Michael Sragow

In The Last Samurai, the body count is almost as high as the dead-brain-cell count.

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

These actors have a firm playful grasp and a palpable affection for their characters' befuddled dignity and attraction. They understand what Wilde meant by the importance of being earnest.

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.

With all the good will in the world, I couldn't warm up to Kit Kittredge. The movie is like a 1930s or 1940s short about Americans pulling together, stretched out to feature length.

The movie fails at the primary steps of turning Rejas' mind inside out and dramatizing the contradictions in his heart and soul.

If only De Niro or screenwriter Eric Roth had the instinct to play some of this for laughs or even outrageous burlesque. Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

There's no innocence left in Shrek 2. The helter-skelter story and throwaway gags emerge from a sensibility that confuses gossipy knowingness and jadedness with wit.

Romanticism fights stoicism to a draw, and the movie grows ever more static, too. Down to the quasi-ambiguous hate-crime finish, Brokeback Mountain comes as close to being a still life as you can get with human characters.

Johansson bequeaths the welcome sight of a talent in full bloom to this wilted, dark whimsy of a movie.

Gory but lifeless.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

A Mighty Heart has the surface tension of a first-rate docudrama but neither the passion nor the vision to encompass its powerhouse subject.

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

High School Musical 3 wore me out, but I'm not the target audience. My favorite high school musical was "Hamlet 2."

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

A bit like a real-world horror film with "heart," right down to the trick ending.

If you haven't had enough of Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan weepies like "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998), The Lake House gives us Mopey in Chicago and You've Got Snail Mail.

New York critics have anointed Crash in advance as the Second Coming, but it's just another over-ambitious first movie.

Terrence Howard has stolen 50 Cent's thunder - and his lightning, and his storm clouds, too - twice in one year.

Despite its adrenalized actors, Tape is a tired return to the roots of the American indie movement's popular surge a dozen years ago. It could have been called "sex, lies and audiotape."

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

Instead of being supple and expansive like the book, this Little Children is heavy-handed and snarky.

This movie's biggest contribution to film history will be resurrecting Davies' reputation as a natural comedian stuck in deadly costume pictures because her lover wanted her placed on a pedestal.

In Stay, the director, Marc Forster, fresh from "Finding Neverland," turns Manhattan into a nightmarish dreamscape and his characters into self-destructive ghosts.

The movie mostly proves that cutting-edge humiliations are best absorbed in 25-minute segments on HBO.

Everyone from the ensemble appears to be acting in a different picture. Zaillian strands them all.

It's not a comedy-drama, really. It's let's-all-share therapy in beautiful Boulder, Colo.

Despite the nice touches at the corners, the center does not hold. In I Think I Love My Wife, there's too much emphasis on the Think.

Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.

The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.

Too bad it doesn't deserve to fold the bedsheets of Paul Mazursky's L.A. roundelay "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).

If Pride had concentrated on a gifted coach's teaching and training techniques, it might have been a contender. Instead, all the overheated melodrama evaporates our rooting interest.

Ragged and frenetic.

All honesty, rebellion and suffering, but no depth.

The overarching joke, of course, is that most movies are so lousy they might as well have been made by blind men anyway. Hollywood Ending is only mediocre, but you may leave wondering, what's Allen's excuse?

For a movie with such a vibrant real-life base, An American Rhapsody is surprisingly low-impact.

It makes for quite a rumpus, but the material never catches fire.

Overdoes it and falls on its farce.

Thanks to Suvari, audiences laugh nervously at the mortification of soul and flesh, but she doesn't really do them much of a favor. She simply keeps them watching as a would-be gross-out comedy turns into would-be gross-out tragedy.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.

The saving grace in an exuberantly graceless movie is Clive Owen. This actor is bulletproof. Even in a sick-joke jamboree like Shoot 'Em Up, he mows down the competition and gets his laughs without losing his composure.

This turgid melodrama fast-breaks away from the heart of its own subject.

This movie proves to be the year's most anti-romantic comedy.

The casting in K-PAX is canny, but the picture as a whole is a clunky mix of the canny and the would-be uncanny.

Despite the dominant air of foolishness, the filmmaking is lush, lively and intelligent, but the gap between the direction and the script is appalling.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

What's fatal to the film is that De Niro's character, though compelling, is so temperate and wise he gives no indication of why he was drawn to a life of crime.

Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies. But she doesn't do enough to quench that thirst.

In Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou tries to top the breathtaking poetic spectacle of his masterpiece, "House of Flying Daggers," and instead plummets into self-parody.

Remember mood rings? The Ring Two is a mood movie - a bad-mood movie.

With Tristan & Isolde, the core must be a passion that enlarges two outsize characters and seems as momentous as the rise and fall of a kingdom. Too bad this film's Achilles' heel is its heart.

Domino should have been a terrific anti-heroine, but the movie never gets deep enough inside this walking time bomb to reveal what makes her tick.

As a whole, The Matrix Reloaded is thin on magic, charm, surprise and fun. It's less like an all-out escape, or even a thrill ride, than a sensory workout. At best, it's a treadmill-like bridge to the hoped-for splendors of episode three, The Matrix Revolutions.

Phone Booth may not be awful, but it's puny.

Borders on poppycock.

Shallow and one-sided.

First-time director Swicord brews an atmosphere of geniality and warmth and brings a modicum of momentum to a happily discursive book.

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

Too bad Dreamcatcher amounts to a pastiche of better films like the original "The Thing" and both versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It ransacks the audience's memory warehouse.

It's one big miss.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

Yet it's pretty in all the wrong ways: pretty slight, pretty preachy and pretty affected.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

Intermittently fresh and amusing in a low-down yet schmaltzy way.

Find Me Guilty flat-lines early.

As a franchise, the James Bond series needs its stomach stapled.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

Hammers away at the plot so relentlessly that you can feel the nails entering the back of your skull.

Divided We Fall has a lot going for it, but its Places in the Heart ending, sentimental and incongruous, helps ensure that it will not find a place in a demanding audience's heart or mind.

In the movie, the unconverted will hold their ears as the banal tunes blare out in multichannel sound. And they'll wince as the camera closes in on every heart-tugging moment.

Contains a dozen winning moments of humor, uplift or exhilaration. But are they enough to justify a 154-minute running time?

If you feel yourself glowing after Love Actually, you might be suffering from sugar shock.

The word "yuppie" has fallen out of favor from overuse, but Closer's young urban professionals are so vain and superficial they may bring it back as the ultimate putdown. This movie is a yuppie nightmare.

The problem isn't the history that the filmmakers leave in, but how much they leave out.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

A strictly by-the-book sequel: It doesn't cheat series fans but it doesn't offer many thrills or surprises or lingering puzzles, either.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

And the movie, likable for short stretches, ends up seeming worn and frayed, like Christmas decorations left hanging until spring.

The problem with Lions for Lambs isn't its political engagement but its cinematic disengagement. Robert Redford directs and stars in this ambitious talkathon, which would have been more effective as a radio play.

Jarrold's reduction of the story is so archetypal that it's indistinguishable from soap opera.

Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.

No matter how "mock" this epic gets, it isn't mock enough. The "D" in the title must stand for dead weight.

It's Cheadle's rich emotionality and sense of humor that have gone seriously missing in Traitor.