Michael Sragow

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.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

Wastes amusing beginnings.

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

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.

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

Gory overkill.

Peaceful Warrior fails pitifully at being transcendent. This New Age movie about living in the moment gets you looking at your watch and squirming in your seat.

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]

Irreversible, though, is not a Kubrickian head trip. All Noe has come up with is a turn-on for sadists.

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.

Siegel takes us to the brink of operatic melodrama, then lands us in a tragicomic spot: a psychological landscape of alternate life and make-believe death.

Ragged and frenetic.

All honesty, rebellion and suffering, but no depth.

Dark Blue is one of those totally happy surprises that moves so quickly and curves so sharply that it leaves this era's hyped critical hits looking like beached whales.

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?

No one could seethe better than Mifune, but what gives the movie equal shares of exhilaration and heartbreak is the feeling that pours out of him when his son finds happiness in his own marriage.

The performers are tremendous, particularly Deschanel, who can travel to the end of an emotional tether and then suggest the mysteries of change and growth that lie beyond.

We don't experience the drama from the inside out because everything is on the surface. Redford is the only one who supplies internal life to Spy Game.

Scrambled space-time comedy that's as light and silly as it is erratic.

What sucks the wind out of the movie's sails is the vacuum at its core.

Both handmade and souped-up, it beautifully renders two types of camaraderie: the bonds among eccentrics and the fellowship of speed.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

The movie conveys the drama of the moment but eschews context. The result is an arresting yet frustrating experience.

Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

A humorous bounty of flesh and fantasy.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

The symmetry doesn't work. Capitalism is an economic system; democracy, a political system. Perhaps Moore should have come out and said what he really wants to see us adopt: a democratic socialism.

Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.

Will Ferrell does chicken-fried comedy right: with crackpot discipline and stripped-to-the-beer-belly courage.

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.

A movie masterpiece -- thrilling, passionate and wise.

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.

This handsome and occasionally exciting movie flounders because it confuses Tinseltown glamour with legendary heroism and beauty.

Cut above this genre's usual industrial sludge, even when the chops and kicks are too fast to follow.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

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.

The script is clever and would be brilliant if it worked.

Beguiling, moving and just plain fun documentary.

Keeps its eye on the big picture even when focusing on the small scene.

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.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

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.

Angelina Jolie focuses her wild energy into outlandish heroics, and emerges with more attractiveness and credibility than all three of those silly Charlie's Angels combined.

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

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

Light, engaging documentary.

At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

Overflowing with comedy and drama, The Boys of Baraka unfolds on the mean streets of Baltimore and in the wide-open spaces of Kenya.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

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?

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is an uptight movie -- the opposite of his scintillating "Out of Sight."

Needs a story.