Michael Sragow

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

In every important way, Breach isn't just a solid thriller; it's also an ambitious and engrossing piece of narrative journalism.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

For better and worse, the entire film goes by like a theme-park cyclone ride. It makes as much sense as it needs to when you're on it. All it leaves in its wake is a residue of vertigo and speed.

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.

It's the ideal capper for a cop comedy with a refreshingly wry, adult and humane attitude.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

It's so wispy that at the end you wonder: Exactly what runs in the family?

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

Full of wit, charm and wonder. It's so hilarious, you might blow a gasket.

Manipulates the audience.

The enthralling documentary Crazy Love is about how a high-flying lawyer's obsession with a young beauty blinded her, metaphorically and literally.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

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

The whole film is about innocence and experience, and if it isn't a Blakean song, it is a sturdy and vibrant piece of prose.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

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

A wholesome, headlong extravaganza - a sort of North by Northeast sans high style and erotic innuendo.

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.

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

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

As a documentary, The Agronomist, in its excitingly fractured, modern manner, does what Lawrence of Arabia and The Leopard do: It traces the upheaval of a civilization in the profile of a magnificent individual. It's a 90-minute nonfiction film with the impact and the greatness of an epic.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

Too soft on its lead character and too willing to chalk up America's drug appetites to the times-that-were-a-changin' in the '60s.

A lovely, mischievous Casanova that will sweep you off your feet.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you feel that no good idea, let alone good deed, goes unpunished. Only the exuberance of the moviemaking keeps your spirits high.

Nolte's gambler-bandit Bob Montagnet is a triumph of imagination, touched with electric existential poetry.

If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

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

You never believe that Paltrow's character is insane, even when she herself does. She has too sturdy a core.

This movie will be remembered not for the notorious Bettie Page but for its showcase of the burgeoning Gretchen Mol.

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.

Is there anything more pathetic than a movie that will do anything for a laugh or a tear that doesn't get any laughs or tears?

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

The movie's own style is strictly an anti-style, all pre-packaged post-punk.

Here's my nomination for future grindhouse double-bill from hell: Pathfinder and "Apocalypto."

What gives Notorious its staying power is what happens before AND after its hero's death.

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

The movie's triumph is that we experience the ending, in which the three girls go mostly separate ways, not as a defeat but as a transition still open to possibilities.

The most refreshing thing about the original Men in Black was that it was relatively small - a modest, slapdash, 98-minute special-effects farce. The most refreshing thing about Men in Black II is that it is 10 minutes shorter.

Here's hoping Allen's static Hennessey is due to an extreme acting choice and not plastic surgery. It would be tragic to lose a natural smile to star in garbage like Death Race.

Russell's conviction is so total that it tingles the spines of the audience.

What makes the "Dolittle" movies stand out from this menagerie is the superb casting and matching of the animals and their human voices.

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

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

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

The sensuousness of Lemon Tree is its glory.

"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

In a feat of performing imagination, Ferrell turns his usual extroversion inside out and his usual zaniness into precision, and makes it all work for him.

There's something junior varsity about the whole sensibility that makes the new version seem more dated than the old one.

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.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

Weitz doesn't manage Pullman's feat of being rational and magical simultaneously. But he rapidly and intelligently opens up Pullman's world.

The movie has a vibrant, sturdy pathos in the manner of Dickens.

If only the director, or his deus, could have delivered us from the inevitable shock ending, which blends Darwin and Einstein with purest P.T. Barnum.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

The movie gives us a time machine that resembles a twin-engined Mixmaster and a script that was tossed together inside one.

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.

The only thing that tops Cave here is Cohen himself at the end, singing "Tower of Song" with U2.

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

There isn't an earned moment of uplift or laughter in the movie. Everything in it is prefab.

The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.

A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.

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 Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.

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

Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

Has the grisly appetite, if not the execution of the original. What it also has are monstrously good Ralph Fiennes and Edward Norton, plus a fine young Hannibal to save it.

This movie leaves 'em laughing - and gasping.

The glory of Japanese Story is that even after a daringly abrupt plot turn, the cast maintains its empathy and lucidity without interruption.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

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

Perfume offers eau de crud.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

This movie has an aura of forced tragedy, like a fourth-generation version of "Requiem for a Heavyweight."

At its best, the movie combines the musical and psychological meanings of a fugue. Sons and daughters and mother take up themes of dislocation and identity loss, and deepen them at every turn.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

It's like Chekhov with a British accent.

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

Despite the merry duo of Ford and Connery, The Last Crusade offered a familiar pursuit of the Holy Grail. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a better move: It goes back to the future. Once again, the Indiana Jones series is the rare franchise that treasures knowledge and embraces the unknown.