Lisa Alspector

Has the enthusiasm and naivete of a first feature.

This gorgeous expressionist drama makes the comparisons so effectively at the outset that by the end they seem belabored.

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

A promotional tool that establishes its superfluousness simply by existing, this clumsy, smirking movie has a bitter soul.

The Griswolds, headed by Chevy Chase, are taking what could be one of their last family vacations.

Not particularly sensitive or funny comedy-drama.

But the most stimulating, satisfying aspect of this action fantasy is the theme music.

Ill conceived or badly handled.

The moody images and Michael Nyman's score aren't enough to salvage this banal 1997 science fiction story.

It's always at least a little disingenuous to attack the medium that's your bread and butter; this media-bashing movie tries to get around the problem by restricting its critique to television, specifically the news.

Not unlike "Eyes Wide Shut," this is an eerily earnest contemplation of fidelity, and it's pitched as farce.

Using archly staged interviews and reconstructions that draw attention to the components of the documentary form, Morris does justice to the complexity of hot-button issues by suggesting several layers of subtext at once, portraying the articulate Leuchter as both rational and prone to rationalize.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

Entrancingly lurid live-action fantasy.

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

Blends extremes of violence and humor to create an irreverent tone that nullifies everything; the plot is so clever it crushes the characterization, making all the action seem perfunctory.

The received notion that kids want their movies fast and furious is barely in evidence in this 1997 comedy, a laboriously slow suburban adventure.

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.

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

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

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

Isn't absurd enough to be funny.

The story--written by Brian Helgeland and directed by Richard Donner--was just dumb.

The social criticism is as unforced as the humor (and the references to "The Conversation") in this 1998 conspiracy thriller, whose spirited action is balanced by an almost contemplative attitude toward surveillance phobias and the movie cliches they've spawned.

It's a bitter story played for humor, in which a callous character is never quite allowed to see herself as such.

The feminist veneer is the most deeply disturbing part of this callow thriller, whose fetishizing of a dead woman's body (and a live woman's sexual behavior) is far more questionable than anything even "The Silence of the Lambs" has been accused of.

Antonio Banderas signs up for charisma lessons from Anthony Hopkins -- but they just don't take.

The result is an exploitation movie that seems like it's about something -- though what exactly I couldn't say.