Mark Caro

Remains watchable when it's not hitting you like a baseball bat with poignancy. But by the time you've endured all of the shamelessly manipulative plot turns and heart-yanking speeches that close out the movie, all you can do is cry foul.

Why Paltrow, who was accepting a best actress Oscar four years ago, would take this clumsily written role is anyone's guess.

But in the end everything comes down to Lawrence, who has yet to develop a truly distinct comedic sensibility.

We've since seen plenty of self-satisfied smart alecks, and Freddy, as written and played, brings nothing new to the party.

Some of its parts are nifty, but the sum of these parts is nothing.

Eighty-six minutes proves to be more than enough time to spend with these characters, but the Hughes Brothers make the case that this is a subculture as compelling as it is repellent.

(Mitchell's) Hansel may be small-boned and soft-featured in an androgynous way, but his Hedwig is a force of nature, burned out and jaded yet brimming with compassion and bursting with energy.

A puzzle movie in which the puzzle is actually worth the time and effort to solve.

Control Room isn't a systematic dissection of Al Jazeera's possible biases regarding the U.S. or Israel; it's noted that Arabs almost invariably view the war with Iraq in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while Americans rarely do.

Combining the immediacy of the Internet and the wise perspective of history, Startup.com proves that investing in real-life drama can reap rich dividends.

Cunningham's and Woolf's novels are dedicated to capturing a person's essence through the events of a single day, and Daldry's film is faithful to that aim. But the range of life presented here feels constricted; the movie misses the sublime for all of the despair.

Stockwell deserves kudos for working mental illness into a teen story without making it the explicit focus, as in simplistic exercises like "Girl, Interrupted."

A rock 'n' roll film should be funny-crazy -- not just a big, dumb promo for some over-the-hill dudes in makeup who are trying to sell today's kids on yesterday's glory by championing deliquency.

The good news is that Vaughn is back in needling, loosey-goosey mode in Made, which he produced with Favreau. The bad news is that by the end, not only do you find him quite resistible, but you also may wish one of the tough guys of this mob comedy would heave him out a window.

Takes a premise that seems ripe for broad, vulgar joking and turns it into a sly, even subtle, comedy.

The day after seeing it, you're less likely to fixate on the flaws than to find yourself experiencing chuckle aftershocks as you recall the most outrageous gags. In these days of mostly forgettable comedies, that sensation has become all too rare. [15 July 1998]

Zucker gives the movie an ebullient spirit, but he also keeps everything at the same loud pitch throughout.

This Australian production pairs two always-watchable actors, Guy Pearce and Rachel Griffiths, yet never compels us to feel a thing.

A brilliant, absurd collection of vignettes that, in their own idiosyncratic way, sum up the strange horror of life in the new millennium.