused, qualities apparent in her posthumously published novel, "The Bell Jar." This book, which spoke to sensitive girls of the 1960s like few others, is mentioned once in passing in the film. We never see her writing it or learn what it means to her.

You won't see a single joke here you haven't encountered before, all in funnier forms.

I never did sort out the gangsters fighting for control of a 19th-century town, nor did I figure out exactly what happened to the main henchman. But I was rarely bored.

Bride has atmosphere and charm, but the exotic flavors have often been toned down to avoid complaints.

Audrey Wells's script and Turteltaub's presentation ring true just often enough to prevent the comedy from descending forever into Cutesy-Wutesy Hell.

Deals with emotional concerns for half an hour. Then it turns into a mindless bloodfest, where it's impossible to care which characters end on the zombie gore-gasbord.

One of many small reasons to like The Recruit is that it pays homage to Kurt Vonnegut, a forgotten old lion of literature.

Many shallower movies these days seem too long, but this one is egregiously short.

Trying to make sense of this shaggy dog story is like climbing a mountain with glass-smooth sides and quarter-inch toeholds.

If you get past the preposterous hypothesis at the start of Return to Me, you'll find a passably pleasant, utterly bland romantic comedy without a surprise to its 110 minutes.

Howard has never been so grown-up in his handling of tough themes or so inventive in depicting states of mind. Goldsman has never been so down-to-earth or created so touching a character.

It has the charm, irony and saucy wit of the original, plus two supporting characters -- a suave, egocentric feline and a cheerfully conniving fairy godmother -- who are funnier than anyone in "Shrek."

By riffing off two iconic American narratives of the last 35 years, "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos," it has changed the template for animation, making a timely film that still deals with timeless children's themes.

I groaned at cliches and grinned at jokes in roughly equal measure.

Corpse Bride had me at the maggot.

Won't startle or surprise you but will satisfy your need to see good actors at work.

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.

I think Garland and Boyle just want to make our flesh creep by showing someone else's flesh decaying. If that's their aim, they achieved it.

The film works best as an extended "Twilight Zone" episode.

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.

This is the first real family comedy I've seen in a long time: one honest enough to satisfy teens, wryly funny enough for adults and zany enough for little kids.

Someone in most Farrelly movies deserves the Good Sport Award; here it's split between Meryl Streep, who befriends Walt in a long cameo as herself, and Eva Mendes, who plays Walt's galpal in a way that mocks perceptions of her as a well-endowed ninny. Cher should get a share of this prize.

You could dismiss it, as I do, as an impenetrable and insufferable ball of pseudo-philosophic twaddle.

Delivers the kind of vengeance fantasy women unhappy with their husbands may want: Vicarious satisfaction, however clumsily delivered, is better than no satisfaction at all. Just be sure to stop by the lobotomy clinic en route to the theater.

The grandest presence here is Eastwood. His directing, like his acting, is minimal: unhurried, spare, unforced, rather somber.

It paints its world in pastels, but the subject cries out for vivid colors.

You may enjoy "Quest for Camelot" if you have no sense of animation history, no sense of movie musical history and no sense of mythical history, especially the Arthurian legend. Otherwise, you'll wish you could drink yourself under the Round Table. [15 May 1998, p.9E]

It's slickly executed, handsomely acted for the most part and utterly easy to forget.

Bullock and Reeves have an unusual kind of charisma, one that works best when they're apart. Though the filmmakers sometimes put them in the same frame for visual ease, they mostly occupy different times.

Over the course of 108 minutes, The Royal Tenenbaums drops downward on the humor scale from hilarious to funny to quirky to pretentiously bizarre to chaotic.

The Truth About Charlie...is that this "Charade" remake is a lumpen bore.

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

The story was primitive, the characters unmemorable, the direction unsophisticated, the writing cliched, the photography and music drab, the pacing uneven, the acting varying from adroitly funny to exaggerated.

What a riveting movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have been! And what a rickety mess it turned out to be when the people responsible lost faith in the origin of the material!

Writer-director Lisa Krueger bends over backward to make everyone happy.

A crackling rendition of Dan Brown's novel, siphoning off unneeded fat and fancy and leaving us with a streamlined train of a picture that never stops moving.

It's well-shot and well-edited by Hollywood standards, though special effects don't reach the top Hollywood level. The stars have their hearts in their work: Cameron and Johnson don't have great depth but give their all. Currie makes a subtle villain.

The strongest parts of the film aren't these money shots, but the buildup to the gunplay.

On the positive side, the four Worm Guys haven't lost their squiggly charm, and Rip Torn is always welcome as MIB mastermind Zed. On the minus side, you get two Johnny Knoxvilles, one of them a tiny head that protrudes from the big one's shoulder.

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

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

Visually compelling, relentlessly loud and so shallow you need just a fragment of your brain to follow it.

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.

Could pass for any serial killer movie except for some pertinent philosophizing about the nature of evil and the operations of the soul.

The title comes from the memoir by Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It applies equally to Winterbottom, who has made the rarest movie among this summer's releases: a taut police procedural that examines all sides of an issue and forces us to re-think our own.

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

Seamless, funny and startling. Anybody who thinks Keaton always does tiny variations on the same sardonic character - making him a bit more tight-lipped, say, when donning a Batsuit - will be surprised by the variety of his skills here. [19 July 1996, p.3E]

Even if we leave aside the obvious time travel paradoxes, we can have a good horse laugh at the rest of the plot's inanities.

People's eyes still look as glassy and dull as a taxidermized possum's. But if you're going to Beowulf to experience the sweeping passions that only real eyes can convey, you're missing the point.

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.

The acting is solid.

Molly Shannon's peachy-keen attitude and spunky patience win us over to the side of Mary Katherine Gallagher.

Kids might get a charge out of the mayhem. I got the vapors.

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.

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.

A sweet, innocent look at an impossibly idealized high school world.

Miller gives the film's one genuine, focused, committed performance, and you can see why she might even reform a rake of Casanova's standing.

Predictable but agreeable time-waster.

Attaching Chris Rock to I Think I Love My Wife is like chaining a Kentucky Derby winner to the merry-go-round in a petting zoo. His humor is hobbled, his personality dulled, his energy depleted. Who's responsible for this lapse in judgment? Chris Rock.

Given a choice between this and the navel-gazing of the novel, I'll take the short ride on a fast machine.

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.

It honors the tone of that wonderful comedy while setting it in present-day New York City.

Foggy allegories and misty metaphors.

The special effects excite at first but wear out their welcome.

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

It's about black athletes, and they swim. It's as reassuringly uplifting as its predecessors, but the African-American and aquatic elements set it pleasantly apart.

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

The director is a cinematic equivalent of his subject, but a man who was able to reach middle age and examine that culture's good and bad points with a clear, detached mind.

Offers an amusing break to the undemanding.

This script by the husband-and-wife team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean is hopelessly contrived and takes forever to get to the point. (I warn you: The film does not absolutely identify the killer.)

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.

Gripping, improbable plot marked by exciting sequences of action.