Michael Atkinson

Shower isn't a bad movie -- just a baneful sign of things to come.

A cute, clichéd, coming-of-age comedy.

The movie is a shambles, a rambling, disjointed love tragedy with a story that amounts to little more than a mess of fade-outs, sloppy montages, and dramatic sketches.

As a portrait of a man barely qualifying for a cinematic portrait, Benjamin Smoke is a trifle, but when Sillen and Cohen turn their cameras on the weedy, workaday, hellhole America that Benjamin calls home, the movie comes alive.

For many, the enticement of seeing two old pros smartly step through their pressurized pas de deux might be reason enough to buy a ticket.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

A pale imitation of the original Winnie the Pooh Disney shorts of the '60s, but a vast improvement on the current Pooh TV series and straight-to-tape specials.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

It's a polished, beautifully made movie with a rotten heart.

The film has a standard trajectory, but the details are unpredictable: Kitano fluctuates between goofy pratfalls. . . and elliptical pathos.

If you're expecting an experience approximately as dumb, badly acted, and childish as a pro wrestling match, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Might be structured like a soggy house of cards, but it's shot beautifully and acted expertly.

Showing the sex seems to be the film's raison d'etre, which gets you only so far.

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.

Clubfooted but earnest, Pandya's movie never forgets about its second-gen issues, but never quite plumbs them, either.

Hackford's movie falls into a meandering saunter. As the music grows dull, so does the movie.

Exploring a specific generational moment in mid-century Italy's social weft, Amelio's family saga might be his grimmest film, if only for the tragic exploitation of fraternity.

Gaby Dellal's cynically mushy film, like "The Full Monty" and its ilk, is best savored only by its target demo: middle-classers who see one imported film a year, the selection in question requiring working-stiff melodrama and leprechaun burrs gently and lovably mangling the English dialogue.

If the title, knee-jerk cast, pop-song intro, and schmaltzy plotline of his new film Changing Times is any indication, he's (André Téchiné) now the French mainstream, the premier Gallic pilot of high-toned soap opera.

If I were 13, I might be sufficiently entranced by the movie's bicycle stunts (down stairs! across countertops!) and wouldn't be wondering why ideas for science fiction films haven't progressed very far from "Star Trek's" first seasons all those decades ago.

Left with barely any there there, Morley compensates with long reenactments starring look-alike Zawe Ashton that are never quite convincing but instead suck more air out of the haunting vacuum left behind in Vincent's wake.

Suggest a Clintons-at-home scenario for 2001 -- haunted by the ghosts of dalliances past.

Artless but seductive.

Even though Gray is no raw-boned rookie-he has made TV movies for decades, plus, back in the day, a single Steven Seagal floater-his movie is rather inexcusably obvious, going for "troot," but recycling dese-dose-dem clichés already pressed into plastic lumber 25 years ago.

The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.

Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.

It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.