Michael O'Sullivan

Did you hear about the Morgans? Trust me, you don't want to.

Sternfeld has created a garden on film that opens up its blooms for us, not in the dark of the movie house, but long after we've left the theater.

It's alternately monotonous, hot and dramatic, which makes for a peculiar, not entirely unsatisfying atmosphere of neo -- or is that post? -- noir. What it all means, of course, I have no idea.

Upon this fine mess shines Janeane Garofalo like a ray of sarcastic sunlight as FBI agent Shelby...With her gift for sweet bile, the sardonic Garofalo makes every second on screen a treasure to be cherished.

A handsome and effective-if over-long-tear-jerker about thwarted love between grown-ups who should know better.

This trio of losers somehow forms a kind of loony family. Like the one in "Little Miss Sunshine," which also used the metaphor of a broken-down car to drive home its point, the interpersonal dynamics are out of whack, but not unworkable.

The movie is as damnably perplexing as the subject himself.

On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes.

By land or by sea, there aren't many movies that can move you like that.

More tasteful, sensitive and original than you might imagine.

The girls in 'Traveling Pants' are only mannequins wearing someone else's clothes. They don't get inside your head, let alone your heart.

It is difficult to watch, but it's also impossible to take your eyes off the screen. It does not blench at the things that Hollywood routinely blenches at: substance abuse, dying, family dysfunction, love.

An appallingly dull film set in the world of professional racing, director Renny Harlin and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone have found a way to drain all the adrenaline out of the sport.

So light and airy, it almost floats away on its own breeziness.

All foreplay and no climax.

A fable that is by turns antic, scary, sweet and, in the end, slightly soulless. In other words, it's a heartwarmer that doesn't have much of a heart itself.

All about undertones, obliqueness and expectancy, about the scent, if you will, of something no one can stop

Sweet and wise little film.

For those so inclined, it's nice to see the girl and the gangsta -- not the gunslinger -- save the day.

Shelton's harrowing and compulsively watchable morality play.

What keeps Phone Booth going, despite its premise, is the acting and the writing, both of which are top-notch.

It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.

Jim de Seve's cogent pro-gay-marriage argument appeals equally to emotion and reason.

It's effectively frightening. It's just not the kind of frightening that stays with you very long, unless of course someone decides to make the same movie . . . yet again.

Land of the Dead is fairly intense. Intensely gory and violent, that is, as has come to be expected from the genre. It's just not very frightening. Not half as frightening as, say, last year's "Dawn of the Dead."

The movie is really just an elaborate excuse to show repeated close-ups of an elephantine dog scrotum.

Despite its impeccable acting and subtle backdrop of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Event lets its message overwhelm its emotion.

Pretty slight, but for a campaign commercial -- which is what it feels like -- it's pretty long.

One singularly unbecoming character, who should, by rights, forever remain a "singleton."

Jack is just one of a dozen enormously appealing personalities in Out of Sight.

There's actually a lot going on in this little movie, and first-time feature director Stephen Daldry, turning his talents from the theater, handles all of it deftly.

A compelling, exquisitely acted drama about the shock waves emanating from -- and toward -- a single act of almost inexplicable violence.

Haunting little film, whose chaotic universe is churned up by the conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

The film's exploration of loss and the gulf of time and memory that separates us from our pasts is beautifully and subtly handled by Kore-eda. But it is his concern with the sometimes insurmountable distance that lies between knowing and not knowing why we do the things we do that is the filmmaker's true -- and most profound -- subject. [2 April 2004, p.T47]

A series of cutesy but flat-footed jokes leading up to a foregone romantic conclusion.

A poke in the adrenal gland -- obeys the first law of action movie-making by quickening the heart and dazzling the eye.

By equal measure tragic and hopeful, it is both a love song to escapism and a warm embrace of the real world.

It might make you tense, it might make you nauseous, and its clangorous roar could well give you a migraine headache.

New Suit is devilishly good fun.

It sounds monotonous, too, but it's not. The succession of passengers he picks up -- a pimply and skittish Kurdish soldier in the Iranian army, a moralistic Afghan seminarian and an elderly Turkish taxidermist -- each react in utterly different and fascinating ways to Badii's unusual request. What it is, though, is a small triumph of filmmaking. Through quiet insinuation, Taste of Cherry evokes sadness without being sentimental, has universal resonance without sacrificing personal immediacy, and generates real drama without resorting to contrivance. [15 May 1998, p.N56]

Despite some small narrative flaws, though, Stiller alone is reason to keep watching. It's a brave, scary and antic tour de force from a performer who, over the past few years, has been slowly banging his head against the glass wall of typecasting. In Permanent Midnight, the clown finally shatters the barrier and comes out the other side an actor.

It's an infusion of zip that's sorely needed, because the chief deficiency of A Bug's Life so far is its blandness….The film's other weakness is the low-octane vocal performances of its leading cast.

One truly, madly, deeply satisfying creep-out.

Dizzy, delightful and just a bit deviant, "The Rugrats Movie" blends all the sarcastic sensibility of "The Simpsons" with the old-fashioned silliness of Soupy Sales.

You'll likely come away from this astonishing encounter between the three corners of a lovers' triangle not just amused but enlightened about such not-so-simple issues as fidelity, betrayal, lust, possessiveness, honesty and forgiveness.

Gripping, if manipulative and somewhat preposterous, drama.

Call it a Christmas miracle, albeit a minor one: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel isn't entirely awful.

A bodice-ripper for intellectuals.

Aniston delivers an utterly un-Rachel-like performance. It's neurosis-free and unmannered, by turns funny, sad and profound.

The real question is whether the film moves the "Brideshead" ball down the playing field in any meaningful way since the acclaimed miniseries. And I'd have to say that it doesn't so much advance it as it shrinks it into a golf-ball-size nugget.

It's a comic book at heart, albeit a thoroughly, grandly romantic one in the end.

It's a soaring achievement, without ever leaving the ground.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

When it comes right down to it, the talking animal thing is sort of secondary to what is, at heart, just a simple but perfectly satisfying little story about a boy who wants to keep his dog.

Anyone with a modicum of good sense -- or a weak stomach -- will take it as a warning to stay the heck away from this literally and figuratively deadly "War Zone."

It's hard to take Predators terribly seriously.

Utterly delightful fable of romantic destiny.

Spielmann doesn't move his camera much, but he doesn't have to. The uniformly crackerjack cast keeps things electric, yet always believable, even when behaving in ways that are shocking.

Lords of Dogtown isn't a cop-out, but rather an ever-so-slight concession to commercialism.

A soundtrack buried inside a sitcom.

What modest pleasure the film affords is largely thanks to the charisma of its genial stars.

Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.

A mite too hard to follow for most of the kiddie crowd who'll want to see it.

Pure David Mamet is an acquired, but delicious, taste.

One big, fat, honking comic book of a sci-fi-martial-arts adventure flick.

It's enough to make your head spin, but Almodovar, whose mastery of the medium has never been more assured, gives you plenty to think about, ultimately grounding the dizzy whirl of his idiosyncratic fictional world in a story that feels not just true but universal.

There's a thin line between some drag comedy and misogyny, and Girls Will Be Girls, a crass comedy in which all the women are played, with over-the-top abandon, by men, roars past that line.

Tailored for the readership of Teen People magazine and about as thought-provoking as the average 500-word celebrity profile.

That script – co-written by Terry Hayes and director Brian Helgeland – is almost too noir for its own good at times, but Gibson somehow manages to pull its implausibility off.

Mind you, there's lots to like, if not love, in this London-set, star-studded comedy. Unfortunately, there's a little bit to hate, too.

A chick flick for guys, with a pH balance in perfect equilibrium between the crass and the sweet.

A gorgeously photographed storybook.

A feel-good movie only in the sense that it wants to reassure today's white people about our own enlightenment and how far we've come in the evolution of our attitudes about race.

In the end, Daybreakers doesn't really want to make anyone think too hard. If that were to happen, they might stop to wonder why all the human survivors out there hiding in fear of their lives don't just become garlic farmers and call it a day.

It's still pretty darn good, despite its smarty-pants aura.

It starts with a bang and ends with a whimper.

You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."

Wonderfully empowering to watch Petula and Dorothy turn the tables on their testosterone-crazed tormentors.

Michelle Williams turns in a performance that is seamless, canny and artistically mature.

Planet 51 is cute, but it's no "Shrek."

It's French. It's sexy. It's got a killer soundtrack.

In trying to compose a poetic love letter to a time of liberation and freedom, Haynes has merely conjured up memories of druggy excess, egotism and tight trousers. The only mementos worth saving from the experience are available on the soundtrack.

It's a hyper-violent buddy comedy. If you like that sort of thing -- think "Training Day," with laughs -- you'll love this.

It's always nice to see Clint, and especially nice to see him play someone whose humanity -- no, whose mortality -- is all too apparent.

Wastes no time getting very loud and very silly and never really lets up.

Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary.

It's actually quite satisfying, in a weird, magical-realism sort of way that manages to disturb and confound as much as it appeases the romantic.

Allegations of governmental double-talk and cover-ups are, unfortunately, boooring.

Functional but tiresome.

What little grace there is in Living Out Loud (and there isn't much) is all in LaGravenese's script, not on the screen.

It's creepy, all right. It's just that HOW it goes about creeping you out is sometimes just plain cheesy.

It's tasty enough, and probably good for you, but at 73 minutes, the film is hardly a very filling entree.

Honest because it gets a paradoxical truth: There's more to life than football, even when there isn't.

Hopeless rip-off of Hitchcock's "The Birds."

A hideously unfunny spy spoof with pretensions to social satire in its treatment of a lesbian relationship.

The drama itself packs a powerful -- and timeless -- gut punch.

The singer-actress has screen presence to spare and a nice, rich voice. By the time her young fans outgrow her -- or she them -- she should have an excellent chance at a second career. Making, you know, real movies and real music.

This is high-carb filmmaking at its finest. When it's all over, you'll have a knot in your stomach.

The documentary makes an effective and rather chilling case that there is an almost unbroken chain between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

Cogent, scary and, at times, sickening.

Tries to put your tear ducts in a headlock with a litany of catastrophes.

The Matrix Reloaded is about sensation, not logic. As such, it delivers, in spades, exactly what you should expect from a popcorn flick -- thrills, chills and spills -- plus a little more for good measure, just to keep anyone from whining who might want a beginning, a middle and an end.

The film stars Bruce Campbell of the "Evil Dead" series as Elvis in a touching, funny and at times grotesque performance that is actually the best thing about the movie.

In its small, achingly beautiful way, this is the lesson that Osama teaches us: When one human being suffers, it is all of us who share her pain.

Nurse Betty is this year's "Being John Malkovich"-an utter original with a little something to say and a way of saying it that manages to be at once delightful and bilious.

A misbegotten marriage of sweet and sour.

Too highbrow for the multiplex and too literal for the hipsters, it's unsatisfying both as gothic camp and serious cinema.

Full of the kind of obnoxious chitchat that only self-aware neurotics engage in. Christopher and Grace probably deserve each other, but that doesn't mean that any of us do.

Yes, The Yes Men is funny, but it's humor that hurts.

Involves such a disturbing blend of unhealthy mother-son affection and physical pain that it gives new meaning to the term child -- not to mention audience -- abuse.

Although Monkeybone will undoubtedly make you laugh at its slapstick highjinks, the irony is that for a movie that's ultimately about soul, that's the one commodity that's in precious short supply up on the screen.

Not enough to keep this celluloid ship from sinking under the weight of its own stupidity.

Less a tale of mysterious, tragic love than a three-way Harlequin romance.

A loud, choppily edited and surprisingly unengaging portrait of speed demons.

It has as much of an ax to grind as the humorless and misguided bureaucrats it mocks.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim's scathing, moving critique of American public education, makes you actually want to do something after you dry your eyes.

The movie is pretty unabashed about the all-but-corny sentiment: Each of us has something to give.

As a rule, the drawn and computer-animated imagery is top notch and seamlessly integrated, but the central characters' tawny complexions and the often chiaroscuro lighting sometimes obscure all but the whites of their eyes and their pearl-perfect teeth.

The first dumb-fun action movie of the summer season has arrived early with The Losers, a loud, loving homage to guns and testosterone based on a series of comic books about a renegade band of CIA operatives. How dumb is it? You might actually kill a few million brain cells just watching it.

There's so much wrong with this movie.

Let Me In wants to make your flesh crawl, and it probably will. But it's unlikely to ever get under anyone's skin, the way "Let the Right One In" did.

A parody of B-movies stupid enough -- and yet with just enough brains -- to appeal to the most discriminating fans of the genre.

The bad news is that the opening credits, which make sick and darkly comic allusions to suicide, are the best thing about the film.

The real problem is not the maudlin script or Madden's travelogue touch. It's Cage as Corelli, a miscasting that turns the normally volatile, edgy performer into little more than a spokesman for the Olive Garden.

With unsurprising irony, the "Sixteen" of the title foreshadows Liam's birthday and even worse calamity, which makes a grim and gripping story all the more heartbreaking.

Fascinating and transgressive love story.

It's a highbrow romantic farce, without the laughs.

Gives new meaning to the word "obvious."

Meet Joe Black is Hopkins's movie and, despite the film's unnecessary length, his quiet and dignified performance almost carries the ball across the finish line.

The title of Ondi Timoner's Sundance award-winning documentary about the loss of privacy in the Internet age says it all: "We Live in Public." Don't believe it? Just try Googling "Tiger Woods" or "Michaele Salahi."

Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.

Disturbing, darkly beautiful.

It's in this final chapter that the director states his message, which is handled so lightly, almost incidentally, you might miss it. But it's a profound one. For what the girls learn is that the way to get what they want -- no, need -- isn't by hoarding something, but by letting go.

It is Carandiru's ability to humanize its central characters ... that gives the movie its wrenching, tragic power

It's the Weather Channel on steroids.

A field goal, not a touchdown.

Crudup gives a performance that is by turns scary, heartbreaking, grotesque and funny as hell.

Will probably win over as many fuddy-duddy fathers as fillies with its mixture of sweetness tempered with genial cynicism.

Feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."

Overflowing with madcap visual flair and following a rambling thread of a plot that seems, at times, more the product of free association than an actual script, The Triplets of Belleville is a triumph of animated style over substance.

Much of the film's humor hovers around crotch level. If jokes about mental illness, terminal disease and sex with orangutans sound funny to you, go for it.

The title (which translates, essentially, as "burned out") is an apt description of the film itself: a hot and smoldering shell.

The Irish independent feature I Went Down is an elusive leprechaun of a film that doggedly resists being pigeonholed. Once caught, however, it yields a small pot of gold in its droll performances and deadpan wit. [3 July 1998, p.N46]

The path taken by the film is somewhat labyrinthine and obscure, but it offers enough rewards to counterbalance its frustrations.

Simple without being slight, and profoundly moving without dipping into mawkishness.

Thanks mainly to Bell's abundant charisma, Hallam makes for a strangely likable antihero.

The words more than hold their own against the pictures.

A confection that is ultimately better because of its bitterness.

Set against "Mooseport's" backdrop of ramped-up whimsy -- and not the kind that charms, either, but the kind that gets old faster than uncovered cheese -- Romano just kind of disappears.

As messages go, I've certainly heard worse. As movies go, Wimbledon is a generally painless float down a lazy river.

Although the cast is uniformly strong, the real revelation here is "The X-Files' " Anderson, who plays Lily with subtle gradations of emotional depth unexpected from someone who has made a career out of deadpan.

It's over-the-top. It's wild. It's filled with outrageous behavior all around.

It's a pretty scathing satire of reality TV, including itself, which makes it both what it is, and a critique of what it is.

The comedy is funny as hell. And yes, I mean hell, not heck.

A film so boring, unsexy, styleless, sluggish and physically ugly that its badness seems almost intentional.

The film as a whole, while possessing a kind of vicious beauty, feels as cold and as embalmed as a corpse.

Wise, funny, sweet, sexy and kind.

The plot is far from intricate, but Waking Ned Devine more than makes up for its narrative simplicity with a uniformly engaging cast of Hibernian oddballs.

If you're mocking holier-than-thou-ness, you can't very well strike a hipper-than-thou tone.

Tries to cram too many ingredients into one small pot.

What really sells this three-hanky tear-jerker -- and there were a lot of women buying it during a recent screening -- is Lane's steely and vulnerable performance. Like Tinker Bell, she almost made me believe in fairies. Almost.

Beyond mawkish, Radio would be harmless twaddle were it not for the offensive depiction of its hero, the real-life James Robert Kennedy.

A dramatization of the life of Christ that takes as its script a word-for-word translation of the Gospel according to John, the adaptation is not so much tedious as pointless.

A love boat afloat on the vast cinematic ocean that sloshes back and forth between the stinko and the fabulous.

One rousing, if rote, adventure.

Its egotistical, wishy-washy and otherwise flawed protagonists are no less heroic because they look -- and act -- like you and me. On the contrary, they are more so.

The movie isn't exactly full of twists and turns, but neither is it a long, hard slog.

Mostly, though, it's a film about that hollow feeling that hits you when the tears have all dried up and your face hurts way too much to even crack a smile.

It's less a children's movie made for contemporary children than a children's movie made for people who still remember, and pine for, how children's movies were made 50 years ago.

Eavesdropping on the glib conversations of witty urbanites can be a pleasant diversion, but after so much volubility, you might find yourself wishing that they would all just shut up and dance.

It will put some viewers in mind of yet another story with the same theme: "Pinocchio."

Despite melodrama that, at times, is enough to induce diabetes, there's enough wolf whistle in this sexy, scary romp to please anyone.

Another film about . . . a cretinous, grating loser.

The film, like the cheap double-scotches quaffed down by the central character, leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste that's hard to wash away the morning after.

Except for the last five minutes, Robin Hood is the story of the radicalization of some guy named Longstride. Who?

The parodistic romantic comedy makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.

Lee's understated performance is a small treat.

A generally well-made tale of humor and hard luck.

All in all, Jack Goes Boating is an auspicious -- if slightly ostentatious -- debut by Hoffman, one of today's greatest actors. Maybe next time his performance in front of his camera will be as subtle as his performance behind it.

When it is good, the film by "Chicago Hope" actor Peter Berg is very, very good, but when it is bad it is horrid.

It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.

It's the sick humor that's most appealing about this odd little Danish film.

But the real treat is seeing Big Daddy Bruce playing the papa bear part to the little lost boy. Sure, he loves his handgun, but for once Willis seems to enjoy his nurturing side as much as his Glock 19. [3 Apr 1998, p.N53]

This slight but insinuating documentary by Abbas Kiarostami...will do nothing to advance or detract from the reputation of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker.

True to the film's name, there is one thing I couldn't hardly wait for, and that's the closing credits.

Unfortunately, the more traditionally drawn 2-D human characters are as flat, in every sense of the word, as can be.

With a cast of actors playing some of England's smartest people and with a crackling script by Stoppard -- no slouch in the brains department -- it pays to stay awake.

The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate.

With this bold stamp [director Jane Campion] lays claim to the story that follows as wholly her own.

The franchise is cheapened by Disney's crass commercialism in releasing material that, by rights, should have gone straight to video.

His story is sad, compelling and morbidly, tragically watchable.

Far filthier and a good bit funnier than Trey Parker and Matt Stone's sophomoric cable TV show ever dared to be.

Like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," Flame and Citron is the story of handsome rogues with guns. It's fast-paced, stylish and thrilling.

Despite its earnestness and valuable lessons, however, "Blood" feels a little like preaching to the choir.

Jarmusch's use of yin/yang, dark/light and good/evil symbolism makes glorious if goofy sense.

The movie itself is already like one long commercial.

Unfortunately, the experience of actually watching the movie is less compelling than the circumstances of its making.

A tad preachy and more than a little bit sanctimonious.

Part of the spell cast by this magical film is its ability to make an unvarnished political statement about economic reality and social alienation while, at the same time, seducing its audience into believing in the transformative power of love and the almost supernatural beauty of the everyday.

Although the rest of the story plays out with melodramatic predictability, it's timely, not to mention refreshing, to see an affirmation of true love over hot sex, along with a reminder that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

A touching documentary on the immigrant experience -- or at least one very tough slice of it.

A jaundiced view of litigation, however authentic, is not necessarily the stuff of great drama, even of the legal-thriller variety, which by definition is confined to a claustrophobic courtroom.

First-time feature director Harald Zwart has a real flair for farce, and he keeps the outrageous high jinks of the script lively yet grounded in reality.

The story here is just not particularly amusing.

What's strangest, though, about Die Mommie Die! is how material that was obviously so giddily irreverent in origin became so inert, so joyless and dull.

Charming but slight comedy.

Fortunately, Jackson and Spacey have enough sassy wit and crackling intensity between them to keep The Negotiator from becoming hostage to its own inanity.

I got exactly what I expected: Scared and tickled, within an inch of my life.

Cletis Tout is both in love with and able to laugh at the conventions it adopts, which is exactly where it goes wrong. It's just a little too self-satisfied.

Moves at a glacial pace.

If this garbage sounds like your kind of thing, and the folks who jump up and talk back to the screen are your kind of people, then, sweetheart, you and this movie deserve each other.

May be a fish tale, but its story of the paradox of love -- knowing when to hold on means knowing when to let go -- is profoundly humane and human.

One thoroughbred of a movie. Sleek, well-muscled and brisk, director Steven Soderbergh's newest offering delivers just about everything anyone could possibly want from filmed entertainment -- except deep thought.

The scenes of Green lavishing affection on his charges under the closing credits go a long way to rounding out this entertaining portrait of a volatile but effective educator.

Shot with a shaky hand-held camera, Wonderland is a sentimental fairy tale with a gritty documentary feel.

Gorgeously animated and stirringly told, Disney's Mulan is a timeless story that will delight kids and divert adults with its sweeping scope, emotional intimacy and screwball humor.

An okay movie made nearly great by one great thing: the bravura, mercilessly watchable performance of Charlize Theron.

Under Our Skin has a major ax to grind, but if even half of what it alleges is true, it's more deeply terrifying than any slasher film you'll ever see.

Fox's film seems to say that the kind of saintly purity that would enable one to walk on water -- or to kill with impunity and without repercussions -- doesn't exist.

As channeled by the extraordinary Hoffman, Dan Mahowny is less a freak than a nerve-deadened Everyman with the courage to search for something that makes him feel alive.

The two-hour film never feels a minute too long.

The movie based on Young's 2002 memoir is a good bit blunter. One early laugh comes at the expense of a pig urinating on a woman's feet at the BAFTA awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars. And it doesn't get much better, or much smarter, than that.

An odd and oddly endearing romantic black comedy.

That movie is not half bad, either. The trial, by comparison, will feel familiar to anyone who has ever watched any David take on any corporate Goliath before a court of law ("Erin Brockovich," "A Civil Action," etc., etc.).

Wild Wild Waste is more like it. Waste of time, waste of money and colossal waste of talent.

Shaolin Soccer really loves what it mocks, after all, and that grandly goofy affection -- nay, joy -- for all things chop socky is purely, utterly contagious.

A stupid and violent delicacy, congealed nachos and Mountain Dew for the Beavis-and-Butt-head set.

A taut, escapist legal thriller.

Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.

May not change the world, but it's deeply creepy and richly satisfying.

Confusing as heck.

The romantic comedy about a divorced couple having an affair manages to be both light on its feet and heavy enough to deliver something of a message.

Like the TV show, The X-Files movie is stylish, scary, sardonically funny and at times just plain gross.

It plays like a soft-core-porn potboiler left over from the 1970s about a hot vampire chick.

This latest, utterly gratuitous chapter in the saga of the wisecracking reptile hunter will add nothing to the ever-dimming reputation of the Subaru pitchman.

Sweet without being saccharine, sad without being maudlin and funny without being forced.

More honest than any conventional morality tale. Here there are no heroes and no real villains; the good guys are all flawed and even bad guys are sometimes capable of the noblest of acts.

Highly watchable stuff (not to mention listenable, with a relentless but not overly obtrusive hip-hop soundtrack propelling the action).

Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's easy to do well. Screenwriter-turned-director Kurt Wimmer has a hard time keeping his actors from, well, acting a lot of the time.

If these repugnant people were really your friends and neighbors, your time would be more profitably spent reading the real estate listings than the movie reviews. But for 1 1/2 hours in a darkened theater, the derailment of their unhealthy emotions makes for one compulsively watchable train wreck.

It isn't that Bobby Jones is especially bad. It's just not especially good, either.

It's a film about culture clash, the generation gap and the loss of tradition that inevitably accompanies the arrival of anything new.

This is a sophisticated movie, but one whose sophistication is surprisingly simple-minded.

For a comedy, there are precious few real laughs. Three to be exact.

The fantastic and at times deliciously nihilistic world of X2 is fully, believably three-dimensional.

In the end, it may leave its audience, young and old alike, just as charmed as its bewitched young heroine.

It's the sort of movie that can make normally well-read and intelligent viewers feel stupid.

Never asks its target audience of self-referential baby boomers and their littles bundles of joy to take it more seriously than it takes itself.

An unoriginal warming over of a skimpy Japanese production that has been re-edited, rescored and rewritten for American tots and padded out to feature length with a plotless short called "Pikachu's Vacation."

Scrat's annoying ubiquity -- is just one piece of evidence that Dawn of the Dinosaurs has been focus-grouped and is now trying to please its presumed young audience a little more than is healthy.

It's daring, deliberately offensive and, for a comedy, it has far more ideas in it than actual laughs.

Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. It's the most fully realized working out of his two favorite obsessions: the subjective nature of experience and the psychological mysteries of pair bonding.

Awash in the kind of pretension that only the French can get away with.

Zigging and zagging serenely between the extremes of deadpan, postmodern comedy and the antic, Max Sennett-style japery of yore.

Really two movies in one, and there's not enough breathing room for both of them.

What the movie may lack in "Saving Private Ryan"-style gloss, it more than makes up for in authenticity, or, in other words, heart.

It's not Deuce's satisfied clientele, but the audience, that gets the shaft.

In addition to McKay, Danes makes a sassy, sexy Sonja. And Efron more than gets by in his role as the sweet, plucky, starstruck newbie. It's a part that doesn't require much heavy lifting, though.

It's a kind of 18th-century "Dead Man Walking" but with that earlier film's foreground arguments against capital punishment pushed to the background here.

A gift for those already in the fold, for those who get the joke and just want to savor it with other like-minded fans.

Despite some Cold War humor, the formulaic film is aimed squarely at the youngest of young children.

There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.

Someone forgot to remind Duvall to write an ending.

Broad and cheesy, yet it is not utterly without a kind of junk-food appeal.

The unsatisfying thriller A Perfect Murder is a triumph of style over substance, with style in this case winning only by default.

I never forgot for a minute that I was watching a cartoon, all the way down to the silly, pseudo-spiritual ending, an ending whose very incomprehensibility is actually one of the more endearing hallmarks of anime.