Lisa Alspector

It's a heady mix of the earnest, the grave, and the frivolous. Wizardly director Kevin Reynolds even manages to condense into a single shot, with a wisp of humor, several of the hero’s long years in a dungeon without making them any less grueling.

The contrast between Tucker's motormouth and Chan's man of few words should be funnier, but the plot -- which is cliched without quite becoming self-reflexive -- and the uneven pace dampen most of their moments.

The behind-the-scenes revelations are thoroughly convincing.

Makes for a tiresome antidrama populated mainly by unambiguously good characters who might as well be invulnerable.

Boring, irksome family movie.

A story that holds little suspense; we know exactly how happily this animated musical will end--and the wait isn't very diverting.

Director Ron Howard makes too much of camera and editing tricks, as if momentarily confusing us about where a character is or which character's point of view the movie is taking will somehow deepen the narrative.

Much of the three-hour movie takes place in the prison, but the resonant characterization, expansive plotting, and judicious use of exterior locations and flashbacks remove any sense of claustrophobia or sluggishness.

The gangster-movie plot, themes, and allusions aren't nearly as intriguing as the earnestly kitschy black-and-white wide-screen images or the mesmerizing, minimalist sound effects.

Stodgy storytelling and a hyperbolic score reduce their experiences to melodrama.

Hokey.

Nicely toned.

Its ponderous explanations about why there are vampires in Arizona in the new millennium (blah, blah, blah).

Because so many female characters spend so much time trying to seduce Harrelson (usually successfully), the notion that multiplicity enhances intrigue is pretty worn out by the time any duplicity is revealed.

Drew Barrymore's virtuoso performance smooths over the plot holes.

The music's great, but frequent tight shots of actors ostensibly blowing their horns look phony enough to be distracting.

This blunt comedy suffers from poor pacing, colorless dialogue, and subpar performances by the two leads that reveal just how much a director contributes to our perception of what a star is.

Sometimes come together exquisitely.

Mined for comedy and milked for drama, though what results is diminished by the very framing device contrived to punch it up.

The rest of these animated sequences...depend on gimmickry, cuteness, or facile ideology, and don't come close to demonstrating the complex relationship between sound and image found in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

Funny, moving, and insightful look at questions about identity and community.

Scary and exciting.

Poor execution sometimes points up the difference between the telling of a story and the story itself--in this case, without diminishing the power of the latter.

In a perfect marriage of player and part, Reese Witherspoon is Elle Woods.

Elmo's obsessive reaction is never examined, compromising the ability of this rambling minor spectacle to put across its obvious lesson about sharing.

Few things are more enthralling than unrequited love, as demonstrated by this drama.

The coincidences that make the destined lovers' paths cross aren't contrived with much finesse, but the characters get in some decidedly clever lines.

This terrifyingly beautiful movie blends metaphor and stark social commentary to achieve a spontaneous grace.

A graceful, understated sense of period allows the behavior of the characters in this love story to be unusually nuanced, making their experiences seem uncontrived as well as archetypal.

Though it suggests intriguing ideas about the nature of performance, humor, ambition, and the consumption of spectacle, the movie only superficially explores them.

In a lumbering way, this depressing feel-good drama about the impact of cancer on two children, their divorced parents, and the father's girlfriend offers some useful insights into how feelings of jealousy and betrayal can limit the potential of family relationships.

The script, which infantilizes one of the older siblings as much as the father does, undermines its own admonitions against parents and adult children meddling in one another's lives.

A painstakingly crafted nonrealist story, which doesn't seem to imply anything beyond what it depicts.

The new sexism -- the old sexism plus the idea that everything is ironic -- is getting old.

The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

Cathartically disgusting adventure movie.

Cliched narrative, which isn't funny as often as seems intended.

Tedious mockumentary.

The filmmakers have created a pretentious extended "Twilight Zone" episode with obscenely high production values.

The coincidences that bring some characters together and keep others apart in this romantic comedy are plotted with musical grace.

This atmosphere-heavy drama, with its comfortably quirky characters, elegant performances, and ever shifting tone, is so innocuous it's not worth panning.

Nobody ever shuts up in this schmaltzy, mannered drama.

Even the most shocking elements of the story are made bland by childish overkill.

Stylistic excess, comedy, and romance often help make extremes of cruelty and horror function as cathartic metaphor, and all three figure, not always successfully, in this sequel.

The plot is more convenient than intriguing, the characters more cartoonish than iconic--especially the heroine, who grapples with feminism in a way that should have been fascinating.

Unlike Michael Jordan, this 45-minute large-format movie demonstrates mostly unrealized potential.

Provides glorious escapism without asking you to turn your brain off.

There's tenderness, humor, a gratuitous body double, and splashy lighting in this ho-hum action drama, which takes itself at times too seriously and at other times not seriously enough.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

Writer Barry McEvoy and director Barry Levinson might want to brush up on the use of metaphor.

Slower, more earnest, and not as gory.

Would be sweeter if the fair maiden weren't such a pill and more exciting if the villain weren't quite so nasty.

The characters--their motives at once obvious and obscure--are almost painfully fascinating.

DeVito's low-key midlife crisis is consistently moving, but Spacey, saddled with the role of provocateur, is demonically boring.

Conveys little sense of a connection, as if di Florio had made it mainly because she had access to a celebrity.

A musical number or two might have balanced the overdetermined politics and spectacle in this version.

Disarming-misfit story, which combines elements of a road movie, romance, small-town idyll, and police procedural.

This movie's story must have been computer generated along with its animation.

After a slow setup, this charming fable wisely spends most of its time on the golf course.

As the driven competitor who learns to make hubris work for him, Jared Leto gives a complex performance that suggests a deep, intriguing interior to the character even as he maintains a convincing one-dimensional facade.

Becomes blandly idealistic.

This spiritual thriller is too wooden to be taken as seriously as was clearly intended.

The theories about sexuality and trauma artfully advanced in this previously unreleased 1975 debut of director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl) are more nuanced and intuitive than those of most schools of psychology.

But Peter Hyams, who's both director and director of photography, forces us to constantly strain to see what isn't there, until ultimately the screen explodes in welcome light, a cathartic finale in broad visceral terms even if the drama hasn't inspired much emotion.

Images about imagery can be diverting, even insightful, but this painterly 1999 feature piles up studies in elaborately choreographed motion that are their own reason for being.

This moving story is full of breathtaking compositions, gorgeous spectacle, and inspiring philosophies articulated by sympathetic figures.

The movie's strength is in its comedy; a tragic subplot feels merely manipulative.

Where other King stories and hundreds of other movies simplistically exploit the archetype, this tale intricately relates the actions of its young evildoer to the more abstract forces bearing down on the adults.

Ritchie may be skilled at generating controlled chaos, but his surprise-a-minute strategy ultimately holds no surprises; Snatch is even more frenetically boring than his 1999 "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

At a relaxed pace, accompanied by restrained pop music.

Luc Besson--and Andrew Birkin wrote the pandering, adolescent screenplay for this pseudosubversive hagiography, and nearly every scene screams out its sensationalist intent, though few actually achieve the status of spectacle.

At once self-conscious and generic, this smart monster movie about smart monsters -- supersharks cleverer than the scientist who created them -- repeatedly lulls you into thinking it's paint by numbers.

Divided into sections bracketed by the arrival of each new DJ and is enlivened by the edgy yet trendy environment.

If misery were inherently interesting, this adaptation starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle as a couple plagued by alcoholism and child mortality might be too.

The movie is truly an open text--its generous poetry inspires free association rather than predictable emotion.